/lit/ - Literature

I read books because there's something in aesthetic experience that connects to zones of the world that feel more alive and vast than the small, artificial zones of everyday consciousness and communication. I think this is what DH Lawrence is getting at in his essay criticising Benjamin Franklin's practically-oriented values: 'This is what I believe: ... That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.'

There's no question of value for me because like most people I feel an inherent draw towards those 'dark forest' zones -- to sense them is at the same to sense a kind of 'call' in them. Aesthetic experience isn't a means to an end but is instead its own end, like how a real romantic relationship isn't transactional even in terms of, like, 'each obtaining good feelings' but instead feels like you and your partner have both stumbled onto a new land that no one else has known before and you are both committed to attending to the spirits of that land and their commands even if it makes you miserable.

It's the feeling you get when you hear a song you once loved but haven't heard in ages and it suddenly shakes you out of your comfy, monotonous, everyday consciousness and fills you with this vertiginous feeling that you've been neglecting something vitally important and not even been aware of it -- you realise you've been neglecting that 'call'. It's like opening a window onto the night and feeling the nightbreeze and hearing a train roll by in the distance.

>>21659238
My post was in defence of pointlessness!

>>21649063
>Take psychedelics ... It'll help
>Magic is the thought that all matters.

I disagree. Deleuze quotes Henry Miller: 'To succeed in getting drunk, but on pure water'. The most intense things are the subtlest, and to achieve them you need to be careful and alert. Every time I've got better at writing, and felt like I was developing my aesthetic sense, it's been because I've become better at discriminating and selecting, at figuring out which things 'work' and which things are fluff or cliche or energy-dissipating.

Negativity is one of your most powerful aesthetic tools, because it's the instinct that pushes you to go beyond the mediocre cultural baggage that doesn't actually give you the ineffable 'thing' you're looking for. Because that 'thing' is ineffable, it's easier to say what it's not than to give a positive definition of what it is. Being negative and critical and discerning therefore helps you avoid those traps and dead-ends that take you further away from the 'thing'.

Making unexpected connections is good, but you have to learn to sense which connections are the most intense and meaningful. You can't just blend everything together into a big abstract soup. If you mix together every colour of paint, you end up with grey. The most intense things are the most concrete and specific, because they contain abstract forces in a delicate one-off configuration that can't be untangled.

I don't think any writer (that I've read) makes language as eerily intense as Samuel Beckett, but he doesn't achieve it by some big sprawling opera about the mystical creative soul of language; he achieves it by stripping things down to the bare essentials of teeth and tongues and lonely unanswered voices in small rooms. There's a reason traditional magic proceeds through carefully planned rituals, in carefully demarcated spaces.