RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: Individualism: One of Billy Beck's all time favourite blog posts  Sat Dec 21, 2013 3:44 am | |
| If There Were Only Time
Blue Note dressing-room wi-fi:
6:36pm local, before the 7:00pm show. I spent a lot of the day thinking about Regina's question of who on earth would be reading "The Decline Of The West". The answer begins with Donatello's Gattamelata, and why grown men of the world fell on their knees and wept when they first saw it six hundred and fifty years ago, and then the dinner menu arrives and I have to go...
(Laterville...)
So, anyway (the next night), the thing about Gattamelata is what it represents. This was the first serious bronze cast since Roman antiquity. To this day, nobody is entirely certain how Donatello figured out how to do it: it's mainly about re-discovery of technique. Yes, the horse's body is too big for its legs, "The Honeyed Cat's" spurs are ridiculous (too long to walk with), and the sword is impossible. (No human being could extract it from the scabbard with a standard grip.) But it went far to redeem the idea that the human mind could be put to work to solve the problems of life on earth. It stands very close in time to the moment when humanism rose to claim earthly existence of real human beings from the long night of unearthly diktat -- what we call "the Renaissance".
It would be a long time after Gattamelata until people routinely lived with something that had been the broad routine in Rome a thousand years before Donatello's marvel: running water. This is astounding, when one thinks about it, and especially when it is not commonly thought about today, when running water is taken for granted outside the precincts of New Orleans. And I've seen no evidence that anyone in Donatello's time looked forward from an equestrian bronze to running water. However, the technical connection is obvious to me: things lost could be recovered, even if any given observer might consider an equestrian bronze to be frivolous in the larger context of pressing human requirements. And more: if production is the application of reason to the problem of survival (which premise I hold to be obviously true), then the principle demonstrated by Gattamelata was -- and is -- without question extensible to running water and beyond.
To Spengler, then:
Very early on in my reading, I was struck with two impressions:
1) that it might pay me to study the German language in order to read "The Decline Of The West" in the original, because I wondered how much was being lost in the translation. I often could not quite believe what I was seeing.
2) it is very hard for me to come up with an important German writer since Martin Luther who was not at least half-crazy.
Spengler is posing a theory of history with all the authority of, say, the law of gravity, which is that cultural decadence and demise is ordained by the fact that history exists. It is not more or less than that the fact of human events set within any given cultural context necessarily results in the ultimate futility and failure of their aspirations.
In my view of intellectual currents, I don't often see Spengler cited. However, I do wonder about the sublimation of his thesis -- or somethings quite practically similar -- throughout every cultural outlook in the West in my time. I cannot discount its seductivity: when I think, for instance, about the admonition to "Don't Worry, Be Happy," I always wonder what necessarily implicit "worries" -- what dangers -- are deliberately being ignored.
Is it a necessity that we must look forward to the end of everything that we've attempted to build? I say that Gattamelata proves the opposite, even accounting for its herald of a new epoch. For what can form a beginning can also form sustenance: at any given moment, individual minds can abstract what is necessary to forge ahead and not only prevent the light of mankind from dimming, but positively brighten the scene of our existence.
Yes, the lights can go out, but there is no reason why they must.
It will be the over-arching disgrace of our time if we do not realize this as a fact. I have never been shy at condemning stark idiocies and their particular exponents by name. They often take insult, and they may, as they choose. It would be far better, however, for them to gather themselves and understand that idiocy is unnecessary and that they could -- and should -- be better than that. And a great part of the American assertion of culture was a rejection of all the worst that had gone before, everywhere else. (It's not for nothin' that our forebears were called "rebels".) The largest implication of this is that ideas matter, and that the American idea -- which necessarily included the inspiration of individualism represented by Gattamelata -- was the best of its time. It could, and should, be again.
Nothing else -- and, certainly, no compromise with anything else -- will do.
http://www.two--four.net/weblog.php?id=P1879 |
|
