17 May, 2014

Spem in Alium

Interesting synchronicity of the day #1, a passage from Fitzie's This Side of Paradise:
So he wrote one day, when he pondered how coldly we thought of the "Dark Lady of the Sonnets," and how little we remembered her as the great man wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare must have desired, to have been able to write with such divine despair, was that the lady should live ... and now we have no real interest in her ... The irony of it is that if he had cared more for the poem than for the lady the sonnet would be only obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would ever have read it after twenty years...
Synchronous, I say, because I had just been arguing that the best literature is grounded in something other than itself, and the author accepts the fact that he is reworking material rather than producing art out of thin air (i.e. Michelangelo cutting down from a block of clay, rather than lumping it together.) Creation (technically, "sub-creation") necessarily entails deletion, since it requires delineation and exclusion of that which is not ("sub-")created. To be expounded in the literary criticism section of my Hegelian knock-off literometaphilolinguoreligiosophical magnum opus "Spem in Alium,"* publication TBA. Anyway, above quotation anecdote.

*Extrinsicism v solipsism, love is all, meaning as connection / connection as meaning.