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EMERSON
and THE HOURS Just a little note to celebrate this week’s release of "The Hours" on DVD. Richard
tells Clarissa: "I
wanted to write about it all. Everything that’s happening in a
moment. The way those flowers looked when you carried them in your arms
— this towel, how it smells, how it feels — this thread —
all our feelings, yours and mine. The history of who we once were. Everything
that’s in the world. Everything mixed up. Like it’s all mixed
up now. And I failed. Whatever you start with, it ends up so much less." Lawrence
Buell writes in "Emerson." "Everyone
notices that ‘Nature’ is arranged in more tidy, sequential
fashion than the later essays. But here at the end Emerson draws closer
to putting into full practice the aesthetics of the fragmentary glimpse
that had been impressing itself on his mind as he was struggling to
finish the book. ‘What is any man’s book compared with the
undiscoverable All? … How hard to write the truth … write
it down and it is gone.’ Many authors know this feeling, but Emerson
was exceptional for building it into his leading ideas and for adopting
as a stylistic principle that intellectual honesty requires being faithful
to those oscillations between epiphany and blankness, to the inevitable
incompletion of any ‘final’ result." Earlier
in the chapter Buell writes: "Emerson
anticipated posterity’s recognition of his literary talents when
he told his second fiancée that he was ‘a poet’ by
‘nature and vocation,’ though his ‘singing’ was
‘husky’ and ‘for the most part in prose.’ Modern
Emersonians have followed suit by claiming more for his literary side
than any other while disputing what to make of it. The best summations
resort to hybrid images like writer-critic, poet of ideas, or ‘artist
in the medium of theory’ that fuse Emerson the writer with Emerson
the thinker. "This is an aesthetics of unfinished business. Art is exploratory, experimental, self-corrective, always in process until mental life permanently shuts down. The most fundamental reason why art is ‘initial’ rather than ‘final’ is that it isn’t just about art. ‘Nothing less than the creation of man and nature’ is its goal. That is why Emerson’s thinking about art quickly takes us into religion, philosophy and politics. Art is the prototype of all creative thought. It is finally not a matter of word-making alone but of life-making and world-making as well." |
