The Careless Habit of Accuracy is the Murderer of Beauty

            On Wednesday morning I had the first verse and chorus of  “Vu de l’extérieur” (From the Outside) by Serge Gainsbourg memorized but I had to make more adjustments to the translation to fit the rhythm. There are also a lot of slang words for the female anatomy that I needed to find English equivalents for. Some lines have a lot of syllables that are spoken very quickly and so I have to fill my translation with English words that can serve the same purpose.          

            I did a bit more reading of Pater’s “Studies in the History of the Renaissance” and then I took 45-minute siesta before getting ready to leave for my Aesthetic and Decadent Movements class.

            There was no class ahead of ours but there were a couple of women chatting. I tried to read but it was hard to concentrate and when they left a couple of women from our class came in and were talking in an animated way and then two more. Perhaps it was a good exercise in concentration for me.

            Kaitlin, who was presenting this time was very nervous about it. She would be doing her seminar starter on Pater and asked me what I thought of the book. I told her that he’s a very good writer but not a good composer of prose, as he rambles like someone distracted and loses track of his point.

            When we started there were only ten students in class and I think only one more showed up while we were underway.  Professor Li was disappointed by the turnout.

            She reviewed a bit of Swinburne and said that he is adamant about art being for art’s sake and yet his poem “Hertha” is quite political. I suggested that all art is political but it just shouldn’t be so consciously.

            The rest of the class was spent discussing Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance. She said that if Pater had submitted this book as a PHD thesis he would not have gotten it. And yet Pater was the theorist for the Aesthetic and Decadence movements.

            Pater forces us to think about our own style. His style is the art of the inexact. We never know what he means. He calls the non-ethics of art for art’s sake “higher ethics”. He needs the reader to give him structure.

            Why does he write this way?

            In the 1870s Victorians were split between the mind and the body. A lot of “isms” came into being such as utilitarianism. Pater’s writing is a consequence of the industrial age’s playing down of sensory responses. Nietzsche calls this “weightless society”. I think he said that when god dies from a culture it becomes weightless.

            In a world of achievement and of studying or working towards a goal, literary works force you to rethink your own views.

            Victorian society had developed to the point where the moral approach was the only approach.

            She asked us to describe Pater’s style. I said that he flows and that it’s like interpretive dance.

            His work is creative writing rather than a rational treatise. The book raised eyebrows at the time. His essays border on fiction and use metaphorical language. His art criticism is imaginative prose that is an art in itself.

            In those days the boundaries of discipline were not laid out. Victorian men of letters were all polymaths.

            For a long time the study of literature was exclusively a classical discipline.

            Pater’s theory of art for art’s sake is the most organized idea in the book.

            We have to go to the inexact to recover from Victorianism.

            Pater is after the experience of the moment. His book is more like a romance than a history. Creative writing is a style of living, temperament and disposition. Art and life are identical. It’s not the criticism of today.

            The purple passage of the book is the one about Mona Lisa. The professor asked me if I’d been to the Louvre to see Mona Lisa. I said I hadn’t. One student had been there several times and she said it’s disappointing. The painting is surprisingly small; one has to view it from a distance behind thick bulletproof glass and through a crowd of people raising their phones to take pictures of it.

            Pater uses imaginative reason. Everything is through the senses. It’s not just about art but artistic sensibility. He is going after the impact of form. The individual response is different and there is no one message.

            Pater’s Conclusion is controversial. Experiencing a particular moment is the end. Understanding is not what he is after. Art is supposed to be new every time.

            He uses the phrase “hard gemlike flame” and we discussed that for several minutes. I said that in addition to being solid “hard” could mean “difficult”. She liked that. The phrase “hard gemlike flame” comes from an article by John Tyndall on the relations of radiant heat to colour and texture. I told her that reminded me of Goethe’s theories of colour and his ideas of science being a matter of observation. 

            He is highlighting things we don’t think about. Art for art’s sake is art for the sake of the moment.

            We took a break.

            In the 19^th Century there were two ways of writing history. One was the German style of getting history as accurate as possible. The other was Thomas Carlyle and Walter Pater’s approach of uncovering the spirit of the past. Putting oneself into the events in order to feel what they were like.

            Inexactitude is political.

            Kaitlin Persaud did her seminar starter on Pater’s chapter on Pico della Mirandola. I think she was saying that all knowledge could be understood in a modern context.

            Pater’s historicism has a sense of modernity. He is interested in history’s images and feelings but he only cares about the mind.

            I suggested that history is like a dream to be interpreted.

            Critics call it historical relativism. The past is meaningful because of our response to it.

            Pater champions subjectivity.

            Oscar Wilde referred to the careless habit of accuracy. If we don’t stop worshipping facts beauty will pass away.

            Pater is against exact modern formulas. Art should represent unconscious systems that Pater calls soul-facts.

            We looked at the purple passage on the Mona Lisa. He says her pain embodies old fancy and the modern idea.

            The future also informs the past.

            We got our essays back and those of us who have already done our seminar starters got marks for those as well.

            She warned us that in her academic background the professor’s notes are supposed to be critical and not full of praise. The praise comes in the final mark.

            She liked my quote from Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” as an epigraph to my title “The Reason in the Rhyme of ‘Au lecteur’ by Charles Baudelaire”: “We got no class and we got no principals and we got no innocence / We can’t even think of a word that rhymes”.

            She thought my second sentence was too involved and I needed an example to illustrate my point.

She said I needed to set up my comparison between Baudelaire’s quatrains and Petrarchan quatrains.

In my citations I’d apparently made a mistake in citing the course pack rather than the original sources referred to in the contents page. I had just followed the MLA instructions for course packs.

Her final note was “Fantastic work! I enjoyed your translation … Well done!”

I got an A-plus on the essay and an A on my seminar starter.

When I got home I ran the water in the kitchen sink to cool it off before drinking a glass and went back out in the hall to get my bike to hang it up. My next door neighbour Benji was just on his way out and stopped to chat about the weather, that the Coffeetime donut shops are all going out of business and the one downstairs will probably move out in December, and that the Popeyes will probably move in early in January, After he left I went back to the kitchen and saw that my sink was about to overflow. I had a fruit bowl full of grapes that the water was flowing on but the bowl had been blocking the drain. I turned off the water and moved the bowl to clear the drain just seconds before there would have been another flooding disaster downstairs like there was a few months ago.

I had a late lunch of half the slice of pizza that David had brought me the night before.

I took another siesta.

I worked on my journal.

For dinner I melted some old cheddar on the other half of the pizza slice and had it with a beer while watching two episodes of Wanted Dead or Alive, starring Steve McQueen.

In the first story Josh arrives in a town where his old buddy Ned is running for mayor against corrupt incumbent Barney Pax and the strong-arm tactics of Barney’s brother Sheriff Steve Pax. Unknown to Ned it was his wife Carole who sent for Josh to help defend against the Pax brothers. Josh comes with help in hand in the form of a wanted poster as he’s found out that Steve Pax is wanted for murder in another state. Barney arranges a meeting with Josh in a room where Josh finds Steve Pax dead and four witnesses to claim Josh killed him. Josh escapes custody. Barney tells Ned he’ll back off of Josh if he writes a letter withdrawing his candidacy. Carole tries to stop Ned by telling lies about Josh’s intentions towards her. Ned writes the letter and gives it to Barney. Carole tries to get it back from Barney at gunpoint. Josh shows up and both Carole and Barney fire at him. Josh ends up killing Barney. Carole is shocked that she almost killed Josh. He gives her Ned’s letter and when Ned asks, Josh lies and tells him that what Carole had told him was true. Josh rides out of town.

Carole was played by Bethel Leslie who was a renowned theatrical performer and won a Tony for her role in Long Days Journey Into Night. For a while she was the head writer on the soap opera, “The Secret Storm” in 1954 and wrote scripts for several other shows as well.

Steve Pax was played by Deforest Kelley from Star Trek.

In the second story Josh is playing poker in a saloon when an old friend of his, Boone Morgan approaches and says he needs to talk to him. Josh asks him to wait until after that hand but then Boone collapses. It turns out Boone has been shot and so Josh takes him to the doctor.  The wound is fatal but Boone has time to ask Josh to promise to take him home. Home is a place called Cameron and Josh takes Boone’s coffin there in a buckboard. This is the closest thing to a home base that has been indicated for Josh Randall in this series, as he has lived there and everyone is glad to see him when he arrives. Meanwhile the two bounty hunters that shot Boone show up in Kenton looking for Boone. When they learn he’s dead they want to claim the reward. The sheriff tells them that the reward would go to Randall but for some reason he gives them his address. Meanwhile Boone’s father receives a telegram for Josh saying he can claim the $500 reward for Boone. This creates the misunderstanding that Josh killed Boone for the reward an so suddenly the whole town is against him. Of course Josh doesn’t even want the reward. The bounty hunters show up and tell Josh they killed Boone and the reward is theirs. He refuses to give it to them and so they beat him up. They give him until that night. Josh’s gun is at Boone’s father’s house but thinking he killed Boone he refuses to let Josh have the gun. No one in town will even sell him a gun. Finally Boone’s sister Ellie brings Josh her father’s shotgun just before the bounty hunters attack. At first Josh has to take shelter in a livery stable without the shotgun but he manages to grab it just in time and kill both men.