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I'm on the lam from a thread I started. And
although I lack the credentials to be here--
which has never bothered me in similar
situations--I thought you might not mind too
much taking me in for a moment and giving
me sanctuary. This is a fascinating place.

I have heard--or think I have--that aesthetic
issues are individual questions, that there are
no widely acceptable standards for appreciating
art, that any person bringing issues of
morality to a discussion of art should be
escorted out because he's obviously sneaked
past the security guards who, after all, have
standards to meet, that context counts for a
whole lot, and that it's peculiar that moderators,
not VWB, should be the ones who are responding
so frequently and at such length to this thread.

That last one, it seems safe to say, is
indisputable. And it's also foolish to neglect
context. If it's literary art, we need to know
the conventions of the period during which
it was written, although if it's truly good it
will probably burst those barriers. Not to
understand those conventions, though, is to be
terribly wise in the conceit of our own judgment.
Of course art has intellectual content. Anything
that forms the materials at hand has that.
Otherwise it would bore the living daylights out
of us. Chesterton said--and I think he was
right--boredom begins where intellectual activity
leaves off. I'd venture art has moral content and
context as well. And some literary art has got
itself in a heap of trouble by belaboring that content
and hanging villains too publicly who should have
been allowed to hang themselves. On the other
hand, it's not quite accurate to say a poem
shouldn't mean but be. In fact, the very poem in
which that admonition appeared ironically violated
its own dictum.

Wallace Stevens got at this as well as any
modern poet, giving importance both to the
context of art and to the shape the artist gives it.
Walking with a friend seaside at Key West,
the poet himself sings about a singer he
overhears:

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude,
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Don't you feel that with regard to the work of a
truly good rodmaker when it's singing in your hands?
And isn't it wonderful that, when one is weary of
lists and acquisitions and accomplishments, the
forum provides us threads like this one? Thanks.

Yeah, Bob. Spruce nailed it. That's
why I gave up work and went on
the public dole. For sooner than
I cared to think I would be forced to brake:

Because I could not stop for Death--
He kindly stopped for me--

Retirement, you see, allows me to strew
these jolly scraps of poetry on your paths or
on your rails as you ride to work. Go get 'em,
you tigers! No need for thanks. It's what I do
now. Practically all that I do.