https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=30-XxczHTyo
I tend to think that changes in art happen in poetry first. So, and, or at least that’s where they become more noticeable. In this case, I would think that if you look at Paris in the mid 19th century, in London a little later, and Germany, of course, you’ll find the, I’ll go back to the whole idea of decadence, right? Of these decadent literature, decadent poetry. What is the archetype of figure of decadent poetry? It is the anemic last in line aristocrat, the last of his house, who is so bored with life, with modernity, that all that’s left for him is sensual pleasure. And so, like Riesmann’s character is the ultimate. He locks himself up in a palace of strange curiosities, bizarre, grotesque plants, and like turtles, and laid with gold, and all kinds of creatures. And he just luxuriates in this pleasure of the senses until finally he can just die. Because there’s nothing left of the world. There’s nothing left except surfaces. Acedia, right? This is the way the monks, the monks who suffered from this condition in the middle ages were, they were told that they suffered from them, called Acedia. The disease of our age, pretty much. Yes, and then what you see in afterwards, and this, you know, what you see is like Dada is the kind of codification of that decadent feeling, affect that was new when Baudelaire and Riesmann and Poe were talking about it. All of a sudden it’s codified, it’s instrumentalized, and it happens to serve a commodity culture very well. A culture that’s completely, in fact, you know, the whole Dada dream of a world of obliterating the line between art and life, we’ve accomplished that. We live in the utopia of the Dadas and the Situationists, in a way. We live in a world where there’s no more boundary between art and life. Between, yeah, so I think that Acedia, which those decadent poets explored first, then just became a generalized social phenomenon, and you see it play out in all these crazy theatrical, weird theatrical events, like the Nazi rallies or like that ridiculous shit we saw in Washington a few weeks ago, this type of like pretending to care about, pretending to be part of history, like fabricating events, trying to get us to feel something again. I think that we’re just apathetic as a culture and we need to wake up, and that’s my take on that. Your final word is that we need to wake up. I agree, I totally agree. I tend to see, and that maybe brings me to also to the one of the aspects that I’ve been trying to develop, which is art as participation. One of the things that I’ve been trying to point people towards is the difference between the modern notion of art as a kind of aesthetic experience or an exterior aesthetic experience, going to the opera, going to the concert, looking at a movie, watching a movie. All of this is different from the participative art that ancient cultures had, or that the idea of a dance, or singing folk songs together, or sitting around a fire and celebrating our stories. Even the Iliad was sung, people didn’t read it. They would have bards that would come and would sing it to them because it was their story and they would kind of have this participation. I think that, like you said, one of the difficulties of something like the the fascist tendency is in noticing the vacuousness of, let’s say, pleasure, this kind of exterior pleasure, this surface pleasure, and the entertainment culture that we embody is this desire to participate and they’re looking for places to enter into the story. The political sphere is an easy and scary place to enter into the story where you take a side, you have a bad guy, you have an enemy, you can even make them really, really evil, like in terms of the Q type people, and then you know where you are and who you’re fighting and what you’re doing, and so it makes you feel alive in a way that I can sympathize with, but also is extremely dangerous because it’s very limited. It’s limited and it’s fundamentally, it gets everything exactly half right and exactly half wrong. Exactly. Right? So being half right is not a good thing in life. It’s like the worst. It’s better to be completely wrong than being half right. That’s hilarious. So is there corruption at the top on both sides of the aisle politically? Of course there is. And so, but that’s where subtlety becomes very important, you know, and looking at yourself becomes very important and not also the holier than thou feeling that the fascist sentiment encourages that we are the pure and they are the impure and all of a sudden all of the stuff that we can’t acknowledge about ourselves gets projected onto the other. Not a good thing. Not a good path. Yeah. That’s why, like for example, when I talk about the church building, let’s say, and I try to get people to kind of experience it, because it’s not I talk about it, but it’s also experiencing it, is that the church building, let’s say the way it’s built, like when you enter into it, it has three parts. It has the altar, it has the nave, and then it has the narthex. That’s the, those are the main parts. And the narthex is that place of relationship with the outside, where the monsters appear, you know, the gargoyles and all of this stuff. And so there’s a hierarchy of being, but it’s not a simple in out identity, right? It’s not a simple us them, because it’s actually a hierarchy which moves out into the outside and into the in the in differentiated possibilities which lay outside of my identity. And so it’s a healthier way to encounter identity. And some people will, will, will object because there is to a certain extent, a recognition of the monstrosity of the strange, like, and when I encounter something that I don’t recognize, like a stranger, there is something monstrous of that. But if I know that that monstrosity is also is also part of how it like I recognize it, right? It’s structural. It’s just structural. It’s there. And it’s like, I see the stranger and I recognize, oh, that’s weird. And then it’s like, okay, well, now move on. Like, it’s, it’s, I don’t have to get over it. I don’t have to necessarily like throw a lance at it, right? Right. Just part of like, just part of how the world lays itself out. And the idea of having like a saint like Saint Christopher or certain other, you know, St. Moses, the Ethiopian certain. Moses with the horns to the Old Testament Moses, Moses who came down with horns there. Yeah, exactly. That’s a fascinating story. But so to me, it’s more like trying to get people to go back into a proper story, like not that not the weird nationalistic story, but a story which has this, this space for the strange, but it also looks towards the altar, right? That it’s not completely fascinated with the snake either, because like, I need to my, my opinion that can be very dangerous because it, because those monsters can also eat you. Like they really can’t. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That’s the great hope is that, that you’re right about all this.