Saturday, April 17, 2010

Perspective

So the other day in class, whilst discussing properties of art in terms of artistic value versus aesthetic value, the idea of when art is became much more apparent. OF course Goodman believes that there is a set of criteria that must be assessed in order for a thing to be art in a particular moment, otherwise it is just partially art. But one thing that greatly interested me was the idea that the perspective of some things is experienced differently by different kinds of people. (Not that different perception is a new idea or anything experienced by individuals) But then the idea of people with Synesthasia arose in discussion and i was fascinated. When the brain processed the signals taken into the brain are processed differently in a sensual capacity. So for instance, a person could hear a sight or smell a sound (like in the popular Duran Duran song, Hungry like the Wolf), and so on. And so to cut a long story short, this reminded me of a surrealist poem that i read a number of years ago in a class, entitled "Correspondances" by Baudelaire. In the poem, he speaks of the state in which all of the senses and experiences are intermingled with one another, corresponding to each other, and creating a kind of ecstasy in the senses. And this is all from a surrealist view of the world.

SO my question right now is, is looking at the world through this particular "lens" a more fulfilling way of experiencing things through an individual's senses?

And here is the poem (in english) if any of you are interested.

Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with understanding eyes.

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
In a deep and tenebrous unity,
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,
Sweet as oboes, green as meadows
— And others are corrupt, and rich, triumphant,

With power to expand into infinity,
Like amber and incense, musk, benzoin,
That sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.

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