A late lament

"Throughout her lectures, O'Connor discusses the shocking, the grotesque, and ultimately transfigurative literary method she has devised to tell her supernatural tales to a desacralized audience. She must write the stories, she explains, because neither untrammeled nature nor the built world of man can convey sacred meanings."

In the modern world that arose from the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment,'..... grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art.'

' That meaning is open and accessible in the actual and the lived concrete does not mean it is to be won or possessed through any type of analytical or synthetic investigation and any type of reflection on the lived concrete' -- Martin Buber

'.... The bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima affects life on the Oconee river.'

"The artist must craft a literature that delivers its hierophanies via techno-cultural shock."*

Neil Postman said essentially the same thing the about, "amusing ourselves to death," and the impossible task of trying to push the sacred into an entertainment medium -- which is really putting a multi-multi dimensional square peg in a small flat round hole. 5 senses and techno-extensions of same old same old? Who is calling who, "boring"? Much less "adolescent," and "irrelevant." Who is really "holding back progress" in any but the crud-est terms? (Maybe not Ned--could it be Crusty?)

The fact that those who live by materialist assumptions--(which is not quite the same set who claim to be materialists, who in fact cannot deeply make such a committment much less the assumption)--cannot even begin to understand any spiritual realities, much less the person Christ, is more obvious to me every day. It's not a matter of "can't," it's a matter of "won't." Actually it's a lot more petulant than that, but let it pass, let it pass.

It also makes it more obvious that narrative art has been replaced by propaganda hack work and ideological butchery which are said to be "novels". Not too far from the pop arts of the CCCP.

What pray tell is "novel" about works that cannot even rise above airport discount rack look-alikes?( yes I meant that, bad as it sounds) Even when someone seizes on a clever plot twist, what's the value of an amusing idea if your work is dominated by uni-dimensional clones and stock characters? Better to admit it's a farce from the get-go! Even TNY seems more and more like a Punch and Judy show, while Bach is played at the deserted cathedral next door. (I experienced something like this at The Cathedral of Guadalajara in 1971-72)

I might add that TNY never published any of O'Connor's stories and panned her novels.

She must increase, and TNY and all its malice-for glamor, must decrease.

I have to say that Dostoevsky and Gogol certainly spoil me for contemporary light entertainment. I find myself asking what I am doing when I haven't read all of the major works of just these two authors? Why waste the precious few years I have left with fraggings from Jerry's Jousting and Jest Joshin' Wild West Show? (I do not here excuse my taste for certain comics and comix)

More later, I mean, earlier, I mean when I am fully perked.

*from The Flannery O'Connor Review, 2009 vol. 17 Doug Davis, "Grace in the Machine"