From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Wed Jun 09 2004 - 16:04:46 BST
Hi Marsha,
You wrote:
> I'm soon to see the Gauguin exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
>
> I'm interested in hearing MOQ ideas that might relate to Art, and add to
> the experience. Seeing art is never just sensual, at least not for me.
> I'd like to hear your perspectives.
My perspective is exactly that of Pirsig's, only he expresses it so much
better that I've taken the liberty of quoting him at length below. For me,
this is one of the most important passages in "Lila" because it describes
the experience of responding to Dynamic Quality, an experience that most
people have had at one time or another, however fleeting. I hope you enjoy
Gauguin at the Boston museum. Personally I liked the paintings there by
Monet, Degas and Van Gogh more, especially Monet who once engendered the
DQ response in me. Please let us know if anything during your visit to the
museum comes close to the DQ experience for you. Best regards, Platt
"In a subject-object metaphysics morals and art are worlds apart, morals
being concerned with the subject quality and art with object quality. But
in the Metaphysics of Quality that division doesn't exist. They're the
same. They both become much more intelligible when references to what is
subjective and what is objective are completely thrown away and references
to what is static and what is Dynamic are taken up instead.
"He found an example within the field of music. He said, imagine that you
walk down a street past, say, a car where someone has the radio on and it
plays a tune you've never heard before but which is so fantastically good
it just stops you in your tracks. You listen until it's done. Days later
you remember exactly what that street looked like when you heard that
music. You remember what was in the store window you stood in front of.
You remember what the colors of the cars in the street were, where the
clouds were in the sky above the buildings across the street, and it all
comes back so vividly you wonder what song they were playing, and so you
wait until you hear it again. If it's that good you'll hear it again
because other people will have heard it too and have had the same feelings
and that will make it popular. One day it comes on the radio again and you
get the same feeling again and you catch the name and you rush down the
street to the record store and buy it and can hardly wait until you can
get it home and play it.
"You get home. You play it. It's really good. It doesn't quite transform
the whole room into something different but it's really good. You play it
again. Really good. You play it another time. Still good, but you're not
so sure you want to play it again. But you play it again. It's okay but
now yon definitely don't want to play it again. You put it away.
"The next day you play it again, and it's okay, but something is gone. You
still like it and always will, you say. You play it again. Yeah, that's
sure a good record. But you file it away and once in a while play it again
for a friend and maybe months or years later bring it out as a memory of
something you were once crazy about. "Now what has happened? You can say
you've gotten tired of the song but what does that mean? Has the song lost
its quality? If it has, why do you still say it's a good record? Either
it's good or it's not good. If it's good why don't you play it? If it's
not good why do you tell your friend it's good?
"If you think about this question long enough you will come to see that
the same kind of division between Dynamic Quality and static quality that
exists in the field of morals also exists in the field of art. The first
good, that made you want to buy the record, was Dynamic Quality. Dynamic
Quality comes as a sort of surprise. What the record did was weaken for a
moment your existing static patterns in such a way that the Dynamic
Quality all around you shone through. It was free, without static forms.
The second good, the kind that made you want to recommend it to a friend,
even when you had lost your own enthusiasm for it, is static quality.
Static quality is what you normally expect." (Lila, 9)
.
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jun 09 2004 - 16:03:50 BST