RonPrice
December 26th, 2010, 03:42 AM
On Sunday 16 March 2008(1) I watched a television program about the French artist Paul Cezanne(1839-1906). From Cezanne’s early forties until his death at age 66, this "father of all modern art” as some call him, worked more and more in isolation and in privacy, a virtual recluse. This was the central aspect, among many, of Cezanne’s life that interested me since that tendency toward increasing artistic isolation, drawing on the familiar and the not-so-familiar in my work. I doggedly struggled to deal with complexity, and my need for a place to be by myself.
All was not doggedness and complexity, though; much was simplicity and the easy pleasures of life. As my fifties advanced year by year and turned, into my sixties in the early years of this 3rd millennium, and as my sixties advanced into the middle years of late adulthood, the years form 60 to 80 as some human development psychologists call these years in the lifespan, I came to enjoy solitude more and more. "Conversation enriches the understanding," as Edward Gibbon emphasized, "but solitude is the school of genius."(2) I was certainly going to that school, but only time would tell if I possessed any of that quality of genius which Gibbon exemplified in his great work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
After more than forty years(1954-1994) of a high sociability quotient, first as a student, friend, and gad-about, then as a teacher and lecturer among more roles than I care to list here, working alone became more and more--by my late 50s--paramount in my daily life with cyberspace increasingly my social milieux--by my mid-60s. –Ron Price with thanks to (1) ABC TV, 4:00-5:00 p.m., "Cezanne", 16 March 2008; and (2) Edward Gibbon in Anthony Storr, Solitude, Harper-Collins Pub., London, 1989, p.ix.
I, too, needed, that attention,
that concentration, exploration,
to capture a truth of perception,
understanding, and imagination’s
design, belief, desire, the familiar,
as well as existence's complexity.
I, too, was a recluse of sorts with
my own isolation and aloneness,
although a social religion kept me
in touch with an immense artifical
world of sociability, of a necessary
and essential reservedness, talk,
stylization, democracy, for the sake
of talking with its own laws, and the
changing of subjects, some play of
relations, joining and loosening.....
winning and succumbling, giving &
taking, means to liveliness, a solemn
consciousness and harmony where
everyone can play the game and the
giver becomes invisible behind some
kind of play-form, some collective,
some airy realm where life emerges in
the flux of the facile and happy, producers
lose themselves in their products, where a
certain tragic vision encompasses the weak
and the strong and feeds on a deep & loyal
relation to aesthetic charms which embody
the finest and subtlest dynamics of broad
and rich social existence, not negative
conventionalism merely, but a type of liberation
and relief where the latent forces of reality
reverberate dimly and their gravity evaporates,
or so one would hope, into a mere attractiveness.
Ron Price
22 March 2008
Updated On: 26/12/'10
For ConceptArt.org Forums
-----------------------------------
In its essence being cultured and attaining the first element of perfection lies in “learning and the cultural attainments of the mind.” One’s purely personal dispositions and one’s mental life attain their full idiom and personality as one’s circle increases, at least in some sense. The possibility of fully developing one’s inner life and personality lies in this social direction. However, isolation is not a strictly individual condition. It in no way implies the absence of society. Isolation and aloneness attain a very real and positive significance as an effect of society at a distance. Isolation is, indeed, a form of interaction. It is characterized by distance between the individual and society, an imagined society, an abstract one or a real one.
The first condition of having to deal with somebody at all is to know with whom one has to deal. Knowledge of another person is reciprocal, but generally not equal on both sides. One can, however, never know another person absolutely since this would amount to an infinite, an endless sharing, a duplication and repetition, of experiences. We form a sense of unity with others, any other person, from those fragments through which another is accessible to us. The unity that may develop, depends among other things, upon what that other person permits us to see about their inner and outer life. Psychological knowledge of a person is not some stereotype of that person but depends, like knowledge of all external nature, upon the forms, the details, the information, which the person gives and which they receive in turn.
The giving of a gift, say in these email posts at this site, must not be considered isolation. It is not a one way act, but it possesses a relation to the total personalities of the two parties. Gratitude consists not only in the return of the gift, but in the consciousness that this gift in some ways cannot be returned. There is something, the famous sociologist, philosopher and critic Georg Simmel(1885-1918) states, which places the receiver in a permanent position with respect to the giver. The first gift, given in spontaneity, has a voluntary character which no return gift can have. That first gift has a freedom without any duty attached to it. A gift once accepted, engenders an inner, a mysterious, relation which can never be eliminated completely. This is because gratitude is a feeling which results and is rendered by the recipient.--Ron Price, Passages from my five volume memoirs entitled: Pioneering Over Four Epochs.
All was not doggedness and complexity, though; much was simplicity and the easy pleasures of life. As my fifties advanced year by year and turned, into my sixties in the early years of this 3rd millennium, and as my sixties advanced into the middle years of late adulthood, the years form 60 to 80 as some human development psychologists call these years in the lifespan, I came to enjoy solitude more and more. "Conversation enriches the understanding," as Edward Gibbon emphasized, "but solitude is the school of genius."(2) I was certainly going to that school, but only time would tell if I possessed any of that quality of genius which Gibbon exemplified in his great work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
After more than forty years(1954-1994) of a high sociability quotient, first as a student, friend, and gad-about, then as a teacher and lecturer among more roles than I care to list here, working alone became more and more--by my late 50s--paramount in my daily life with cyberspace increasingly my social milieux--by my mid-60s. –Ron Price with thanks to (1) ABC TV, 4:00-5:00 p.m., "Cezanne", 16 March 2008; and (2) Edward Gibbon in Anthony Storr, Solitude, Harper-Collins Pub., London, 1989, p.ix.
I, too, needed, that attention,
that concentration, exploration,
to capture a truth of perception,
understanding, and imagination’s
design, belief, desire, the familiar,
as well as existence's complexity.
I, too, was a recluse of sorts with
my own isolation and aloneness,
although a social religion kept me
in touch with an immense artifical
world of sociability, of a necessary
and essential reservedness, talk,
stylization, democracy, for the sake
of talking with its own laws, and the
changing of subjects, some play of
relations, joining and loosening.....
winning and succumbling, giving &
taking, means to liveliness, a solemn
consciousness and harmony where
everyone can play the game and the
giver becomes invisible behind some
kind of play-form, some collective,
some airy realm where life emerges in
the flux of the facile and happy, producers
lose themselves in their products, where a
certain tragic vision encompasses the weak
and the strong and feeds on a deep & loyal
relation to aesthetic charms which embody
the finest and subtlest dynamics of broad
and rich social existence, not negative
conventionalism merely, but a type of liberation
and relief where the latent forces of reality
reverberate dimly and their gravity evaporates,
or so one would hope, into a mere attractiveness.
Ron Price
22 March 2008
Updated On: 26/12/'10
For ConceptArt.org Forums
-----------------------------------
In its essence being cultured and attaining the first element of perfection lies in “learning and the cultural attainments of the mind.” One’s purely personal dispositions and one’s mental life attain their full idiom and personality as one’s circle increases, at least in some sense. The possibility of fully developing one’s inner life and personality lies in this social direction. However, isolation is not a strictly individual condition. It in no way implies the absence of society. Isolation and aloneness attain a very real and positive significance as an effect of society at a distance. Isolation is, indeed, a form of interaction. It is characterized by distance between the individual and society, an imagined society, an abstract one or a real one.
The first condition of having to deal with somebody at all is to know with whom one has to deal. Knowledge of another person is reciprocal, but generally not equal on both sides. One can, however, never know another person absolutely since this would amount to an infinite, an endless sharing, a duplication and repetition, of experiences. We form a sense of unity with others, any other person, from those fragments through which another is accessible to us. The unity that may develop, depends among other things, upon what that other person permits us to see about their inner and outer life. Psychological knowledge of a person is not some stereotype of that person but depends, like knowledge of all external nature, upon the forms, the details, the information, which the person gives and which they receive in turn.
The giving of a gift, say in these email posts at this site, must not be considered isolation. It is not a one way act, but it possesses a relation to the total personalities of the two parties. Gratitude consists not only in the return of the gift, but in the consciousness that this gift in some ways cannot be returned. There is something, the famous sociologist, philosopher and critic Georg Simmel(1885-1918) states, which places the receiver in a permanent position with respect to the giver. The first gift, given in spontaneity, has a voluntary character which no return gift can have. That first gift has a freedom without any duty attached to it. A gift once accepted, engenders an inner, a mysterious, relation which can never be eliminated completely. This is because gratitude is a feeling which results and is rendered by the recipient.--Ron Price, Passages from my five volume memoirs entitled: Pioneering Over Four Epochs.