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The Fundamental Tension in Art

Within the realm of poetry, and art in general, and life in general, there are two forces at play: perhaps they can be called order and chaos, reason and emotion, id and superego, the primal and the civilized. In the context of aesthetics they are often referred to as the Appolonian and the Dionysian, based on the Greek gods.

Roughly, the Appolonian drive is tied to order, craft, reason. In poetry, this applies to formal verse, verse grounded in concepts and societies and focused on the experience of a people. The Dionysian, in contrast, is focused on the experience of the individual, emotion, ephemera. It is associated with much wilder leaps of metaphor.

It is easy to consider these two forces as opposites. Forces that only exist is tension, and I think that is fairly accurate. Many myth systems are less about good and evil, and have dichotomies based on creation and destruction, or the previously mentioned order and chaos, where there is no good or evil applied to these concepts. They are merely the forces underlying everything.

Poetry, or at least good poetry, relies on tension. Tension gives the poem dynamic energy. Tension between rhymes, between meanings, between line and syntax. Perfectly crafted formal verses may be appreciable based on its technical merits, but it is dull without more wild elements. The strangest of the Surreal can be so fanciful as to be unintelligible, but when it is connected to life, crafted to include considered repetition, is going to be superior.

Poetry cannot follow one impulse or the other. It exists between the two forces, constantly being pulled this way and then that. The struggle, especially as an artist, is to find the particular balance between the two that is ideal for you.

Critical Mass of Crazy

I wonder if there is a certain amount of crazy that a group cannot exceed and continue to function. Perhaps not so much an exact number, but a ratio of total crazy to number of group members. I think about this because I work with some really nutso people, and it doesn’t seem one building should be enough to contain all of this.

Then again, perhaps it works the other way? Maybe a certain amount of crazy is required? As if crazy was fertilizer and Beethoven music. It may be that the best gardens require the most disparate seeds.

Really, imagine how dull life would be if everyone agreed with you all the time.  Certainly, if everyone agreed with me all the time, the world would be a smooth and ordered place, but what opportunity for debate, for new ideas, for synthesis….

There’s a happy balance, I suppose, as there is in most things.  Some ideas are just bad.  Detrimental to the accomplishment of their purposes.  Detrimental to the survival of the species or the planet.  Those are problems.  Excessive oddity? Not so much an issue, but I still wonder how we can function in this messed-up workplace.

"That’s why I had to buy an external hard drive…"

"…Just because it’s midget porn doesn’t mean the file sizes are smaller."

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