Beautiful Things Research Articles

"You Must Remember This": The Lives of Others and the Cinematic Imagination

The lives of others won most of top European and international film prizes between 2006 and 2007, including seven Lolas and an Oscar, but it has also been heavily attacked by some critics both for its sympathetic portrait of a Stasi officer and for its misogynistic portrait of a faithless, drug-addicted actress (e.g., Porton; Foundas). The monstrous Gerd Wiesler, critics have argued, is magically transformed into the Good of Georg Dreyman's novel after his sudden exposure to theater, poetry, and music, and vulnerable Christa-Maria Sieland (Mar- tina Gedeck) must be sacrificed to film's central love story, that between Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) and Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). In my view, much of this negative criticism implicitly acknowledges that Lives is tremendously suc- cessful at authentically recreating East Ber- lin of 1980s. The film captures bleak- ness of architecture, cuisine, and fashion in such unnerving detail that reviews insistently demand that film deliver docu- mentary accuracy. too responded to film's authenticity and found its recreation of East Berlin had visited in 1983 uncanny and unset- tling. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck took pains to film on location in rare streets that had not been transformed after fall of Berlin Wall. He refined palette of film to capture sense of color in German Demo- cratic Republic (GDR), so that greens stand in for blues and orange-browns replace reds (von Donnersmarck, Interview on DVD). Visually, film strives for quality of documentary.But The Lives of Others is not a documentary. Although he researched his subject thoroughly for four years, von Donnersmarck's understand- ing of character, his interest in relationships, and his belief in transformative power of art do not come from history, but from an educa- tion in classic Western cinema. We do not fault Casablanca (1942) or Rome, Open City (1945) for being sentimental. We do not blame The Red Shoes (1948) or The Third Man (1949) for being overblown. Instead, we celebrate these films for courage of their sentimentality and hyperbole. And von Donnersmarck's first film is an homage to his cinematic heritage. The per- formance of Martina Gedeck cannot be divorced from iconic performances of Ingrid Berg- man, Alida Valli, Anna Magnani, Moira Shearer, and Julie Christie on which hers is based. And an awareness of Wiesler's cinematic anteced- ents complicates any simple reading of him as a good man.These antecedents have been largely over- shadowed by ideological critiques of Lives. Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, an ex- traordinary book about life in GDR, fears that Lives is fostering a new form of Ostalgie.Groups of ex-Stasi are becoming increasingly belligerent. They write articles and books, and conduct lawsuits against people who speak out against them, including against German publisher of Stasiland. . . . The system demanded such loyalty . . . that most ex-Stasi are still true believers. A story such as Wiesler's plays into their hands as they fight for their reputation. (Funder, Tyranny of Terror)Funder admires Lives: I think film deserves its public and critical acclaim. It is a superb film, a thing of beauty. But it could not have taken place (and never did) under GDR dic- tatorship. . . . No Stasi man ever tried to save his victims, because it was impossible. We'd know if one had, because files are so com- prehensive (Tyranny).Whereas Funder argues that von Donners- marck is taking brutal fact and turning it into narrative, argue exactly oppo- site. Von Donnersmarck's particular achieve- ment is using his cinematic influences-almost all of which are fantasy narratives-and trans- forming these into a film that many critics have misread as an attempt at documentary real- ity. Yet an intertextual reading that accounts for these fantasy narratives can do much to shatter this misperception. …

Children’s views and preferences regarding their outdoor environment

This study aims to enhance awareness of what young children want to do outside and their preferences regarding their outdoor environment. Views of children as active participants, the affordance of the environment and the importance of place for children’s learning constitute the theoretical background of the study. The study was part of a research and development project on education for sustainable development in which preschool children and compulsory school children participated in decision-making about how their common school ground should be constructed. Data were gathered through observations and interviews with children and teachers. The findings show that the children wanted to challenge themselves as well as to be secure, explore things, be in contact with others, find or create nests and enjoy beautiful things outdoors. The children highly valued the natural environment and liked diversity in playground equipment.

Blue mythologies: reflections on a colour

1. Everything is blue 2. Blue is joyful-sad 3. Unwrapping Blue Boy 4. One cat, four girls, three blue and white pots: Walpole's 'Selima' and Sargent's Daughters of Edward Darley Boit 5. 'A thing of Beauty is a guilt for ever' 6. Milk and sugar are blue 7. Timber, timbre: hearing blue again 8. A bolt from the blue 9. Cyanoclasm 10. Like a stocking: two paths of metaphor and metonymy 11. Blue lessons: a Patch of Blue, a blue cardigan buttoned and a robin's egg 12. To blue: Helen Chadwick's Oval Court 13. 'A foggy lullaby' 14. Words fail 15. A blue fawn's eye 16. Blue Albertine and Blue Ariane: (Marcel Proust and Chantal Akerman) 17. A blue lollipop (Krysztof Kieslowski) 18. 'O blue' 19. Venice is a wet map 20. Domestic blues: Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur 21. Aran is a blue place where it is hard to find anything missing 22. In Lieu of a Blue Ending: Un-Knitting a Cerulean Jumper

A Short Note on Translating Thomas Hardy’s Biblical Allusions

In one of the many moving passages in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles , the heroine baptizes her dying child Sorrow. It is worth examining the following scene: “Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she stood in her long white nightgown, a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging straight down her back to her waist. The kindly dimness of the weak candle abstracted from her form and features the little blemishes which sunlight might have revealed ─ the stubble scratches upon her wrists, and the weariness of her eyes ─ her high enthusiasm having a transfiguring effect upon the face which had been her undoing, showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty, with an impress of dignity which was almost regal. The little ones kneeling round, their sleepy eyes blinking and red, awaited her preparations full of a suspended wonder which their physical heaviness at that hour would not allow to become active” (my emphasis, 94).

A thing of beauty, is a joy forever...!!!

A thing of beauty, is a joy forever...!!!

Collective commentaries regarding two articles disputing value of cervical disc arthroplasty vs. Anterior cervical diskectomy and fusion.

Collective commentaries regarding two articles disputing value of cervical disc arthroplasty vs. Anterior cervical diskectomy and fusion.

ONE, TWO, THREE, PHI

1 5 1 R O N E , T W O , T H R E E , P H I E D I S O N M I Y A W A K I I’ve got an idea – and I’m just spitballing here – but what if I wrote a wandering dream of a book, lavishly illustrated on glossy pages, in which I am me, myself, a working scientist, cast in the mold of Dante Alighieri, except that I don’t write in terza rima. But I’ve got thousands of Virgils as guides. The Virgils are important scientists and of course artists, and I’ll borrow from all of them copiously, with appropriate scholarly citation. Anyway, these Virgils guide me through the matrix of a nervous-system network – which is to say, the human brain, which I study in real life – and then, miraculously . . . Interrupting response to the above proposal: the book could be hell; it probably is hell. Phi (that would be phi, ⌽, not pi, ⌸) is now out for laypersons and scientists to see and judge for themselves. They might find, to author Giulio Tononi’s credit, that his book is not a reader’s purgatory – not entirely. True enough, there’s torture in it (example to follow). Prolix and uneven, it is nevertheless an astonishing foray into what might be called neuroaesthetics. In theory, neuroaestheP h i : A V o y a g e f r o m t h e B r a i n t o t h e S o u l , by Giulio Tononi (Pantheon, 364 pp., $30) 1 5 2 M I Y A W A K I Y tics should be congratulated whenever and wherever attempted: getting scientists to write well about beautiful things, including the brain, is noble. Indeed, Nobel winners in science have been getting into the act recently, and we might expect more trade books in step with the latest science-prize announcements from Stockholm. Recently, for example, we have Eric Kandel’s The Age of Empathy (2012). Kandel’s winning science had to do with how the brain remembers, but his Age is about fin-de-siècle Vienna, about Kandel’s nostalgia for the era, and about how art and science mingled then, like hydrogen and oxygen, to create truly beautiful vapor. Even the co√ee klatches in that Vienna (as Kandel describes ) were ethereal. A certain Berta Zuckerkandel, wife of a local anatomist, threw the best soirées by far. ‘‘On my divan, Austria comes alive,’’ she once announced, probably with a demure smile. In aesthetic critical terms, Kandel’s Age confines itself to discussing Viennese portrait artists of the time. By comparison, Giulio Tononi is boundary-less and gratuitously encyclopedic. If memory serves, the only thing that Tononi doesn’t discuss is Viennese portraiture of the fin de siècle. Who is Tononi? I flip through my nonelectronic files to pull a manila folder marked, with Sharpie pen, ‘‘Tononi, G.’’ I find in it, to my embarrassment, only one Xeroxed article, from the 4 December 1998 issue of Science, titled ‘‘Consciousness and Complexity .’’ Tononi’s co-author is Gerald Edelman, a Nobel laureate like Kandel (though Edelman got his prize twenty-eight years before Kandel, for work on the immune system, not the brain). There’s one sentence in my lone Science article – a single phrase, in fact – to suggest that Tononi has spent a sizable chunk of his life working on just one thing. Here’s the sentence, and I’d ask the reader to consider what single phrase or clause in it might make for a career: ‘‘It can be shown that high values of complexity reflect the coexistence of a high degree of functional specialization and functional integration within a system, as appears to be the case for systems such as the brain.’’ The answer is not ‘‘It can be shown,’’ but you’re warm. ‘‘High values of complexity’’ makes me scratch my head vigorously , to the point of disregarding all that comes thereafter. Can one put a ‘‘value’’ on complexity? What are the units – cups or quarts? If you did make a measurement, who would care? The O N...

James Risser's Contemporary Hermeneutics

beautiful strangeness ( Seivov) of human lifethe beautiful strange power that is human lifeJust beneath the surface of James Risser's The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), haunting almost every paragraph and certainly every chapter-whose overt themes are understanding and language-lie two recurrent themes that the book is hardly able to contain. These are the theme of community and the theme of a beautiful strangeness. I will try to follow the thread of these themes and say something about how Risser weaves them together into a tapestry of words that push the limits of Gadamerian hermeneutics in new directions.In the last and most beautifully written chapter of this book, Risser discusses the of beauty. Something of the nature of beauty that l had not previously considered is struggling to come to the fore in this chapter. It becomes clear in his analysis that this flash of beauty cannot be appropriated into an appearance and is immune to dialectical absorption. Risser argues that this non-dialectical, sudden moment of upsurgence that belongs to beauty and thereby to all that radiates in the light of beauty, that is, all that appears, this sudden flash cannot itself be articulated because it is the origination of language. the origination of language, the flash of beauty takes place as the contraction of itself into a null point, befitting every ( 111 ). As the origin of language, this null point is the origination of connection and community. This inarticulable unity that gives itself without exhausting itself is the source of illumination in which things appear in their manifold shining and in their interconnectedness.An example of this inarticulable unity at the heart of language is exposed by Risser in his discussion of the poetic word. Risser discusses the poetic word as opening discourse in a way that preserves the unity and integrity of the creative word and yet hears in the singularity of word itself the generation of language. Risser says: In ordinary discourse we continually run ahead in thought searching for the meaning, letting 'the appearance of the words fall away as we listen and read for the meaning being conveyed,' while in poetic discourse each and every word has meaning in its sonority (105). I understand this to say that the unity of a poetic word resonates within itself the whole of language; and in this way, the word generates the text. How is it that the poetic word in its self-articulation and what Risser calls its self-authenticating power is able to repeat itself sonorously and be heard as language? Risser's answer is that we need to recover the vitality of language if we are once again to regain our capacity to hear in the unity of the poetic word its generative power as language, to hear how language generates itself out of the poetic word, how the one becomes many, how the apparent word becomes meaning. Risser suggests that this recovery of the poetic word occurs not through our own devices but by virtue of the beauty that belongs to the poetic word. The nature of to kciXov, the beautiful, is kciAeTv, to call (107). The beautiful is the call of being and this call has an appealing and enticing character. It is this calling us forth to be that is the origin of language. The voice of this call quickens those who hear the poetic word. And calls forth what is into shining appearance.It is important to notice here that beauty arises in the shining of things and belongs to this appearance and self-showing and yet is uncapturable in it; its shining always exceeds. The flash of beauty is Risser's term for this excessive moment of the beautiful that belongs to all things of beauty. It seems to me that Risser's hermeneutics is always in one way or another attempting to get at this ungraspable unity that belongs to the plurality of beings that appear. It is for Risser a question of participation: how is it that what appears participates in the illumination of beauty in a way that lets it appear alongside and with others without destroying its singularity; indeed how is it that the oneness of beauty constitutes this singularity as the very basis of community? …

The Significance and Role of Aesthetic Education in Schooling

Every child needs planned, aesthetic education in order to influence the experiencing, feeling and enjoying of beautiful things as a counterbalance to our currently rationalized world. Since the contemporary school strives for the development of professional knowledge and skills on the basis of intellectual actions, while (at the same time) neglecting other dimensions of the child’s personality (emotions, feelings, etc.), it is one of the most important tasks of the education of children and young people to develop the ability to enjoy art and beauty, and in one’s inner and outer life to act in accordance with a sense of proportion, harmony and beauty. The purpose of the article is to highlight the significance of aesthetic education in the development of the personality as a whole, to shed light on the aims of aesthetic education, to define the aesthetic dimension of experience and to ascertain the reasons for the neglect of aesthetic education in theory and practice.

On Occultism, the Hieratic, and Other Strangely Beautiful Things

Following his attendance of the congress of the “Ordo Templi Orientis” in Ascona in 1917, Hugo Ball describes occultism in positive terms as a non-dogmatic and humane way of advocating a less materialistic concept of life. Ball links the “fine aims” of the Ordo Templi Orientis to modern experimental dance as represented by Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman. Ball also praises the performances of Raya Belensson and Sophie Täuber.

Narrative Cartographies, ‘Beautiful Things’ and Littoral States in Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea

Much scholarship on By the Sea has focused on its representation of south-north migration and asylum. This article attends instead to the narrative cartography by which it maps Zanzibar and the Swahili coast into the Indian Ocean world while, in turn, opening up into a world ocean of stories. Central to this reading are its allusions to A Thousand and One Nights, through which it crafts a poetics of passage while reflecting on the enthralling nature of things. Redolent of what a focus on things might reveal about the Indian Ocean, and vice versa, By the Sea opens up their potent potentialities and explores ways of relating to them that scramble the vectors of possession, and solidify or sully the bonds between or encasing subjects. In the process, the novel is able to render a suggestively ambivalent portrayal of the Indian Ocean world at it attends the Swahili Coast, refracting its history through the prism of narrative in order to cast a spectrum of representation capacious enough to translate the insights gleaned from its cosmopolitan and dehumanizing pasts into an emergent world order.

‘All the Beautiful Things’: Trauma, Aesthetics and the Politics of Palestinian Childhood

This paper examines the ways in which Palestinian children variously perform and transform the discourse of trauma and the aesthetic of suffering that have come to dominate representations of Palestinian childhood and the Palestinian struggle in general. It is argued that everyday beauty in the lives of Palestinian refugee children, as found in mundane spaces and enacted through interpersonal relationships, constitutes an aesthetic disruption to the dominant representation of trauma as put forward by international humanitarian aid organisations and development agencies. Far from being restricted to the immediacy of everyday spaces and interactions, however, everyday beauty is located within wider national and religious geographical imaginaries, and likewise forms the basis of critiques of social and political injustice, and demands for a more just and equitable future. It is argued that children enact an everyday Islamic ethic of beauty as part of a wider political demand for life itself.

Endgame: A Series of Endings

Samuel Beckett's popular play Endgame, depicts a prison-like room with two windows that show a dead universe and a "corpsed world". Throughout his play, Beckett uses ideas, symbols, objects, and actions that reflect an ending. In Endgame the characters cannot choose; it seems that everything is coming to an end and they can do nothing about it; they have to accept it. The play's world is devoid of meaning, warmth, humor and all beautiful things. In most of his works Beckett shows that human faculties are deteriorating and Endgame is no exception. Hamm and Clov are not mobile; Hamm cannot stand and Clov just moves in a limited way. Nagg and Nell are confined in a dustbin totally without action and mobility. Hamm's chronicle is an unfinished one and one can generalize it to all Beckett's works as they avoid closure. In fact the play starts from the point where it's "nearly finished" and it ends the same.

An Image of Europe: Yinka Shonibare's Postcolonial Decadence

In 1891 Oscar Wilde argued that “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.” A hundred years later, the Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE takes up where Wilde left off, arguing that “[t]o be an artist you have to be a good liar.” This essay explores how Shonibare reinvents Wilde's antirealism for a globalized, postcolonial world. Building on Leela Gandhi's notion of “interested autonomy,” I argue that in works such as his 2001 photo series Dorian Gray, Shonibare turns to Wilde's aestheticism as a means of upending the relation between realism and politics found in Chinua Achebe's critique of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, rediscovering the disparate racial and sexual geographies at stake in Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and in Albert Lewin's 1945 film version of it. Shonibare's post-colonial decadence, I argue, demonstrates how decadent aestheticism may become central to postcolonial imaginings of the real.

The six R's of remembering.

AbstractAlthough complex and multifaceted, memory can be distilled into a small set of very fundamental principles-the six R's of memory. The first is receding, whereby what is actually experienced is transformed on its way into memory with the goal of establishing associations that enrich memory. The second is rehearsal, whereby what has been experienced (and likely recoded) is reviewed with the goal of strengthening memory. The third is relearning, whereby memory is enhanced by reexperiencing, without the necessity of awareness. The fourth is reminding, whereby the encoding of an event invokes the memory of a related previous event, which in turn benefits remembering. The fifth is retrieval, whereby what has already entered memory is recollected, typically with the goal of responding but also with significant implications for subsequent remembering. The sixth is reconstruction, whereby the components of episodes are assembled for the purpose of recollection and where the use of schemata and associations alters memory. Together, these six processes capture much of the richness and power of memory.Keywords: memory, recoding, rehearsal, relearning, reminding, retrieval, reconstructionIn a century and a half of empirical and theoretical research on memory, we have learned a great deal about how this most human of systems works. As is true for any science, however, we still have a very long way to go: One of the beautiful things about learning is that it is never completed. It has been my privilege to be a part of this quest to understand what makes us ourselves for 40 years, decades that have passed with the fleeting yet indelible quality of memory itself. In that time, I have been struck by the recurrence of one letter - the letter R. I have not felt persecuted, as Miller (1956) felt by the digit 7, but I have felt . . . watched or guided by the letter R. So many of what I think of as the basic components of remembering - the processes that have interested me for these four decades - begin with this letter that I have decided to build this article around the letter R in tribute.Table 1 contains a list of the six R's that I see as fundamental to how memory works. In what follows, I will take each of these in turn and describe in brief some of the influential research that has validated that process. This will certainly not be a thorough and complete analysis of each process - this is not meant to be a review article and anyway, each of these would warrant a review in its own right - but hopefully the centrality of each process will become evident. As it happens, in one way or another through my career, I have investigated all of these, and consequently I will also incorporate some personal examples in this sketch.These six processes can be roughly categorized into two groups. Recoding, rehearsal, and relearning correspond more to what are traditionally thought of as encoding processes, in that they promote entry of events into memory; reminding, retrieval, and reconstruction correspond more closely to what are traditionally thought of as recovery processes, in that they promote inspection of events already in memory. I note this distinction with some trepidation because I am very much a proceduralist, influenced by the ideas of Kolers (1973) and Kolers and Roediger (1984). Under the proceduralist analysis, as we process an event, we create a record of that processing, integrating the present with the remembered past. Later, we can replay that record, which, if accompanied by conscious recognition, will produce the experience of remembering and which will also augment memory. In this framing of memory, each instance of encoding involves retrieval, and each instance of retrieval involves encoding, so that there is no sharp dividing line to separate encoding from retrieval.Proceduralism stands in stark contrast to the more common, received view of memory based on the library metaphor. …

‘An eye for an eye’: examining a cuneiform inscription on the Nebraska State Capitol

There is little doubt that the Nebraska State Capitol building is a masterwork of art, architecture, history and mythology (fig. 1). Its skin of Indiana limestone records the political and legal growth of human civilization with quotations from Plato, Aristotle and Native American oral tradition, and the figures of great thinkers and leaders from Solon to Napoleon, who laid the philosophical foundation of the modern world. The designers of the Capitol wanted these depictions to shroud the elements of state government, while exposing those who worked there to the legacy of which they were a part. If it were not for a shared history and theme, some of the faces and languages on the Capitol would seem a strange find in Nebraska. Perhaps one of the strangest is Hammurabi1 and the depiction of a portion of his famous Code. While Hammurabi, though probably not his stylized appearance, is familiar to many, the script carved near him is not. The inscription is cuneiform, the wedge-and-line script of several civilizations in the ancient Near East. While the script on the Capitol expresses one of Hammurabi's most famous laws, its depiction is not completely accurate, and the translation given in perhaps the best article on the symbolism of the building needs updating.2The Nebraska State Capitol, built between 1922 and 1932, stands 15 storeys (121 m) high in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. When the previous capitol needed to be replaced, a Capitol Commission was formed to select an architect for what would be one of the largest construction projects in Lincoln at the time. The commission established principles to guide the project, namely that the building be a functional house of government, built with integrity and pride, and that it be:An inspiring monument worthy of the State for which it stands; a thing of beauty, so conceived and fashioned as to properly record and exploit our civilization, aspirations, and patriotism, past, present, and future; intelligently designed, durably and conscientiously built, and of worthy materials; and all beautifully and fittingly set, surrounded, embellished, and adequately furnished.During a competitive process, the commission selected the plan of the architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869-1924). Goodhue did not, however, work alone: to address the mandate that the new capitol record the history of civilization, specifically the development of law and government, he engaged the sculptor Lee Lawrie (1877-1963). Lawrie, together with a professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Hartley Burr Alexander (1873-1939), used what is termed 'architectural sculpture': 'The exterior sculpture, a major part of the symbolism on Nebraska's capitol, is best described as architectural sculpture. It is clearly intended to be subordinate to the architecture.'4Lawrie appreciated that architectural sculpture was a critical, almost foundational, element of the entire concept of sculptural art. He noted, 'the sculptures of Babylon, Egypt, Greece and even of the Middle Ages were made almost entirely for and on buildings. The art museum is a recent invention . . . and sculpture in early days was done for a reason.'5 The sculpture of the capitol had a mission to accomplish, and what Lawrie and Alexander did with the canvas of Indiana limestone was breathtaking. The Capitol Commission declared 'The Capitol of a State is the outward sign of the character of its people. Their respect for its traditions and history, their belief in its importance and worth, and their love of its fair name - all find expression in its Capitol.'6 And that is what Nebraskans received. The sculpture of the capitol is, as Alexander wrote, 'a book, logically arranged, with introduction, body and conclusion'.7 This 'book' records the stories of Minos, Hammurabi, Moses, Akhenaten, Solon, Solomon, Julius Caesar, Justinian I, Charlemagne and Napoleon, referred to collectively as the great lawgivers, along with elements depicting the ideals of culture such as history, reason and liberation. …

Ranger le monde. 'Féerie générale' d’Emmanuelle Pireyre

To describe the world and to put some order into our contemporaneity, Emmanuelle Pireyre gathered in his novel titled Féérie générale (2012) numerous examples of situations that are symptomatic of the reality of the last years. Written in a way that highlights all the nuances of everyday life and interspersed either with the narrator’s opinions on modern society, or with dreams, extracts of electronic notices, anecdotes, or even with the presentation of a collection of kisses, the stories summarize the discontinuous and complex world. Denouncing the aberrations of society, the narrator confronts the clichés and the ideas people do not have time to think about, suggesting that we see in this world only the beautiful things, love and happiness, feelings considered futile by the thinkers and the creators. In this collection of magic things, Pireyre invites at the same time the readers to distance themselves from the disorder of the world and to live on a kind of islands of happiness.

Looking at Well-Crafted Objects

Looking at Well-Crafted Objects Translated by Andrew Schelling (bio) ramyāṇi vīkṣya madhurāṃś ca niśamya śabdānparyutsuko bhavati yat sukhito'pi jantuḥtac cetasā smarati nūnam abhodha pūrvaṃbhāvasthirāṇi jananāntarasauhṛdāni ramyāṇi. beauties, beautiful objects vīkṣya. having seen madhurāṃ. sweet, honeyed ca. and niśamya. having heard śabdān. sounds paryutsuko. (bv. cmpd.) restless, stricken bhavati. becomes yat. he who sukhito. content, happy 'pi. (api) even jantuḥ. man, person tat-cetasā. with his heart smarati. remembers nūnam. now (here: perhaps) abodha. without knowing pūrvaṃ. previously, long ago bhāva. emotions sthirāṇi. stationed, established janana-antara. (of a) former lifetime sauhṛdāni. loves, companions [End Page 42] Looking at well-crafted objectshearing sweet musiceven the contented persongrows edgypierced by unknown desires.Could it be deepin the heart one uncoversthe trace of a loverfrom lifetimes ago? This poem occurs in Kālidāsa’s dramatic work The Recollection of Śakuntalā. Indian poets and critics have cited it for centuries, using it to get to the heart of rasa. In the play, a young warlord on a hunting expedition encounters a girl, Śakuntalā, who has been raised in a cloistered forest ashram by her mendicant father. Prince and girl fall for each other and consummate their love in a wooded glade. By India’s old conventions, this is a “gandharva wedding”—a ceremony sanctified by the gandharvas, celestial musicians who watch over human love. The young couple strolls through the woods after their lovemaking and literally trip across a severe recluse, disrupting his meditation. In a fit of rage, the powerful yogin hurls a curse: when the prince returns home, no matter his vows, all memory of Śakuntalā will be obliterated. In a subsequent scene, the warlord is back in his life of wealth and rank when he hears a strain of music drift through the palace. A former lover of his plays on a musical instrument in her far-off quarters, the song a subtle reproach for his neglect of her. His heart, unexpectedly pierced, becomes paryutsuka, troubled, full of longing, brimming with uncertain desire and regret. The audience knows that a trace of Śakuntalā, some thin strand of passion, runs through his body, too buried by the curse to rise into consciousness. It is at this moment in the play—most likely accompanied by ceremonial dance—he recites, ramyāṇi vīkṣya … For poets, the stanza is the perfect isolation of rasa, bedrock emotional territory that underlies our surface passions. The purpose of poetry is to access that subconscious material, to provide a “taste” of the underlying white-hot encounter with what’s real. To the philosopher this taste is a “foretaste” of spiritual liberation. Most Indian accounts of the origins or the purpose of art have proceeded from the concept of rasa, ever since the Kashmiri poet-philosopher Abhinavagupta set down its metaphysical basis in the tenth- or eleventh-century treatise Abhinavabhāratī. The eight (or at times nine or ten) rasas are the names of emotional states: erotic love, humor, [End Page 43] grief, rage, revulsion, horror, heroism, and wonder. Laid out in a visual psychology, each has a color, a direction, a deity, a time of day or year, and many other associations. Originally meaning juice, sap, semen, rasa came to mean the essence or life-juice of anything, its “taste.” René Daumal translated rasa as saveur. The questions raised by this poem edge into psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and ecology. What is the wild unnamed edginess a person approaches in art? Why should things of beauty provoke desire instead of allay it? How far does memory reach, and through it do we actually touch other persons? How is art able to make us feel as though we’ve brushed against former life memories? The poem uses technical terms hard to match closely in English. Ramyāṇi are things that are gorgeous because they provoke bodily desire, from the verbal root ram, to make love. The bhāva-sthirāṇi are deep-seated personal emotions—almost “complexes”—at the core of the individual...

Discussion on the Combination of the Modern Ceramic Art with Outdoor Environment

Since the success of drilling wood to make fire was achieved by human for the first time, the history of tens of thousands of years had passed over. In such a long period of time, the ceramic culture was created by Chinese people with their own wisdom and hands. In the modern times, the age of the information economy, which has attained a rapid development, has brought about a new, important, and different beginning to human beings. Along with the arrival of the comprehensive cultural age in which natural science is mutually colliding with humanism science, technology and art, thinking in images, and rational thinking, etc. In the meantime, the pursuit of people in beautiful things is developing, and also their consciousness in aesthetics is continuously improved. Modern ceramic art is a demand of human on civilization, but also one of the most important components of the history of art. Besides, modern ceramic art has been accepted by modern people in a certain space environment with great willingness, and also are more appropriate to the needs of modern people, because it owns many characteristics and advantages. For this reason, the combination of modern ceramic art with outdoor environment has a bright and roomy bright prospect in future de-velopment.

The Treachery of Beautiful Things (review)

Reviewed by: The Treachery of Beautiful Things Kate Quealy-Gainer Long, Ruth Frances . The Treachery of Beautiful Things. Dial, 2012. 363p. ISBN 978-0-8037-3580-4 $16.99 Ad Gr. 7-10. Despite having spent the last seven years insisting that her older brother was stolen by trees, seventeen-year-old Jenny is finally ready to put the past behind her and returns to the woodsy site of Tom's disappearance to say a final goodbye. Instead, however, Jenny hears what she thinks is Tom's flute, follows the sound, and finds herself being attacked by a small group of well-armed faeries. Rescued by Jack, a guardian of the border between the faerie realm and the mortal world, Jenny demands to be taken to her brother. Jack acquiesces, but like everything in the faerie world, he has his own motivation and he's willing to put Jenny's life on the line if it means he gets what he wants. The third-person narration is primarily focalized through the steadfastly loyal and mostly boring Jenny, but the emphasis sometimes [End Page 96] shifts to the much more interesting Jack, giving readers a broader sense of a faerie world steeped in secrets, magic, and lore. Long builds the foundation of her setting on traditional English and Celtic tales, but she also draws on elements from Nordic and German stories to create a distinct sense of place. The malice that underlies the world's beauty plays out the title to the fullest and adds a substantial bit of true gruesomeness to what is already a suspenseful story. With such a fascinating and complex build-up, the tidy ending is therefore disappointing, especially in that it takes both Jenny and Jack out of the faerie world completely. Still, readers of the genre will no doubt enjoy getting lost here and will find themselves hoping for a sequel that ensures a return trip. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois