Abstract
If you associate with academics who discuss the arts — the professor critics, interpreters, aestheticians, and assorted cultural deep thinkers on campus — you will meet one of their major products: nonsense on stilts. I learned the phrase “nonsense on stilts” from Paul Ziff, who learned it from reading the works of Jeremy Bentham. Ziff isn’t timid about using this phrase in connection with aesthetics or any other area of philosophy. It fits his irreverent attitude towards intellectual matters generally. For him, there simply are no precious ideas or sacred books, including his own. He is severe with all ideas. The typical aesthetician (or beautician, as Ziff likes to call them) is at the other end of the spectrum: indulgent as can be with ideas. A master, one might say, of the uncritical attitude.
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Notes
The Changing Light at Sandover (New York: Atheneum, 1982) is a trilogy with a coda. The first part is entitled “The Book of Ephraim” and it first appeared in Divine Comedies (New York: Atheneum, 1976); the second part originally appeared as Mirahell’s Books of Number (New York: Atheneum, 1978) and the third part appeared as Scripts for the Pageant (New York: Atheneum, 1980).
Judith Moffett, James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); David Lehman and Charles Berger (eds.), James Merrill: Essays in Criticism ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983 ).
Lehman and Berger, p. 27.
Milbourne Christopher, ESP, Seers and Psychics ( New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1970 ), p. 131.
Moffett, p. 174.
Jane Roberts, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), p. xvii.
Ruth Montgomery, The World Before ( New York: Fawcett Crest Books, 1976 ), pp. 15–16.
Ruth Montgomery, A World Beyond ( New York: Fawcett Crest Books, 1971 ), p. 7.
Jane Roberts, The Seth Material ( New York: Bantam Books, 1970 ), p. 83.
Moffett, p. xvii.
Jane Roberts, The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), p. xi.
Moffett, p. xvii.
Jane Roberts, Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology ( New York: Bantam Books, 1975 ), p. 15.
Lehman and Berger, p. 285.
Roberts, Adventures in Consciousness,p. ix.
Lehman and Berger, p. 275. Also see Stephen Yenser, The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987 ), pp. 217–321.
Lehman and Berger, p. 1581.
John Archibald Wheeler, “Not Conscious but the Distinction Between the Probe and the Probed as Central to the Elemental Quantum Act of Observing,” in The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World, ed. Robert G. Jahn ( Boulder: Westview Press 1981 ), p. 105.
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Stalker, D.F. (1994). Rhyme without Reason. In: Jamieson, D. (eds) Language, Mind, and Art. Synthese Library, vol 240. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8313-8_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8313-8_13
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