Low Brow High Concept

Truth and Beauty and Goodness?

I heard somewhere that Art is Truth and Beauty, but I can't remember. When I search it, I find Truth and Beauty and Goodness, but I don't believe in Goodness, and it doesn't exactly match up with what I remember internalizing. Now I will redefine it as I've internalized. For something to be valuable first has to be True. It has to speak to some truthful aspect of reality. It must reflect lived experience. In this way, more things become art as you become older. Your reading comprehension increases as a function of age. Beauty is more difficult to nail down. Something has Beauty if it is (and this depends on the reader), but, for me, empowering primarily. We then get this definition of Art as something that takes what has happened to you and makes you stronger for it. It emphasizes the transformative nature of art.

Low Brow

Angela Carter is not very high brow in my opinion. She does not hide behind euphamisms and metaphor any more than is literally necessary. In fact, her fantasy metaphysics is largely the direct action of symbol on symbol instead of any hidden layer of pretense. It is this lack of pretension that makes her frankly vulgar writing style so emblematic of Truth. I cannot imagine, as in the Lathe of Heaven, the death of 6 billion people. This has never happened to me.

I was a young child when the Fukushima power plant was hit by a tsunami and I cried for hours on end. I was unconsolable. It was the first time I could comprehend tragedy, and approximately from that point on my empathy distance shrank immensely. I think I was encouraged to not think about it so much since I couldn't do anything, but I can't really remember. I just remember crying a lot. There is no Truth in Le Guin's 6 billion people, for me at least. It is one of the greatest tragedies said but it is too high brow, too sanitized for me to get it.

But when Desiderio gets raped by the acrobats, is bleeding from his ass as he climbs a mountain, and he decides to destroy everything around him in a fierce discharge of "eroto-energy," a hatred caused by sex, fueled by sex, engrossed in sex? I was there. That is Truth.

High concept

Carter is also very high concept I believe. Further representative of the symbol on symbol action described above, Carter usually does not interface with people. Every character is a living personification of the thesis, the antithesis, or a type of synthesis. It's a perfectly symmetrical war in which Desiderio must kill his soulmate who in turn must trap him in a sex machine forever. Desiderio and Albertina are kind of made for each other since neither of them really do anything or exert any agency the entire story, and I think this is an intentional reflection of attempted synthesis between what I call "the fascism of logic" and the "fires of passion." Le Guin is also somewhat high concept, though maybe not to the degree in which Carter is (because Carter refuses to draw a conclusion for you, and Le Guin seems to have made up her, and ideally your, mind about it all).

Urgency

If Le Guin is higher concept than I give her credit for, I couldn't tell you, I did not read her book with the same Urgency, with the same thirst for Truth that I read Carter with. When I read Carter's two books, over and over again, they were the most important two books in the world to me at the time. I found them to be immensely meaningful to me. Not only did I find them meaningful, I knew they had meaning I had to decipher. That's Urgency. I showed everyone I could these books, and nobody else felt the Urgency that I did. I mean, of course not, I chose my new friends after reading this book to be those who had already internalized its message. Only someone I wouldn't spend time on would get that Urgency. Nobody will ever understand Hoffman like I do.