We all genuinely believe it. It’s not arrogance. It’s because we are still hungry. There’s no reason why we can’t do this. You think about other art forms and artists – filmmakers, painters, sculptors. It doesn’t follow that your best work is done in your late twenties, early thirties, and then it’s downhill. Unfortunately, that’s the way rock & roll has panned out. But we don’t buy that. Our only limitation is our ability to apply ourselves, to be hard-minded on our work. We push and push until we get to those special pieces of music, those lyrics. And it doesn’t arrive on call. You can’t turn it on. It needs time spent and time spent in the right frame of mind.

While I’m on the topic of U2, you might consider this powerful quote as a means of grace to stir your Christmas affections. Don’t just read it; meditate on it. Merry Christmas!

The idea that God, if there is a force of Logic and Love in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in shit and straw…a child… I just thought: “Wow!” Just the poetry … Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. There it was. I was sitting there, and it’s not that it hadn’t struck me before, but tears came streaming down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this

And here’s a bonus, the new song “Winter” off the Brothers soundtrack. Moving.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DiegKVXpCs]

What do you think? Do we need a genuius, a muse?

HT: MT

“Milton’s poetry is good to think with. It’s a good workout. You feel really great and fit when you’ve finished. Maybe that’s what he meant by the ‘fit reader.’”

In a day when the medium often trumps the message, such good-thinking art is hard to come by. Of course, most consumers of art are, well, just that–consumers. Surely there’s nothing wrong with appreciating a photograph timely taken or a song that is musically stirring, but what goes into good art has as much, if not more, potential to shape and thrill us. Milton experts have, century after century, found themselves stirred and provoked, inspired and confronted with the beauty of his work and the depth of his reflection:

it is always demanding that its readers measure themselves against the judgments it repeatedly makes – judgments about the nature of virtue, about the proper mode of civil and domestic behavior, about the true shape of heroism..about the criteria of aesthetic excellence, about the uses of leisure, about one’s duties to man and God, about the scope and limitations of reason, about the primacy of faith, about everything.

Milton’s poetry does more than entertain; it provokes a response, invites a dialogue. Why? Could it be that he has a medium within the medium? An intangible moral, theological clay from which he fashions his words, his art? A medium within the medium of the poetry itself?

We would do well to heed Milton’s example, to produce good-thinking art, whatever the medium. To become reflective artisans that begin with some kind of ideaological “medium,” which we then push through the medium of our art, to increase aesthetic excellence.

During the symposium, the question was posed: “Who was better? Milton or Shakespeare?” The answer, of course is neither; they are different. But consider this closing observation:

And the difference is that after reading or seeing a Shakespeare play you want to sit down and discuss the glories of Shakespeare, whereas after reading a Milton poem you want to sit down and discuss the ideas and imperatives he has thrust at you.

A medium within the medium.

See the rest of the article here (HT:MC).