Alberto's ballet analogy

Please allow me to go off on a brief tangent.  One of the basics of formal
ballet esthetics is the importance of giving the *impression* that dancing
is totally spontaneous, by relying on rock-solid technique to maintain
control.  It's extremely difficult to dance ballet, even for top dancers
in their athletic, conditioned prime.  But it has to seem effortless and
spontaneous.  Once the audience sees the sweat, it's not art, it's
competitive sports.  But that illusion of *spontaneity* is not
spontaneous, it's rehearsed and tightly controlled.  Acting is the same.  
Stanislavski, who wrote extensively on this, established that if an actor
has not experienced his character's emotions in his own life (and how many
actors playing Macbeth have killed a king?), he has to find a substitute
(maybe he can recall a summer job, long ago, when he stole some money from
a cash register).  So, though the spontaneity of his performance is not
*really* there, it's part of his job to create the illusion of
spontaneity, maybe by recalling the guilt associated with his theft.  So
to come back to Al's question, in the case of ballet and acting, both
performance arts, control creates the illusion of spontaneity.

But poetry is not usually performance art.  Poems (including Ginsberg's)
were conceived, produced, and delivered to an audience.  I don't think
they were performance art.  The kind of spontaneity we are talking about
is not the same as in performance art.  Here, spontaneity means something
like...the first surfaced, virginally-intact vision, uncensored,
quick-don't-think, non-selected.  This anarchic, all-inclusive lack of
discrimination will reflect, the Beats hoped, a common humanity which all
readers will recognize as true, a new freedom, an unburdening of deadening
past history and all past conventions, a new way again of "making it new."
I visualize the process as a poet sitting, purposefully "tuning into"
(chemically- or meditation- or however-facilitated) a subject, and
becoming a vessel, a chanelling medium, a spectator/annotator of his own
perceptions; his respirations, as in "Howl," providing the rhythms of the
poem.  True spontaneity (the desired goal) is achieved like so, and only
when the mind just disappears.  Maybe in this context, then "...the best
minds of my generation (being) destroyed..." wasn't such a bad thing.

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