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Acolyte, vol 1, issue 3, whole 3, Spring 1943
Page 5
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is usually reflecting a section of current opinion in a more than commonly graphic and poignant way. This makes his voice more clearly audible than the average, and gains him the reputation of "prophet" when he happens to touch upon the territory generally covered by the conception of "prophecy". But there is no exactitude, authority, or close cerebration in what he "prophesies"---and he is in truth more often wrong than right, since he is always led by unreliable sympathies and caprices rather than by a cooly intelligent analysis of the events concerned, and a calmly rational estimate of the probable result of their interaction. It is never the glowing bard, but always the steel-cold man of intelligence, who gets the closest to the truth---the question of what is and what isn't---and has the best chance of constructing a sound forecast of what will be. Poetry and art for beauty---but science and philosophy for truth. it was a glowing, misty-minded young poet, and not a sober man of analytical intellect who muddled matters by fastening a false linkage of truth and beauty upon the popular consciousness! However---this isn't to say that poets and artists are less important than men of science, for in hard fact we must admit that truth is nothing of any intrinsic importance. it doesn't matter a hang whether we know anything about anything or not, so long as we can be contented. If we can happily do it, we might just as well believe in Santa Claus, god, a green-cheese moon, fairies, witches, good and evil, unicorns, ghosts, immortality, the Arabian Nights, a flat earth, etc., as learn the real facts about the universe and its streams and patterns of eternal and alternatingly evolving and devolving energy. Truth becomes important only when it is necessary to establish our emotional satisfaction. Emotional satisfaction is the one big thing; and the greatest person is the one who can create the thing most emotionally satisfying, whether or not it has any relation to truth or prophecy. On the whole, I think that beauty is more often satisfying than truth; so that the poet and artist are really somewhat ahead of the scientist and philosopher in a sound and exquisite culture. It is certain that the human personality never attained a greater height of satisfying realisation than in the age of Pericles---yet we know that Periclean Athens was in many respects childishly naive and ignorant in its conception of the universe. The present age, though, has its natural emotional demand for truth very keenly developed; so that the classic parallel will work very exactly. Successful emotional adjustment or equilibrium today undoubtedly requires a far greater proportion of realistic fact-comprehension than an equally successful adjustment in the Hellus[[?]] of 400 B.C.---or even in our own mutable civilisation a generation or two ago. This does not imply any especial advance, but merely a change. We can't regulate our emotional demands, and there is no reason to prefer any one set to another. All we can do is to note their slow, automatic, deterministic change, and to meet them as best we may in the art-forms and folk-ways of each new generation. There is nothing more to life than that. Art, then, is really very important---perhaps the most all-inclusive and important single element in life---though it abrogates its function and ceases to be art as soon as it becomes self-conscious, puffed with illusions of cosmic significance, (as distinguished from local, human, emotional significance) or burdened with ulterior considerations and worries based on its possible reception by the world and its effect on the creator's position. There is an old epigram which defines a gentleman as "a man who doesn't give a damn whether he's a gentleman or not"---and I would extend its principle to other arts than that of living, by averring that artist is one who doesn't give a damn whether he is creating art or not, but who succeeds through not trying to succeed; who aims simply to express himself, and only -- 5 --
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is usually reflecting a section of current opinion in a more than commonly graphic and poignant way. This makes his voice more clearly audible than the average, and gains him the reputation of "prophet" when he happens to touch upon the territory generally covered by the conception of "prophecy". But there is no exactitude, authority, or close cerebration in what he "prophesies"---and he is in truth more often wrong than right, since he is always led by unreliable sympathies and caprices rather than by a cooly intelligent analysis of the events concerned, and a calmly rational estimate of the probable result of their interaction. It is never the glowing bard, but always the steel-cold man of intelligence, who gets the closest to the truth---the question of what is and what isn't---and has the best chance of constructing a sound forecast of what will be. Poetry and art for beauty---but science and philosophy for truth. it was a glowing, misty-minded young poet, and not a sober man of analytical intellect who muddled matters by fastening a false linkage of truth and beauty upon the popular consciousness! However---this isn't to say that poets and artists are less important than men of science, for in hard fact we must admit that truth is nothing of any intrinsic importance. it doesn't matter a hang whether we know anything about anything or not, so long as we can be contented. If we can happily do it, we might just as well believe in Santa Claus, god, a green-cheese moon, fairies, witches, good and evil, unicorns, ghosts, immortality, the Arabian Nights, a flat earth, etc., as learn the real facts about the universe and its streams and patterns of eternal and alternatingly evolving and devolving energy. Truth becomes important only when it is necessary to establish our emotional satisfaction. Emotional satisfaction is the one big thing; and the greatest person is the one who can create the thing most emotionally satisfying, whether or not it has any relation to truth or prophecy. On the whole, I think that beauty is more often satisfying than truth; so that the poet and artist are really somewhat ahead of the scientist and philosopher in a sound and exquisite culture. It is certain that the human personality never attained a greater height of satisfying realisation than in the age of Pericles---yet we know that Periclean Athens was in many respects childishly naive and ignorant in its conception of the universe. The present age, though, has its natural emotional demand for truth very keenly developed; so that the classic parallel will work very exactly. Successful emotional adjustment or equilibrium today undoubtedly requires a far greater proportion of realistic fact-comprehension than an equally successful adjustment in the Hellus[[?]] of 400 B.C.---or even in our own mutable civilisation a generation or two ago. This does not imply any especial advance, but merely a change. We can't regulate our emotional demands, and there is no reason to prefer any one set to another. All we can do is to note their slow, automatic, deterministic change, and to meet them as best we may in the art-forms and folk-ways of each new generation. There is nothing more to life than that. Art, then, is really very important---perhaps the most all-inclusive and important single element in life---though it abrogates its function and ceases to be art as soon as it becomes self-conscious, puffed with illusions of cosmic significance, (as distinguished from local, human, emotional significance) or burdened with ulterior considerations and worries based on its possible reception by the world and its effect on the creator's position. There is an old epigram which defines a gentleman as "a man who doesn't give a damn whether he's a gentleman or not"---and I would extend its principle to other arts than that of living, by averring that artist is one who doesn't give a damn whether he is creating art or not, but who succeeds through not trying to succeed; who aims simply to express himself, and only -- 5 --
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