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Scientifictionist, issue 2, after 1945
Page 12
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sought to make artists organic and integral in life-- as a great bridge, a cathedral, a symphony are organic and integral in a great period of human life. But though he succeeded in creating art, he failed in creating a community of artists. Because he failed, art became less and less organic and integral. Therefore art took and more took the way of the subjective or personal multiverse of each artist's own little half-way self (halfway between the community of logic and reason in the surface mind and the community of subconscious super-knowledge in the buried mind). Out of that half-way land came Surrealism on the one hand and Abstract Art on the other. Surrealism and Abstract Art! -- they, they are of the fog, dissolve things lucid and real into the drifting amorphous dreams of each man's individual arbitrary fancy of theory... into the individual fog shapes of each man's little personal multiverse. The universe of the sun becomes the multiverse of the fog. The objective world the the sun gives is full of distinction, variety, difference of line and color, of nuance and mood; the many subjective worlds that the fog gives, are full of monotony, blurred shadow-shapes, and a deadly dissolution of forms. The subjective destroys itself first; then it destroys man's zest and appetite for art; and finally it tends to disintegrate man's very world. Art, as Van Gogh knew long ago, must return to the simple, the human, the spiritual: it must be functional, organic, integral, objective: it must lift the objects of life into communal joy. Our problem today, if we love art and life, is to find out how we may do in a victorious and wider way what Van Gogh tried to do long ago in his valiant but defeated way. How can Art be lifted out of the subjective multiverse of the little personal men who defile and caricature it in innumerable poetry magazines, picture galleries, musical fog-banks, stream-of-consciousness novels... and into the great objective, clarity, simplicity and integrity that Van Gogh desired! What is the light and where is the road! The genius of our American Continent, also, has always sought to find itself, as Van Gogh found himself, by expressing its subjective love in outward creation. The purest spirit of our Continent and the widest of our Continent, were both objective in this noble sense. Henry David Thoreau-- simplifying life in order that he might find life subtle, accepting poverty that he might be rich-- loved the touch of earth, the glow of air, the flow of water: he became individual and unique by the love of outward substance as inward symbol. And Walt Whitman seeing the objective universe, praised it thus: Smile, O voluptuous, cool-created earth: Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! Earth of sunset! earth of the mountains misty-tops! Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue! Earth of the shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river... Far-swooping, elbowed earth! rich, apple-blossomed earth, Smile, for your lover comes! Mark Twain, too, in all that was best in him (not the paltry stricken pessimism, the theories rooted in personal defeat and frustration of his later years) -- in those rich earlier celebrations of Old Man River-- was great in objective wealth. He loved the touch and savor of things -- even the 'fish-belly white, (the) white to make a body's flesh crawl' of Huckelberry Finn's father. He loved to drift on a raft, or to thunder and splash on a steamboat, down a great river under the stars... discouraging, watching the jeweled lights of cities, cat- page 12
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sought to make artists organic and integral in life-- as a great bridge, a cathedral, a symphony are organic and integral in a great period of human life. But though he succeeded in creating art, he failed in creating a community of artists. Because he failed, art became less and less organic and integral. Therefore art took and more took the way of the subjective or personal multiverse of each artist's own little half-way self (halfway between the community of logic and reason in the surface mind and the community of subconscious super-knowledge in the buried mind). Out of that half-way land came Surrealism on the one hand and Abstract Art on the other. Surrealism and Abstract Art! -- they, they are of the fog, dissolve things lucid and real into the drifting amorphous dreams of each man's individual arbitrary fancy of theory... into the individual fog shapes of each man's little personal multiverse. The universe of the sun becomes the multiverse of the fog. The objective world the the sun gives is full of distinction, variety, difference of line and color, of nuance and mood; the many subjective worlds that the fog gives, are full of monotony, blurred shadow-shapes, and a deadly dissolution of forms. The subjective destroys itself first; then it destroys man's zest and appetite for art; and finally it tends to disintegrate man's very world. Art, as Van Gogh knew long ago, must return to the simple, the human, the spiritual: it must be functional, organic, integral, objective: it must lift the objects of life into communal joy. Our problem today, if we love art and life, is to find out how we may do in a victorious and wider way what Van Gogh tried to do long ago in his valiant but defeated way. How can Art be lifted out of the subjective multiverse of the little personal men who defile and caricature it in innumerable poetry magazines, picture galleries, musical fog-banks, stream-of-consciousness novels... and into the great objective, clarity, simplicity and integrity that Van Gogh desired! What is the light and where is the road! The genius of our American Continent, also, has always sought to find itself, as Van Gogh found himself, by expressing its subjective love in outward creation. The purest spirit of our Continent and the widest of our Continent, were both objective in this noble sense. Henry David Thoreau-- simplifying life in order that he might find life subtle, accepting poverty that he might be rich-- loved the touch of earth, the glow of air, the flow of water: he became individual and unique by the love of outward substance as inward symbol. And Walt Whitman seeing the objective universe, praised it thus: Smile, O voluptuous, cool-created earth: Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! Earth of sunset! earth of the mountains misty-tops! Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue! Earth of the shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river... Far-swooping, elbowed earth! rich, apple-blossomed earth, Smile, for your lover comes! Mark Twain, too, in all that was best in him (not the paltry stricken pessimism, the theories rooted in personal defeat and frustration of his later years) -- in those rich earlier celebrations of Old Man River-- was great in objective wealth. He loved the touch and savor of things -- even the 'fish-belly white, (the) white to make a body's flesh crawl' of Huckelberry Finn's father. He loved to drift on a raft, or to thunder and splash on a steamboat, down a great river under the stars... discouraging, watching the jeweled lights of cities, cat- page 12
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