Ready-Made Elysiums Do Not Comfort

Here is a kind of extended comment on a previous post, "A Critical Judgment of Popular Writing."  I've highlighted portions I find particularly relevant.

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Those who deplored Rosenfeld's refusal to join the Communist ranks overlooked the most telling point in his confession of faith.  He saw (as [John Jay] Chapman had seen in the early days of socialism) that the ideal of "rich corporate existence and spiritual growth" had not in fact been furthered by the change in political allegiance.  This ideal of social wealth had always been dear to intellectuals caught up in the American game of salvation by individual acquisition; and yet, following closely the political activity of the '30's, Rosenfeld noted the lack of any "quarrel with the whole blindly wasteful tendency of American life...."  At the rallies he did not hear of the desire for "the right to the good and the sincere job" or of " the social necessity of a living use of materials."  Instead, behind the revolutionary talk he heard the old demand for bourgeois comforts.  The "revolution" was simply distributive; its end was not a change in the quality of life but "cars, silk stockings and radio sets for all."

History may force us to grant the justice of Rosenfeld's observations, but somehow, in our own preoccupation with things, we find quixotic the partisan of a better life.  Rosenfeld might have taken comfort from Thoreau, not only because the '30's taught him a bitter lesson in simplicity but because his stand was never popular.  He now feared that the artist's cause had been lost from the beginning and that a society seeking spiritual ends was "incapable of realization in the world."  America, he wrote, was not "the first land to believe that, made economically secure and comfortable, life will automatically grow blessed."  He did not spare himself hard truths.  Perhaps it was the world's misfortune to be destined to belong to "the stupid."  But if it were, it was still the "artist's business to tell it so."  It was the artist's business to fight for life against death.  The waste land and martyrdom were not the only alternatives.

Rosenfeld placed the artist in the world but beyond the politics of possessions.  For the artist was fundamentally an anarchist.  His intuitions revealed the ever-changing order in things.  To this order he was faithful when he shaped material "in accordance with its own nature and the idea to which it conforms...."  For in this way his work was "expressive," carrying us, as Rosenfeld said of great music, "out of ourselves and beyond ourselves, into impersonal regions, into the stream of things; permitting us to feel the conditions under which objects exist, the forces playing upon human life."  The nature of vision committed the artist to an open world, and in this sense the environment proved "hostile" only when the artist himself refused to embrace it.  "What we call a favorable environment, and what we call creative ability," he explained, "are actually two aspects of a single force, basically or at one with itself, and productive in its two-part play.  Of these parts, one is the 'not-I,' the other the 'I'; but essentially they are lovers...."
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Only by spontaneously and openly responding to the world can the artist capture the rhythms of his time.  Without preconceptions he must woo the "not-I."  His love affair with the world is an exploration of reality to the end of adjusting men to the world and to other men.  "Ready-made elysiums" therefore do not comfort him.  The "pink world of received ideas and sentiments" that Rosenfeld found in the work of Gershwin and other popular artists weakened the "lure of the actual...."  Such work removed men from contact with reality.  It offered easy security, not freedom for living; it was not mature.

Sherman Paul, introductory essay to Port of New York by Paul Rosenfeld (1924, 1961).

The Creature of His Own Creations

The justice of a nation's claim to be regarded as civilized seems to depend mainly upon the degree in which Art has triumphed over Nature. Civilization is the influence of Art, and not Nature, on Man. He mingles his own will with the unchanged essences around him, and becomes in his turn the creature of his own creations.

The end of Life is education. An education is good or bad according to the disposition or frame of mind it induces. If it tend to cherish and develop the religious sentiment, — continuously to remind man of his mysterious relation to God and Nature, — and to exalt him above the toil and drudgery of this matter-of-fact world, it is good.

Civilization we think not only does not accomplish this, but is directly adverse to it. The civilized man is the slave of Matter. Art paves the earth, lest he may soil the soles of his feet; it builds walls that he may not see the Heavens; year in, year out, the sun rises in vain to him; the rain falls and the wind blows, but they do not reach him. From his wigwam of brick and mortar he praises his Maker for the genial warmth of a sun he never saw, or the fruitfulness of an earth he disdains to tread upon. Who says that this is not mockery? So much for the influence of Art.

Our rude forefathers took liberal and enlarged views of things, — rarely narrow or partial. They surren- dered up themselves wholly to Nature; to contemplate her was a part of their daily food. Was she stupendous? so were their conceptions. The inhabitant of a mountain can hardly be brought to use a microscope; he is accustomed to embrace empires in a single glance. Nature is continually exerting a moral influence over man; she accommodates herself to the soul of man. Hence his conceptions are as gigantic as her mountains. We may see an instance of this if we will but turn our eyes to the strongholds of Liberty, — Scotland, Switzerland and Wales. What more stupendous can Art contrive than the Alps? What more sublime than the thunder among the hills? The savage is far-sighted; his eye, like the Poet's,

"Doth glance from Heaven to Earth, from Earth to Heaven."

He looks far into futurity, wandering as familiarly through the Land of Spirits, as the civilized man through his woodlot or pleasure-grounds. His life is practical poetry, a perfect epic. The earth is his hunting-ground; he lives summers and winters; the sun is his time-piece, — he journeys to its rising or its setting; to the abode of Winter, or the land whence Summer comes. He never listens to the thunder but he is re-minded of the Great Spirit, — it is his voice. To him the lightning is less terrible than it is sublime; the rainbow less beautiful than it is wonderful; the sun less warm than it is glorious.

The savage dies and is buried; he sleeps with his forefathers, and before many winters his dust returns to dust again, and his body is mingled with the elements. The civilized man can scarce sleep even in his grave. Not even there are the weary at rest, nor do the wicked cease from troubling. What with the hammering of stone, and the grating of bolts, the worms themselves are wellnigh deceived. Art rears his monument. Learning contributes his epitaph, and Interest adds the "Carey fecit" as a salutary check upon the unearthly emotions which a perusal might otherwise excite.

A nation may be ever so civilized, and yet lack wisdom. Wisdom is the result of education; and education being the bringing-out or development of that which is in man, by contact with the Not-me, — that is by Life, — is far surer in the hands of Nature than of Art.

The savage may be, and often is a sage. Our Indian is more of a man than the inhabitant of a city. He lives as a man, he thinks as a man, he dies as a man. The latter, it is true, is learned. Learning is Art's creature, but it is not essential to the perfect man; it cannot educate. A man may spend days in the study of a single species of animalculoe, invisible to the naked eye, and thus become the founder of a new branch of science, — without having advanced the great objects for which life was given him, at all. The naturalist, the chemist, the mechanist is no more a man for all his learning. Life is still as short as ever, death as inevitable, and the heavens as far off.

HDT--College Composition: "The Mark or Standard by which a Nation is judged to be Barbarous or Civilized. Barbarities of Civilized States." Reproduced in The Life of Henry David Thoreau by F. B. Sanborn, 1917.

There is proficiency in dissection...

The whole field of education is affected -- There is no end of detail that is without significance.

Education would begin by placing in the mind of the student the nature of knowledge -- in the dead state and the nature of the force which may energize it.

This would clarify his field at once -- He would then see the use of data.

But at present knowledge is placed before a man as if it were a stair at the top of which a DEGREE is obtained which is superlative.

nothing could be more ridiculous.  To data there is no end.  There is proficiency in dissection and a knowledge of parts but in the knowledge--

It is imagination that --

That is : life is absolutely simple.  In any civilized society everyone should know EVERYTHING there is to know about life at once and always.  There should never be permitted, confusion --

There are difficulties to life, under conditions there are impasses, life may prove impossible -- But it must never be lost -- as it is today --

I remember so distinctly the young Pole in Leipzig going with hushed breath to hear Wundt lecture -- In this mass of intricate philosophic data what one of the listeners was able to maintain himself for the winking of an eyelash.  Not one.  The inundation of the intelligence by masses of complicated fact is not knowledge.  There is no end --

And what is the fourth dimension?  It is the endlessness of knowledge --

It is the imagination on which reality rides -- It is the imagination -- It is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and therefore can never be discovered by its anatomization.

It is for this reason that I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science -- in spite of everything.

Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality -- Poetry

The effect of this realization upon life will be the emplacement of knowledge into a living current -- which it has always sought --

In other times -- men counted it a tragedy to be dislocated from sense -- Today boys are sent with dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts -- broken, bruised

few escape whole slaughter.  This is not civilization but stupidity -- Before entering knowledge the integrity of the imagination --

The effect will be to give importance to the subdivisions of experience -- which today are absolutely lost -- There exists simply nothing.

from Spring and All by William Carlos Williams (1923)