Thus, elaborating, I seem to perceive that a stark-naked soul has nothing but its naked likes and dislikes – nothing much better than artlessness – and bare naïveté is no more trustworthy in a gallery of paintings than in a chemist’s laboratory. In either the gallery or the laboratory, ignorance can blow itself up; and a complacent slight knowledge, too, can be disastrous. Sorcerers’ Apprentices uncork horrible turbulences.
This doesn’t mean that only a rarefied culture should dare to look at pictures or take pleasure in them. Nothing more sinister is intended than the inference that our opinions upon works of art, as upon anything else, need all the foundations we can put under them, or they are likely not to be worth expressing or even possessing. Moreover, when we rise above our likes and dislikes to form what we believe to be dispassionate judgments, these can be tricky. Sometimes we’re confident that they’re solidities, sound for the ages – and presently they prove as sly as quicksilver. Most often they are not ours at all, never were; we’ve only caught them like colds. Again, with a little time or a change of place, we see them as shameful ghosts we’re mortified to have consorted with.
We know that no man can escape from his period – willy-nilly he must be of it, chained down to it – but he has at least the power to free himself from the pressure of his haberdasher. He can even go further and keep clear vision when this decade’s styles in painting and sculpture are shown at fashionable exhibitions of art. He can’t fly out of his period, but he can avoid being harnessed in blinders by any of the series of fashions that succeed one another before his eyes.
When the fashionable way of looking at things has full hold upon us we’re victims of the flitting hour. The next hour most certainly arrives and forerunners deride what they thought valuable an hour ago. Life is as befuddled as this for minds fluffy enough to float on the fashions; but no person capable of meditative thought upon his own education needs to be that fluffy.
The meditative thought would not be enough without the education, and the education might be easily frazzled without the meditation. Current styles in seeing and thinking – even current styles in emotion – are insidiously contagious, especially so, of course, for the enthusiastic natures. Current styles may be ‘good’ styles and yet be as blinding as ‘bad’ ones. The merely stylish person, his vision slave to his modishness, utters the loud and vacant laugh of contemptuous sophistication when his led eyes behold the styles that yesterday enthralled him or his father. For the stylish of today, only today’s style, and styles somewhat like it in the past, are ‘good’ ones.
Thus stylishness is a kind of provincialism or localization in time, and the more ‘correct’ the up-to-dateness of the victim, the more surely is he to be a joke on the morrow. The paintings that Father bought go up to the garret as Grandfather’s come down. Some day Father’s will come down too. Then perhaps both will go up again, or to the auction block, making room for brighter canvases of the hurriedly passing present – these to be banished laughingly with the coming of a newer hour of illusion.
How may we live free of the continuously changing series of small illusions? How may we learn at least to see with the eyes of our whole period, and not the glaucoma gaze directed, as through gun-barrels, at tiny areas bright one moment, dark the next, and forever sliding out of sight? For the development of those necessities, education and mediation, we need all the educative and meditative aid that’s offered. Out of the history of man some truths about him have emerged into the light, and out of the history of art more than mere changing appearances may be discerned in that same illumination.
Will reference properly when i retrieve this book out of the box I sent back to Singapore, which hopefully gets there in about 2 months from now.
Packing up and winding down.
I sat at the bench, reading, today. It was past 9pm, but it was still light out. Birmingham was experiencing extremely warm weather, and I was out in my shorts and slippers. I looked out at the sky and the lawn, listened to the birds screaming at each other in the trees, made small talk with friends who walked by, and tried my best not to ruin the moment with my usual sentimental circularity.
Crossing the road earlier in the day, I waded through dandelion fluffs suspended in the sky, migrating together toward unknown destinations; anywhere but here, that's the idea. They looked like snowflakes, but less fatalistic.
Walking through the park, packed with families. Ice cream cones in every hand, worn proudly, the multi-flavoured badges of summer indolence. I hope to return home highly decorated.
My thoughts spiral wildly inward, sucking me in; I'm involuted.
Who will follow me into the dark?
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