Written
in the distorted if not perspicacious style of old:
What can we, whose calendar days are erased by
the rustling of leaves and whose cauldrons boil with impotent indignation
against the siege of daylight hours – what can we glean from the sand and
stars? Our hours ironed out, we fade into abstraction. “Meaning” deigns from
its skyward throne – built on clouds. Rain appears as tears to the weeping, and
rivulets disregard lachrymose eyes.
Timepieces mask the honeyed leaves, and torture
us from the grip of autumn. What cosmic shout supplants the appointments you’ve
made? For your engrossment, could you discern it from a car horn? Do you not
hear the stifled siren in the claxon call? Its dumb scream as it rolls down a
road darkly… it is pseudo-interaction, reduced to the fundamental social
experience of modernity: anxiety and malaise. It is nature dissipating in
acidic vapors. Blinding pollution: what
can we glean?
The miasmic artifice must be eliminated. Impotent
art wraps itself in similar shrouds of self-importance, universality, and
higher realms. Do not transcend; there is no such thing as ungroundedness, only
abstraction, the illusion of ungroundedness. They are possible, or at least
conceivable, “those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths –
ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars.” (Lukács) Driving towards a telos, or feeling nostalgia (whichever suits your preference)
implies a critique of the present, and evinces a pragmatic aspect to what would
colloquially be called “idealism” in its implication that the present is
amenable to directed change.
Maybe
the rosiness of Romanticism (or the romantic style) is not totally blind
sentiment. That sentiment seems to have historically accompanied (prefigured) nineteenth-century
utopianism with the early Romantic aesthetic movements. Is it that Romantic
art, supposing itself autonomous, donned blinders to contemporary society, and
the unsavory public manifestations of early industrial-capitalism? After all,
it goes without saying that the many popular artists of that period were privileged
enough to avoid the conditions of factory labor (although we sometimes see
remarkable exceptions to this ignorance that prove the rule of the bourgeoisie
artist). Was nineteenth century utopianism just a synthesis of two oppositional
tendencies, the sublime divergence from the present and the corpus of social
critique that had been steadily growing since the Industrial Revolution in
seventeenth-century England?
Perhaps
it is possible to unearth and innovate a style that (nonetheless) countervails the
present.