THE FALL OF PARIS
443
of the community site, where the grip of the dead was most
unrelaxing....
Then, suddenly, almost in the span of one generation, every–
thing buried under ground had been brought to the surface. The
perspective of the immediate had been established-or rather, a
multiple perspective, in which time no longer reared up like a
gravestone, or flourished like a tree, but threw up a shower of
wonders at the will of the onlooker.
The urge towards a free life, in a society that every year
tangled him deeper and deeper in· the web of the systematic, had
carried the individual too far.
So the Modern became, not a progressive historical movement,
striving to bury the dead deeper, but a new sentiment of eternity
and of eternal life. The cultures of the jungle, the cave, the north–
ern ice fields, of Egypt, primitive Greece, antique China, medieval
Europe, industrial America-all were given equal due.
Strange vision of an eternity that consists of sheets of time
and space picked from history like cards from a pack, and con–
stantly shuffled, arranged, scattered, regrouped, rubbed smooth,
re-faced, spread in design, brushed off to the floor. An absolute of
the relative, to be recreated in compositions of bits of newspaper,
horsehair, classic prints, the buttocks of a South Sea Islander,
petroglyphs, and arbitrary shapes suggested by the intoxication of
a moment.
Thus the Paris Modern, resting on the deeply felt assumption
that history could be entirely controlled by the mind, produced a
no-time, and the Paris "International" a no-place. And this is as
far as mankind has gone towards freeing itself from its past.
Modern art has been a series of individual explosions tearing
at strata accumulated by centuries of communal inertia. In the
words of one of its poets,
The fairest monument which can be erected
the most astonishing of all statues
the finest and most audacious column
the arch which is like the very prism of the rain
are not worth the splendid and chaotic heap
which is easily produced with a church and some dynamite.
But note: processes less spectacular than those of the Paris
studios have also been steadily loosening the cultural reefs of the
past. Paris has been synonymous with Modernism, in the sense of
