314
PARTISAN REVIEW
ment. Kleist's
Penthesilea
would never have been written if a vote
had been taken on it first. Strindberg, Nietzsche, El Greco would
never have appeared on the scene. But conformism would have existed
all right! It has always been there, only
it
would never have created
the four hundred years of western civilization." Surely there's no writer
who hasn't often envied painters: they can paint oranges and aspho–
dels, pitchers, even lobsters and other crustaceans, and nobody re–
proaches them with not having got in anything about the housing
problem. But obviously the trade unions have their rights in the case
of anything written. Anti-social is the word. "Art
must.
..."
It's prob–
ably a waste of time pointing out that Flaubert gave us a description
of the artist's predicament, of his inability to express all he feels and
yearns for, and how he can only express what it is given to him to
express within the limitations of word and form.
Only one kilometer more and we shall have reached the ceiling.
The traveler glances down. When the diamond-dealer Salomon Ross–
bach jumped off the Empire State Building he left a mysterious mes–
sage: "No more above, no more below, .and so I leap off." A good
message, the traveler says: no more above, no more below, the center
is damaged, the compass-needle and the quarters of heaven are no
longer valid, but the species is rampant and keeps going by means
of pills. The body has grown more morbid, with modem medicine
positively offering it thousands of diseases, and they break out of it
with scientific vigor--oh, no slur on the doctors, a very fine lot of
men, I only mean that in the old days
if
you were bitten by a mos–
quito you scratched the place, but today they can prescribe a dozen
different ointments and not one of them helps-still, that's life, it
keeps things moving. Our bodies are more morbid than they used to
be, but they live longer.
The brain lives longer, but where there was once power of re–
sistance there are now empty places developing--or can you, down
there on the earth, look out of your window and still imagine a God
in it all, a God who created anything as gentle as plants and trees?
Rats, plague, noise, desperation-yes-but flowers? There is a four–
teenth-century picture called
The Creation of the Plants,
with a small,
crooked, black-bearded figure of God standing there, his right hand,
which is much too big for the rest of him, raised as though he were
pulling the two trees out of the ground, and there they are beside
