316
PARTISAN REVIEW
But in our day the eye is slightly moist when one looks that way, and
that's
all
there is to it. That's how
it
stands with such works nowadays.
Around the greatest of all the translators and interpreters keep
on circling for a few centuries, but soon there is no one left who un–
derstands their language. What then? Primitives, the Archaic, the
Classical, the Mannerists, the Abstractionists, in a word, the Quater–
nary Period. But what then? Spaces that are much too big have been
opened up to us, and too many spheres, and feelings too weighty–
perhaps the making of art is, after all, a rather shallow reaction?
Isn't it perhaps
profounder
simply to suffer the human substance in
silence? What was it the Lord Jehovah put into our essential nature,
what was the fate he gave us? Was creative salvation to be our lot, or
were we meant to go for the still point, to sit under the Bo-tree, im–
mobile, waiting to meet Kama-Mara, the god of love and death? How
many hours of my life I have spent pondering on a certain saying of
the Balcony God's, turning it this way and that-the saying that:
"On
its highest peak poetry seems to be completely external. The more
it withdraws inwards, the further it sinks." What does that mean?
Am
I supposed to disown my inner being, cheat it, make a fool of it- is
that
the precondition for poetry? And what else is it? A conjuror's
act, the rope-trick, mere nothingness with a glaze over it? And from
the East I hear them harping on the same tune. The Master Kung
Dsi, speaking of painters, says: "He is crude in whose work the mean–
ing has more weight than the line." In other words, for him too the
higher thing is the manipulated thing, the manufactured thing, style.
On the other hand, there's Guardini saying that "behind every work
of
art,
as it were, something opens up...." Well, and what is it that
as it were opens up? After all, we are supposed to cover it up with
paint and hide it. Or what of a great philosopher's dictum that "art
is the self-manifestation and operation of truth"? What truth, any–
way? A truth made up of sketches and designs, a manufactured truth?
Or is truth only mentioned in order to let philosophy make a show–
ing, for of course art isn't concerned with truth at all, only with ex–
pression. And then finally we come to the question: What is this
expression that thrusts its way in in front of depth? Is expression the
same as guilt? It might be.
Still, I dare say I'm too old to unravel these problems. Mists of
weariness and melancholy cloud my mind. I can remember having
