LITERATURE, REVOLUTION AND ENTROPY
177
Absurd, isn't it? The intersection of parallel lines is also absurd.
But it's absurd only in the canonical, plane geometry of Euclid; in
non-Euclidian geometry it's an axiom. The one essential is to cease
to
be
flat, to rise above the plane. Today's literature has the same
relation to the plane surface of real life as an aircraft has to the
earth: it is nothing more than a runway from which to take off and
soar aloft from real life to reality, to philosophy, to the realm of the
fantastic. Leave the carts of yesterday to creak along the great high–
ways. The living have strength enough to cut off their yesterdays.
We can put a police officer or a commissar in the cart, but the
cart will still remain a cart. And literature will still remain the
literature of yesterday, if we drive real life--even "revolutionary
real life"- along the well-traveled highway- even if we drive it in
a fast troika with bells. What we need today are automobiles, air–
planes, winged flight, seconds, dotted lines.
The old, slow, soporific descriptions are no more. The order of
the days is laconicism-but every word must be super-charged, high–
voltage. Into one second must be compressed what formerly went
into a sixty-second minute.
Syntax
becomes elliptical, volatile; com–
plicated pyramids of periods are dismantled and broken down into
the single stones of independent clauses. In swift movement the
canonical, the habitual eludes the eye: hence the unusual, often
strange symbolism and choice of words. The image is sharp,
syn–
thetic, it contains only the one basic trait which one has time to
seize upon from a moving automobile. The lexicon hallowed by
custom has been invaded by dialect, neologisms, science, mathe–
matics, technology.
There is a rule, if you can call it a rule, that the writer's talent
consists in making the rule the exception; but there are far more
writers who turn the exception into the rule.
The business of science and art alike is the projection of the
world onto coordinates. Differences in form are due to differences
in the coordinates. All realist forms involve projection onto the
fixed, plane coordinates of the Euclidian world. These coordinates
have no existence
in
nature. This finite, fixed world does not exist;
it is a convention, an abstraction, an unreality. And therefore real-
