MODERN AS VISION
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become independent of dogmas, institutions, .and actual traditional
objects. All has to be reborn each instant as memory to confront
external change. And if the poets are incapable of such incandescence,
then the divorce between dogmatic beliefs they nurture in themselves
for the sake of their art, and the world of changing appearances will
become evident. Or those who are today's up-to-date critics tied to
the values of the Great Tradition will become tomorrow's antiquaries.
As
Rilke puts the matter:
Even for our grandfathers a house, a fountain, a familiar tower,
their very clothes, their coat, was infinitely more, infinitely more in–
timate; almost every object a vessel in which they found something
human or added their morsel of humanity. Now, from America, empty
different things crowd over to us, counterfeit things, the veriest dum–
mies. A house, in the American sense, an American apple or one of the
vines
of that country has
nothing
in common with the house, the fruit,
the
grape into which have entered the hope and meditation of our fore–
fathers. The lived and living things, the things that share our thoughts,
these are on the decline and can no more be replaced.
We are perhaps
the last to have known such things.
The responsibility rests with us
not only to keep remembrance of them (that would be but a trifle and
unreliable), but also their human or 'laric' value (,laric' in the sense
of household gods). The earth has no alternative but to become in–
visible--IN us, who with a portion of our being have a share in the
Invisible, or at least the appearance of sharing; we who can multiply
our possessions of the Invisible during our earthly existence, in us
alone
can there be accomplished this intimate and continual transmutation of
the Visible into the Invisible ... just as our destiny becomes unceasingly
more present, and at the same time invisible, in us.
The machinery of the symbolism of the angels becomes apparent.
They are the agents which transform the memoried past into the
invisible which flows over and acts upon the present.
4. The Alternate Life of Art. By this I mean something different
from
(3), the hope that art might become the agency for inspiring a
transformed society, and (4) the use of art to interpret the external
materialism into the language of inner life. The Alternate Life
is
when
it
is intended that the processes of art are brought close to the
borderline ecstatic or sexual experiences. I
am
thinking here of the
