Unity and Alienation in Art & Letters

This I write, aged sixty-one, amused by the synchronicity of number in everyday life, upon having cast recently an oracle of the I Ching numbered 61 and sometimes translated as "Inner Truth." Chung Fu: above SUN the gentle, wind; below TUI the joyous, lake, "The wind blows over the lake and stirs the surface of the water. Thus visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves." Similarly, in one reading of the biblical image of creation--the first one that appears in the book of Genesis, conventionally translated as the Spirit of God, "the tremendous vital energy of Sheen originated by Aleph, "the Sheen of Shamaim acting upon " Mayim, the so-called waters: the two Mem...between which Yod is playing against its partner Aleph in the game of existence versus life." In the Wilhelm/Baynes double-dipped translation of the Chinese oracle, the hexagram number 61 is explained thus: "The character Fu ("truth") is actually the picture of a bird's foot over a fledgling. It suggests the idea of brooding. An egg is hollow. The light-giving power must work to quicken it from outside, but there must be a germ of life within, if life is to be awakened. Far-reaching speculations can be linked with these ideas." The Judgment contains a reference to "Pigs and fishes," glossed as "the least intelligent of all animals and therefore the most difficult to influence," adding some wise counsel about finding the right approach, the community of interest, and so forth.

Ordinarily, I do not keep my copy of the I Ching on my worktable. Two of the books that do happen to be there presently contain references with the word "alienation," Kenneth Rexroth's More Classics Revisited, edited by Bradford Morrow and published (1989) by New Directions under the oxymoronic rubric, "A Revived Modern Classic," and Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism, blurbed as "a report from the battleground of contemporary culture, a landscape littered with the remains of vilified artworks and discredited orthodoxies,"

Mr. Rexroth's essay on William Blake attributes to the great English artist, poet, philosopher, and printer a comprehensive grasp of the mystical tradition and apocalyptic cosmology "which gives him his power and which makes him ever more meaningful as time passes...[among] the very small group of founders of the sub-culture of secession which has accompanied industrial, commercial civilization since its beginnings." But Blake differs from purely literary figures such as Holderlin, Baudelaire and Stendhal, as from Sade, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, the philosophers of alienation "...in that he was able to develop a completely worked-out world view, a philosophy of nature and of human relations which could provide answers to the questions asked at the deepest--or the most superficial--levels.... Blake knew that his age was faced with a major crisis or climacteric of the interior life. He could diagnose the early symptoms of the world ill because he saw them as signs that man was being deprived of literally half his being...the epic tragedy of mankind as it enters an epoch of depersonalization unequaled in history. ...Blake was not only right about the spiritual, intangible factors,,,that are the symbols of the struggles of the interior life and the achievement of true integration of the personality. He was also right about the external factors--the evils of the new factory system, of forced pauperism, of wage slavery, of child labor, and of the elevation of covetousness from the sin of the Tenth Commandment to the Golden Rule of a society founded on the cash nexus, A generation before the birth of Marx, and before Hegel, he put his finger unerringly on the source of human self-alienation, and he analyzed its process and consequences...."

In his comments on "The Journal of John Woodman," Rexroth compares the Quaker sense of social responsibility found in contemplation as an outward manifestation of an "interior gaze at the absolute, or the ultimate, or the ground of being, or God, or even Nirvana. Nirvana originally seems to have meant 'unruffled,' as the surface of a pool, and those whose minds have achieved that vision of peace are unable to violate it by violence or the exploitation of other living creatures."

Effectively self-alienated as the consequence of his "'opening'--an illumination of that Inner Light which Friends look to for guidance--...he traveled up and down the thirteen colonies, and eventually over to England, rising...and voicing his concern. That is all. Meditative prayer and endless travel, a simple speech in Meeting...and, not to be forgotten with this simple activity, a physical witness in life and person. ..,Eventually Woolman ceased to eat sugar, wear cotton or indigo-dyed woolens, because these were products of slave labor. Out of modesty and a disdain for luxury, Friends dressed plain and looked outlandinsh to their satin-breeched contemporaries, yet in the long run their witness told. Woolman looked outlandish to Friends. Within his own lifetime...Woolman's witness told on Friends. The Society not only renounced slavery in Meeting after Meeting but became the earliest, most powerful single force in the antislavery movement. Woolman's Journal is the simplest possible record of his ever-widening travels and his ever-deepening interior life, two aspects of one reality.... It is this moral quality, once called humility in days before our terminology of the virtues became hopelessly confused, that elevates Woolman's writing to the level of great prose."

Wendy Steiner, in "The Arts Embattled," sees in postmodern art "much , more than a reflection of troubled times, but in the face of inequality, nuclear menace, and environmental collapse, one cannot teach a view of art or views in art without in some way mentioning the world's disorder. For example, Richard Rogers, who designed the Pompidou Center...insists that 'architecture mirrors society,; its civility and its barbarism.' .The curators of the infamous Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition likewise assert: 'We...do not believe it is our role to shelter the public from controversial or disturbing work.' An education in contemporary art seems like an arduous training in alienation. ,..With the best of intentions, professors teach contemporary art with all its humor, paradox, and occasional provocation, hoping to promote pleasure and an understanding of the world through an understanding of a crucial part of it--representation. One of the most important purposes of art, they claim, is to sharpen and complicate our views, providing alternatives to simplistic ideas and revealing the inadequacies of unquestioned orthodoxies."

Kurt von Meier
February 5, 1996