What city is this
Whose moments tremble
Azure sky and lime lights
Walking in the intersections
Through the squares of paradise
People are solidly addicted to story line. Beginning, middle, end. They want to have it, over and over, in different guises.
The ultimate payoff of that addiction? There is none. Except the need for more.
Propaganda,
media, announced government policy, education, religious messages,
hundreds of medical treatments---the underlying theme is polished story
line. Wrapped up and sold. When the wrong ending looms like a
thundercloud, an order to goes out to hide it or lie about it.
When
a relentlessly creative individual disrupts story lines, an unlimited
number of universes opens up. And every one of them causes tremors in
the addict.
“Don’t
do that. I don’t understand what you’re doing. Stop. It makes no
sense. You’re crazy. Where is the ending? Civilization is going to fall
into the sea. What is your message? I can’t find it. Boil down what
you’re saying. God will punish you.”
The addict feels his mind is cracking. He runs screaming in the night looking for his next fix.
For
example, the open and basically endless poetry of Pablo Neruda, Walt
Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Arthur Rimbaud can have that
effect.
So many new worlds moving through the old one.
Why does a story have to have a recognizable plot and a tuned-up climax? Same question: Why does a person need to inject heroin?
Look at Piero della Francesca’s 1464 fresco, Legend of the True Cross---perhaps
the greatest painting of the Renaissance. In a series of episodic
panels, it traces the mythical history of the wooden cross on which
Jesus was crucified. However, there are a number of puzzling
“non-linear” representations in Piero’s work, the most famous of which
is the panel titled, King Solomon Receiving the Queen of Sheba. What
does that meeting have to do with the purported journey of the timber on
which Jesus hung?
The
Roman Church would claim it is symbolic of an archetypal super-event
called The Arrival, and refers to the birth of the Messiah or his later
entrance into public life as a teacher; or Sheba had precognitive
knowledge of the tree whose wood would be used to make the cross. That’s
an extraordinary stretch, to say the least. But it’s typical of a
strategy down through the ages: when a promoted story line breaks down,
invent a way of claiming it’s still coherent.
Buttress conventional story at all costs.
Mechanical minds will always reduce events, data, history, science, etc., to manageable stories.
Oceanic artists go the other way: they proliferate their work beyond any mechanical limit or summarized interpretation.
Why
does that matter? Because, for these artists and their committed
audiences, routine day-to-day experience is cracked open like an egg,
out of which emerge vital energies of concealed dimensions. Life becomes
LIFE.
When
I was 21, a friend showed me photos of the architectural productions of
the Spanish genius, Antoni Gaudi, scattered throughout Barcelona. My
first reaction was, these buildings came from another planet. My second
reaction: how was he allowed to build these structures?
Gaudi
was a technical innovator of the first order. He developed forms and
methods of construction that surpassed the engineering rationale of the
great cathedrals of Europe. At the same time, he confounded old ideas of
space. The experience of seeing or standing in one of his buildings
yielded up the sensation of living in a DIFFERENT KIND OF CONTINUUM.
That
new continuum disrupts the story line of consciousness by proliferating
a new narrative that has no convenient ending. The old way of seeing
has been given a bath in some mysterious dynamo and is vitalized.
Habitual categories and compartments of perception have dissolved.
Who would have known this was possible, unless Gaudi (1852-1926) had lived?
Our world, contrary to all consensus, is meant to be revolutionized by art, by imagination, right down to its core.
That this has not happened is no sign that the process is irrelevant. It is only a testament to the collective resistance.
Who
knows how many such revolutions have been shunted aside and rejected,
in favor of the consensus-shape we now think of as central and eternal?
We are living in a default structure, the one that has been left over after all the prior revolutions have been put to sleep.
Occasionally,
an artist will take on the role of actor and performer, in order to
deal with the denizens and mental dwarves of ministries of truth. Over
the past hundred years, it would be hard to find an artist who carried
out such a program with more skill and verve than Salvador Dali.
Let’s start here. To absorb a work of imagination, one has to use his own imagination.
Since
this is considered unlikely, pundits earnestly help us with step-down
contexts, so we can understand the work in pedestrian terms. In other
words, so we can reduce it to nothing.
Salvador Dali was not content to allow this to happen.
The critics would have declared Dali a minor lunatic if he hadn't possessed such formidable classical painting skills.
He
placed his repeating images (the notorious melting watch, the face and
body of his wife, the ornate and fierce skeletal structures of unknown
creatures) on the canvas as if they had as much right to be there as any
familiar object.
This
was quite troubling to many people. If an immense jawbone that was also
a rib or a forked femur could rival a perfectly rendered lamp or couch
or book (on the same canvas), where were all the accoutrements and
assurances of modern comfortable living?
Where was the pleasantly mesmerizing effect of a predictable existence?
Where was a protective class structure that depended on nothing more than money and cultural slogans?
Dali
invented vast comedies on canvas. But the overall joke turned, as the
viewer's eye moved, into a nightmare, into an entrancing interlude of
music, a memory of something that had never happened, a gang of genies
coming out of corked bottles. A bewildering mix of attitudes sprang out
from the paintings.
What
was the man doing? Was he mocking the audience? Was he simply showing
off? Was he inventing waking dreams? Was he, God forbid, actually
imagining something entirely new that resisted classification?
Words failed viewers and critics and colleagues and enemies.
But
they didn't fail Dali. He took every occasion to explain his work.
However, his explications were handed out in a way that made it plain he
was telling tall tales---interesting, hilarious, and preposterous tall
tales.
Every
interview and press conference he gave, gave birth to more attacks on
him. Was he inviting scorn? Was he really above it all? Was he toying
with the press like some perverse Olympian?
Critics
flocked to make him persona non grata, but what was the persona they
were exiling? They had no idea then, and they have no idea now.
It
comes back to this: when you invent something truly novel, you know
that you are going to stir the forces trapped within others that aspire
to do the very same thing. You know that others are going to begin by
denying that anything truly NEW even exists. That DOES make the
situation a comedy (among other things), whether you want to admit it or
not.
It
is possible that every statement ever uttered in public by Dali was a
lie. A fabrication. An invention dedicated to constructing a massive
(and contradictory) persona.
Commentators
who try to take on Dali's life usually center on the early death of his
young brother as the core explanation for Dali's "basic
confusion"---which resulted in his bizarre approach to his own fame.
However,
these days, with good reason, we might more correctly say Dali was
playing the media on his own terms, after realizing that no reporter
wanted the real Dali (whatever that might mean)---some fiction was being
asked for, and the artist was merely being accommodating.
He was creating a self (or selves) that matched his paintings.
It is generally acknowledged that no artist of the 20th century was superior to Dali in the ability to render realistic detail.
But of course Dali's work was not about realism.
The
most complex paintings---see, for example, Christopher Columbus
Discovering America and The Hallucinogenic Toreador---brilliantly
orchestrated the interpenetration of various solidities/realities, more
or less occupying the same space.
At
some point in his career, Dali saw (decided) there was no limit to what
he could assemble in the same space---and there was no limit to the
number of spaces he could corral into the same canvas. A painting could
become a science-fiction novel reaching into several pasts and futures.
The protagonist (the viewer) could find himself in such a simultaneity.
Critics
have attacked the paintings relentlessly. They are offended at Dali's
skill, which matches the best work of the meticulous Dutch Renaissance
masters.
They
hate the dissonance. They resent Dali's mordant wit and rankle at the
idea that Dali could carry out monstrous jokes in such fierce extended
detail.
But
above all, the sheer imagination harpoons the critics. How dare a
painter turn reality upside down so blatantly, while rubbing their faces
in it.
The
cherry on the cake was: for every attack the critics launched at Dali
the man (they really had no idea who he was), Dali would come back at
them with yet another elaborate piece of fiction about himself. It was
unfair. The scholars were "devoted to the truth." The painter was free
to invent himself over and over as many times as he fancied.
Dali
was holding up a mirror. He was saying, "You people are like me. We're
all doing fiction. I'm much better at it. In the process, I get at a
much deeper truth."
Dali
was the hallucinogenic toreador. He was holding off and skirting the
bull (shit) rushes of the critics and the historians. They charged at
him. He moved with his cape---and stepped out of the way.
The
principles of organized society dictate that a person must be who he
is, even if that is a cartoon of a cartoon. A person must be one
recognizable caricature forever, must be IDed, must have one basic
function. Must---as a civilization goes down the trail of decline---be
watched and recorded and profiled.
When
a person shows up who is many different things, who can invent himself
at the drop of hat, who seems to stand in 14 different places at the
same time, the Order trembles.
(Fake) reality declares: what you said yesterday must synchronize absolutely with what you say today.
This
rule ("being the only thing you are") guarantees that human beings will
resonate with the premise that we all live and think and work in one
continuum of space and time. One. Only one. Forever. The biggest joke of
all. The big lie.
Whatever he was, however despicable he may have been in certain respects, Dali broke that egg. Broke the cardinal rule.
He
reveled in doing it. He made people wait for an answer about himself,
and the answer never came. Instead, he gave them a hundred answers,
improvised like odd-shaped and meticulous reveries.
He threw people back on their own resources, and those resources proved to be severely limited.
How
harsh for conventional critics to discover that nothing in Dali's
education produced an explanation for his ability to render an object so
perfectly on the canvas. It was almost as if, deciding that he would
present competing circumstances inside one painting, he perversely
ENABLED himself to do the job with exacting skill, "making subversive
photographs come to life."
That was too much.
But there the paintings are.
Imagination realized.
Like it or not, Dali paved the way for many others. He opened doors and windows.
And
the pressure has been building. The growing failure of major
institutions (organized religion, psychology, education, government) to
keep the cork in the bottle signals a prison break in progress.
The pot is boiling. People want out. Even if they don’t know where out is.
Somewhere
along the line we have to give the green light to our own creative
force. That is the first great day. That's the dawn of no coerced
boundaries. Everything we've been taught tells us that a life lived
entirely from creative power is impossible. We don't have it within us.
We should maintain silence and propriety in the face of greater official
power and wisdom. We must abide by the rules. We must, at best,
"surrender to the universe."
But
what if, when we come around the far turn, we see that the universe is
us? Is simply one part of imagination? Is a twinkling rendition we
installed to keep us titillated with dreams that would forever drift out
of reach? What if it turns out that we are the perverse ones and a Dali
is quite normal?
What if we pop out of the fences of this culture and this continuum and this tired movie called Planet Earth?
~~~
(The link to this article posted on my blog is here.)
(Follow me on Gab at @jonrappoport)
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