Art for a New Age

Abstract

Let the epigraph dwell in your minds. It is one-half of my story, the half sounds the call to Being, to return, to the whole ness before and to the never-ending thirst for the wholeness after. But call awaits the whole story. I take it for granted there are cer tain attitudes toward an art for a new age which we already share. These have to do with the psychology of desire. For example, the art we seek must be more appealing and more powerful than what we know now. And it must be accessible to more of us than the present art is. Certain questions are bound to arise: Why don't we already know this art? How do we get to it? We do not know this art yet because our habitual conceptions of art cannot touch it. Even though we secretly desire this art, when our thoughts go out to it they find no object, so we mistakenly conclude it does not exist. There is nothing mysterious about this. We know likewise, for example, some thing more is at stake in a football bowl game than the immediate contest, some thing beyond mere identification with a win ning or a losing team. It has to do as well with the tensing of our largely unused muscles and the activation of our nearly atrophied imaginations. We know this even as we watch that flickering rectangular [one-eyed] son of a bitch sits scream ing in every living room in the land (Helprin, 1983, p. 519). In much the same way we know an art for a new age belongs to a different realm altogether, even as we, potential ultimate athletes, belong to a dif ferent order of sport. Where, we might ask, does this intui tive grasp of such an art come from? Is it extraterrestrial in origin? Such questions I cannot answer. I can only watch my own mind phenomenologically and report what I learn. For it seems our mundane thought goes on as though such an art, more romantic, more sacred, more human, did not exist; while the truth is it is de flected by the very conditions separating our present existence from its own. What we are seeking is akin to one of those near apparitions lingers only when we don't try to stare at it. How, then, can we get to it? We have already assumed that, like the dream foot ball game, the idea of it is not absolutely hidden from us. It is already in our periph eral vision, so at a certain moment and in a certain place we might surprise it. Let us further assume the place and time are not our usual place and time but rather those of imaginal space and qualitative time; this presupposes we are not our usual selves but phenomenologists of the active imagination engaged in poetic rev erie. We already know this state, then, but only when we are in it, as creators, lovers,

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