Strange Old Man, Shall I Go With You? (draft)

To capture art in its decline one must begin to see what art is in its essence, what allows it to transcend eras, morph into different types and techniques without ever losing its power. What is common to all the highest art is its freeing power, the forceful harmonization of a community with time and the most violent laws. Plato reminds us that this is carried out as good judgement in artistic contests: the crowd must be given over to the highest laws, guided towards the next stage of life or death, even if this goes against the spirit of each viewer and his preferred work. One cannot prefer the puppet show forever, something which we see form naturally in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister from the earliest age.

Hölderlin says to the Muse, "For once I lived like the gods, and no more is needed." Art, as the violence of law, is a means to theomorphism, the most fruitful death. One great work is enough for us if it leads us to our fate, if it is in accordance with the perfection and freedom of our being. Many small works may also lead us to the same end.

This freedom of the law of violence and memory is also in the wealth of Goethe's life. Art was not an end for him, but a means to increase the force of life and the becoming of the state within the formative order. Art was not a thing for him, but a fulfilling process of perfection and freedom.

One may catch a glimpse of this in his own life, represented in the cliche, "Everything has led up to this moment." In love, coming of age, the birth of a child, and death, we experience a force, an appearance of the natural or elemental laws, which betrays any necessity of action. Here we encounter fate, the soul, the numinous laws - and what this speaks to is that which is higher than art. In Tolstoy one sees this in the death of Count Bezuhov, the beauty which begins to form even amidst the loss of order and an age falling away from its laws. The young have lost sight of the laws of monarchistic wealth, yet in this moment they are returned to it.

This force of violence and law, where it appears as the elemental or the invisible signs of natural order, remains undiminished in the realm of religion, theology, myth. "God's being missed in the end will help him." Our morphology is what allows us to survive even the death of the gods, strengthen ourselves and the law - if not the gods themselves. "With hands they pushed away the white milk, the table, by themselves. And drinking from the silver horns they besotted themselves."

The centaurs return the wealth of nature through the tyche; the Muses question our judgement of lies and truth before the transition of the state in its beauty; Hephaestus reaches a higher form of artistic power than anything the other gods can imagine, an invisible yet monstrous dominion greater than beauty; Orion is made one with the heavens, where he may preside over all hunters and give to them the abundance in which they too may hunt all the creatures of the earth; the heroes of the Iliad battle over the dead from within the forming dominion, and through the stripping of their armour they become the paralyzed vision of a life lived before the eyes of Athena's Aegis - so that they might fall as the great oaks and pines of the mountain forests.

This is a necessary vision, because art today captures almost none of its power. The laws remain, but their appearance is entirely diminished. Where art must perfect the objective order while freeing the subjective memory, we have nothing other than a subjective order which gnaws away at the objective memory. This, in seeming contradiction, increases the necessity of art in our lives, for ugliness demands the greatest sacrifices.

While the origin of modernist and abstract art begins from a truth - that the emptiness of essence begins to destroy the idyllic and refine its materials into a hidden but explosive powder - it comes to only increase this law. What this reveals is that modernist art is not the opposite of the earlier works of the masters, the beautiful works of the rebirth of the Golden Age. Abstract and avant-garde art is only a malady, a reflection of this higher art's inner sickness: harmonization with law no longer occurs as theomorphosis but as thanatomorphosis. Death is no longer the freeing madness, the purification of wandering into the longest winter, it is the starving dog who searches in vain for even the bones of a skeleton. Yet the absolute indifference of an all-consuming nature is nothing in the holloways of white and barren trees.

Avant-garde art is also the perfection of of art as a process, as a technique in which the substratum is drawn out into eternity. It is, in short, the sacrifice of the image where it is no longer possible, where Queen Truth can no longer be seen from the perspective of artworks or even festivals.

One sees this in the regression of the image, in the drawing out of the image to a nothingness which is also penetrating. Bruegel's landscapes are hollowed out, the celebration of ugliness loses its beautiful potential, the peasants sacrificed to the orderless new world; Icarus disappears completely as the longest formality. Beauty is at once removed and metastasized. Such a great territory cannot be mastered without this blinding of the image - the work becomes its own world through the cutting out of the mote in its eye. The impossible object is torn away from the gallows at the center and becomes the entirety of the work. And only the magpie remains.

Malevich's Black Square is this process in its very form: the void recurs at the center, all art outside it is liquidated as a law of impossibility. Yet the law of art in itself, l'art pour l'art, marches on, whether as dogma or reaction. Icarus may also be said to be falling eternally. Otherwise, the aerial vision gives a new impression of Bosch's landscapes - the war becomes material but only disperses the violence. The brutal armaments only weaken the horrific image so that we see more deeply into the ruined and ruinous mind. But nothing of this may be made explicit, as art has eliminated the ineffable from its repertoire.

Modern art penetrates the veil of the hidden order that it is an occasion of. It reveals a grievous deformity. Before the permanently gored face of the trench soldier one sees nothing more than the wound in his own head. This, taken as an image of order and time, may be seen in its final form in the subterfuge of Perseus with the Head of Medusa. Only the technique undergoes morphology, not us, nor the state and its legislation. 'One immense being is created of eternal change and the continuous transformation of component parts.' Even the myth becomes profane, the order of transition itself an object to be refined into destructive powder. We pour out of the wound of the Leviathan back into the wild. We awaken as one of the countless dogs of Actaeon, where one may only hope to return to the cities, live as a van Gogh figure, bring him to life as a titan, or sell one's own head on the black market of sacrifice.

Where the stasis of form brings us all too close to the knowledge of our death we begin to pull heroes down from the heavens. Against the violence of the highest laws we disgorge Atlas from out of the mountain.

Demomorphosis.

"Barfuss auf dem Eise

Schwankt er hin und her;

Und sein kleiner Teller

Bleibt ihm immer leer.

Keiner mag ihn hören,

Keiner sieht ihn an;

Und die Hunde knurren

Um den alten Mann."