To recoil from the tired shape. Form and anti-form collide, tugging from opposite sides at the drama of naturalistic illusion. The urge to engage in the shattering of shape. And never shall the twain be twined again. Excuse us for the verbiage. unfortunately there is probably more. Lots more. heaps of it doled out in a painful concern to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, without any artificial colors and flavours that could dilute the purity and in turn, engage us in a seduction away from the subject at hand and into a love affair with someone’s words. To drink from the master’s water and to imbibe, tipsily the eternal and infinite if only as an artistic kick, albeit sometimes in the arse.
Yes, to be charmed by the progressive step of a sustained narrative, punctuated by alienating whispers. The human condition would not appear to be inclusive of Arcadia like conditions that offer idle amenities of cantering easily along a style-smoothed roadbed beneath a fiction enriched pattern of sheltering leaves. After all, there is an argument that syntax and language itself is inadequate to the purposes of truth, a safeguard against being lulled into illusions of continuity, in mistaking the graces of what appears to be artful, man controlled management for what is essentially the unmanageable presence of life. The plainly carpented, safety inspected formulas in which debris, preconceived as crisis, is gathered up in handy dramatic dustpans and cleanly recycled. Doll house entertainment designed to keep the creative hand from straying and boxing in the action.
But to leave the neat, the plausible, the familiarly shaped poses decisional consequences. What does the new look like? And will it be persuasively better than the stale crusts at hand? To abandon precisely weighted proportions wrapped for the freezer, ready for instant use. There is an implicit obligation to destroy an illusion and replace it with something else, beyond calling mocking intention to how the old is made, above and without a backward glance at Brecht’s celebrated doctrine of alienation as violation of the familiar model, but not as the foot servant of some ideology.
The moment you touch what is with the wand of style, the moment you arrange music, words, images in a way that the arrangement itself becomes attractive aesthetically, a fraud has been perpetuated. Truth becomes an artifice, and the architectural outcome, whatever its shape cannot help being a lie; the realized fear that conscious art is a liability, the fig leaf between the individual and what is roiling around inside which remains whatever the formula employed. Intrinsic tampering and lingering falsification that clings to pure energy infecting it with pretense and sequence. Just touching the dice disturbs the rolling at random by the master stage manager. To be guided by the impact of pure whim. Calculation kills and we must turn to chance to feel the warmth of the creative spark. A spark often extinguished, stepped on by the coctail bomb of melancholy that impairs creativity. A human condition of exile and its vigour and yearning composing within a context of eroding, terrorism, against wisdom and creativity.