Rejection & Reflection

“The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.” ~Marianne Moore

Man cannot transcend without relief—this principle follows from the God-given design of the sacredness of the Sabbath. Convenience is not the source of our salvation—it is not uplifting, despite the modern supposition. We must have leisure—which is a very special use of one’s time, specifically spending it non-usefully. Convenience is not leisure because it stops one step short; it only earns time by saving time, but the spare time must be used properly to make leisure. We gain a moment only to utilize it for our material, not spiritual, gain. But spiritual gain is precisely the fruit of time spent non-usefully. It is not surprising that prayers are done in silence and stillness.

All we have really accomplished in our modern age of technology, communication, and machinery is not a liberating advance, but a stagnation full of color, neon lights, and gadgetry—in short, an innovative hunter-gatherer society. Mankind, despite the centuries and millennia since the debacle at Babel, has yet to understand its lesson: a structure build upon spiritual depravity is socially disruptive and leads to disunity and confusion. Judging from the chaos on the ground it seems safe to conclude our system and structure suffers from spiritual depravity. Secularity, relativism, unfettered commerce, vanity, greed, usury, and individualism describe this depravity and they are to blame for the social disruption.

Yet the modern structure is comprehensively systematic and its potential disruption is apocalyptic. The only people situated to remind man of his transcendence is not the politician or the philanthropist or even the priest—for they all must remain in machine-like structures which exploit us all, conscript us into erecting Babel. Only the monk and the artist are properly disposed to withdraw from the world as one must to imagine, reflect, pray, and prevent oneself from becoming the “pastime of powerful men” or “mere sequin upon the social dress.”

The foundation of God’s Kingdom on earth must begin by being purged of both big-business and power-politics and being committed to men and mankind with all its spiritual elements intact and respected. Revolutions (in the violent sense) are not the source of this civilization’s setting; rather, it will be ushered in by substitution and conversion. Artists are precisely what we need—people who bow-out, making their very business un-business. They are not organizers or administrators, as Massingham writes, but rather, the artist is the “centre of suggestion.” These men and women reject in order to reflect; they cease to pontificate and participate in order to listen. The will withdraw in order to “penetrate the dormant bud of being, where it protects itself in its sheath of darkness from the frost that paralyses and the heat that consumes.” What they produce are not armaments for battle, but remedies for depression. The strategy of modern man’s struggle in not the warfare-of-advance-through-destruction; this is the unworkable myth of progress that calls us to be ever-changing into the future’s new and un-sustaining trend. This hawkish stance taken by the moderns will ensure their demise. Structures bent on actively destroying ultimately consume themselves: “destruction mutinies in its own camp and sends its loyalists packing into the meager cohorts of the faithful.”

The meager cohorts of the faithful are the artists whose vocations are summed up in walking away from the darkness in order to sketch portraits of Light that they pepper behind themselves leaving a trail for us to follow in their journey. These wayfarers harbor and cultivate the human spirit by coming to know it; they communicate the truth of it not as the muse from on high descends to them, but as they approach the muse, themselves. The artists’ retreat and fleeing to the fields, to the simple life is the source that best reveals the depth of mystery and the actual and only effective revolution that mankind will witness. The artists’ withdrawal is the battle—remaining artistically chaste is simply a matter of not becoming a whore of commerce. Charles Marriot reminds us, “There must be no making friends with the children of Mammon.” This type of celibacy will be demanded as the only practical means to the end toward which the artist tends: “He will not be able to give up the world for Christ’s sake unless he give it up for his own…He cannot give it up for his own unless he learn to laugh, as well as to frown—both at himself and the rich absurdity of what he is leaving.”

There are many-a-philistines today who proclaim that art is obsolete because it is a complete waste of time. My position concedes to Testadura, &al. that they are right about art being a complete waste of time. I would remind them that so, too, is eternity. Further, I think it worth pointing out that it is art’s complete wasting of time that makes it so invaluable and necessary. Why, dear Testadura, is it so silly to waste one’s time living as opposed to spending one’s time wasting life?