Not to answer the postmodern with the modern, but… to make a suggestion towards un-nostalgic ‘couth’… recalling July’s notes from George Lukacs, which mention “a world of intended and would-be soullessness”… and seeking somehow to exist within a ‘difference separating man and God,’ within vibrations in word and color, within flows of internal necessity, within the music striking keys of an anachronistic soul… watching without knowing, not present, not absent… unconscious, wide awake…
I. ‘Masquerades’ - a selection from Fernando Pessoa (1936)
I like to think, because I know it won’t be long before I stop thinking. It’s as a point of departure that thinking delights me– a cold, meticulous harbor station from which to set sail for the vast South. I sometimes try to focus my mind on a large metaphysical or even social problem, because I know that, ensconced in the hoarse voice of my reason, there are peacock tails ready to spread open for me as soon as I forget I’m thinking, and I know that humanity is a door in a wall that doesn’t exist, so I can open it onto whatever gardens I like.
Thank God for that ironic element in human destinies that makes dreams the mode of thought for the poor in life, even as it makes life the mode of thought– or thought the mode of life– for the poor in dreams.
But even dreaming channeled through thinking ends up making me weary. At which point I open my eyes from dreaming, go to to the window, and transfer my dream to the streets and rooftops. And it’s in my distracted and profound contemplation of so very many roof tiles divided into rooftops, covering the astral contagion of people organized into streets, that my soul becomes truly detached from me, and I don’t think, I don’t dream, I don’t see, I don’t need to. Then I truly contemplate the abstraction of Nature– Nature, the difference between man and God.
II. ‘Panel for Edwin Campbell #4′ and ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ (1914, 1912)
www.wassilykandinsky.net/work-106.php
www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/phil%20of%20art/kandinskytext2.htm#1