The intention of the modern movement is to liberate art from the convention of pushing this individualistic aesthetic structure to a final pictorial conclusion.
The modern has chosen to exteriorate the “God in the machine” without the ceremonies of the graven image.
The stages of progress towards the presentation of the purely metaphysical structure of an aesthetic creation have been marked various degrees of subject in dissolution and subject in process of crystallization influenced by the artist’s perception of phenomenal dynamics.
The picture in which the transpiercing of the pictorial subject by the metaphysical pattern is most completely revealed is the El Greco landscape lately loaned to the Metropolitan Museum. Here the “intention” of the moderns has been forestalled to the extent that the aesthetic pattern projects itself beyond the subject matter.
The same is to a subtler degree noticeable in the rhythmic arabesques to which he induces his religious figurations.
In all the masters we can track this formative metaphysique to within their spatiality, volume, and motor idiosyncrasies of technique, however compactly incorporated in objective reproduction.
MI & LO
I.
Form
lo
Does form result from seeing unform repeatedly? For the first man I see is formless, in that he has no recognisable form. But the second man I see is recognisable as having the same form as the first man I have seen.
mi
Not so. For the one half of the first man I see is the replica of the formation of the other half of the first man I see. Thus, instantaneously he takes form.
The intention of his form being endorsed by its duality. Form is the union of identicals.
lo
The first half being the question to form and the second half the answer of form.
mi
Form being thus a token of the truth in which the question and the answer are incorporate and inseparable: truth being the question that answers itself — as immortality existing as a question in man’s mind, is answered by its confirmation in the macrocosmic mind of god.
lo
Then are the first halves of the microcosmic forms in the human mind and the second halves in creative god-head?
And is this the elucidation of “man in his image and likeness”?
But where occurs the macrocosmic element in this monad?
mi
Inasmuch as to the duality of this man-form indicated by right and left inheres the infinite intermediate, which, as cognisable from the fourth dimension, makes possible the one half of a man to be at an infinite distance from the other half of a man. In the recession of boundary during the process of thought, while the intellect encompasses phenomena with its convergent apparatus, comparable to sight, and compresses duality to the third dimensional unification.
lo
Then man is an instrument for imposing form upon phenomena. Man IS auto-conscious.
mi
Man is not the conceiver of form. The phenomenal universe provides exercise for the tenacity and increase of perception toward its ultimate reception of macrocosmic forms.
Form is a signal reconnoitred by the intellect on its march upon the illimitable.
lo
Then it is the confinement to form that incites the intellect to exceed itself.
mi
Form is the expressive encroachment on the increate from which— Appearance with its several significances derives.
From the untraceable precedent all form emanates; as sentry to the presence of creation.
lo
But may not intellect be the mold of phenomena?
mi
The mind and phenomena fit each into the other with exactitude; that is so.
If it were not, phenomena, to which the mind does not fit, become unbounded, would flow out of cognizance.
The encompassment of phenomena by the mind is the resistance of the mold for the conservation of the form.
lo
But a mold is an inverted form for the containment of a (so far) unassembled form, whereas phenomena already have form.
mi
The mold has been taken originally from the form. And after all the concavity of the mold is but the continuity of the convex form.
Any regular or irregular scission of any element will constitute a form in its mold: the confrontation of inner and outer—
II.
mi
Life we may say to be animation — and the source of animation can be disclosed.
The source of all animation is the unique force of the universe — every human body is animated by the whole unimaginable tonnage of the force of the universe.
An incalculable ocean of impact — an impact that should crush the body to infinitesimal fractions of smithereens.
lo
How then is such crushing tonnage of force available to the human body—
mi
When it arrives at contact with the body — it runs down the nerve centre of the brain and the spinal column and provides energy for the whole organism; the surplus runs into the ground, the spinal column acts as a lightning conductor to the universal force which continuously coursing through, continuously animates.
lo
But how does this force gain entrance—
mi
Through the pineal gland considered of such great importance by certain ancient sages.
Its outlet into the ground as a continuity of its course through man provides the much discussed attraction to the earth — or gravity—
It is for this reason that the body in recline can harbour a greater vitality — by placing the soles of the feet together, and thus establishing an extra self-enclosed circuit of energy — the same is true of the circuit enclosed by placing the palms of the hands together and it is not for nothing that out of the dark mystery left by an enlightened past — that the attitude of prayer has come down to us — a circuit of the arms and hands for the greater retention of the divine animation.
This is understandable inasmuch as the animated force disperses at the end of the spinal nerves — to, in the perpendicular event, bifurcate through the feral motor extensions—
In the supine event, force, which in the fourth dimension has impetus four ways at once, traverses the body horizontally which (but this is too intricate to explain in third dimensional formulas) produces — slumber. Not being pushed forward in sleep you give up your cooperation with active time.
lo
But I can lie awake or be most animated horizontally?
mi
In both conditions then are animated degrees of progress. Yet you will agree with me that in the erect position there is a possibility of, tendency, to stay awake indefinitely — while in the horizontal position there is no possibility or likelihood of staying awake for ever— Generally speaking the erect position tends towards awakeness and the horizontal position tends towards sleep.