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<p>Hi all<br>
</p>
<p>this is a beautiful essay below . The scenes narrated in
Steppenwolf and other novels by Herman Hesse were formative to my
youthful Psyche and had a profound influence on the life path I
have taken. The essay does a wonderful job of relating the novel
to our times of perpetual war, authoritarian restriction on our
freedom of expression and the lies we are being lead to believe
about Big pharma's benevolent vaccine salvation. It has inspired
me to reread the novel. <br>
</p>
<p>Art<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAFmR-mU=1kEFZ8rGKV=+Ar+sKy_w7MPFCFQ4egwcv0U16H5w2A@mail.gmail.com">
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moz-do-not-send="true"> Hello, Bernice. This is an irregular edition of
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<h1
style="display:block;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:21px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:normal;border-bottom:1px solid #e19b9b;margin:0 40px;padding:0 0 7px;text-align:left;color:#262626!important"><a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=89332047e4&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737!important;text-decoration:none!important"
target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">A
Lighthouse for Dark
Times</a></h1>
<div style="margin:0 40px">
<p
style="color:#262626;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:165%;text-align:left">This
is the elemental
speaking: It is during
phase transition — when
the temperature and
pressure of a system go
beyond what the system
can withstand and matter
changes from one state
to another — that the
system is most pliant,
most possible. This
chaos of particles that
liquefies solids and
vaporizes liquids is
just the creative force
by which the new order
of a more stable
structure finds itself.
The world would not
exist without these
discomposing
transitions, during
which everything seems
to be falling apart and
<a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a7256db30f&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">entropy</a>
seems to have the last
word. And yet here it
is, solid beneath our
living feet — feet that
carry value systems,
systems of sanity, just
as vulnerable to the
upheavals of phase
transition yet just as
resilient, saved too by
the irrepressible
creative force that
makes order, makes
beauty, makes a new and
stronger structure of
possibility out of the
chaos of such times. </p>
<img
src="https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/4.jpg?resize=680%2C993"
width="600"
style="border:0;height:auto;line-height:100%;outline:none;text-decoration:none;display:inline;width:100%"
moz-do-not-send="true">
<p
style="color:#8c8c8c;font-family:Arial,Sans-serif;font-size:0.8em;line-height:165%;text-align:left;border-bottom:1px solid #bfbfbf;padding:0 0 4px">Light
distribution on soap
bubble from the
19th-century French
physics textbook <a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c97906efa0&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"><em>Le
monde physique</em></a>.
(Available as <a
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print</a> and as <a
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style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">stationery
cards</a>.)</p>
<p
style="color:#262626;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:165%;text-align:left">Cultures
and civilizations tend
to overestimate the
stability of their
states, only to find
themselves regularly
discomposed by internal
pressures and tensions
too great for the system
to hold. And yet always
in them there are those
who harness from the
chaos the creative force
to imagine, and in the
act of imagining to
effect, a phase
transition to a
different state. </p>
<p
style="color:#262626;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:165%;text-align:left">We
call those people
artists — they who never
forget it is only what
we can imagine that
limits or liberates what
is possible. “A society
must assume that it is
stable,” James Baldwin
wrote in <a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d4497d19df&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">reckoning
with the immense
creative process that
is humanity</a>, “but
the artist must know,
and he must let us know,
that there is nothing
stable under heaven.” In
the instability, the
possibility; in the
chaos, the building
blocks of a stronger
structure.</p>
<p
style="color:#262626;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:165%;text-align:left">A
century of upheavals
ago, suspended between
two World Wars, <a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=af8ddc4019&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">Hermann
Hesse</a> (July 2,
1877–August 9, 1962)
considered the strange
power and possibility of
such societal phase
transitions in his novel
<a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0f0447d171&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"><strong><em>Steppenwolf</em></strong></a>
(<a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=197ef9ff25&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"><em>public
library</em></a>).
He writes:</p>
<blockquote
style="display:block">
<p
style="color:#595959;font-family:Arial,Sans-serif;font-size:15px;line-height:170%;text-align:left"><img
src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png"
align="left"
width="50"
style="border:0;height:auto;line-height:100%;outline:none;text-decoration:none;padding:5px 30px 10px 0px;display:inline;width:50px!important"
moz-do-not-send="true">Every age, every culture, every custom and
tradition has its own
character, its own
weakness and its own
strength, its beauties
and ugliness; accepts
certain sufferings as
matters of course,
puts up patiently with
certain evils. Human
life is reduced to
real suffering, to
hell, only when two
ages, two cultures and
religions overlap. A
man of the Classical
Age who had to live in
medieval times would
suffocate miserably
just as a savage does
in the midst of our
civilisation. Now
there are times when a
whole generation is
caught in this way
between two ages, two
modes of life, with
the consequence that
it loses all power to
understand itself and
has no standard, no
security, no simple
acquiescence.</p>
</blockquote>
<p
style="color:#262626;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:165%;text-align:left">We
too are living now
through such a world,
caught again between two
ages, confused and
conflicted, suffocating
and suffering. But we
have a powerful
instrument for
self-understanding, for
cutting through the
confusion to draw from
these civilizational
phase transitions new
and stronger structures
of possibility: the
creative spirit. </p>
<p
style="color:#262626;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:165%;text-align:left">Hesse
observes that artists
feel these painful
instabilities more
deeply than the rest of
society and more
restlessly, and out of
that restlessness they
make the lifelines that
save us, the lifelines
we call art. A century
before Toni Morrison,
living through another
upheaval, insisted that
<a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=37501f13c0&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">“this
is <em>precisely</em>
the time when artists
go to work,”</a> Hesse
insists that artists
nourish the goodness of
the human spirit “with
such strength and
indescribable beauty”
that it is “flung so
high and dazzlingly over
the wide sea of
suffering, that the
light of it, spreading
its radiance, touches
others too with its
enchantment.” </p>
<img
src="https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/HilmaAfKlint_Dove_small.jpg?resize=680%2C900"
width="600"
style="border:0;height:auto;line-height:100%;outline:none;text-decoration:none;display:inline;width:100%"
moz-do-not-send="true">
<p
style="color:#8c8c8c;font-family:Arial,Sans-serif;font-size:0.8em;line-height:165%;text-align:left;border-bottom:1px solid #bfbfbf;padding:0 0 4px"><em>The
Dove No. 1</em> by
Hilma af Klint, painted
during World War I.
(Available as <a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d2ab10caa6&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">a
print</a> and as <a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=583d11d3cd&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">stationery
cards</a>.)</p>
<p
style="color:#262626;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:165%;text-align:left">Often,
they do the nourishing
at great personal cost.
He considers what it
means, and what it
takes, to be an artist:</p>
<blockquote
style="display:block">
<p
style="color:#595959;font-family:Arial,Sans-serif;font-size:15px;line-height:170%;text-align:left"><img
src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png"
align="left"
width="50"
style="border:0;height:auto;line-height:100%;outline:none;text-decoration:none;padding:5px 30px 10px 0px;display:inline;width:50px!important"
moz-do-not-send="true">You will, instead, embark on the longer and
wearier and harder
road of life. You will
have to multiply many
times your two-fold
being and complicate
your complexities
still further. Instead
of narrowing your
world and simplifying
your soul, you will
have to absorb more
and more of the world
and at last take all
of it up in your
painfully expanded
soul, if you are ever
to find peace.</p>
</blockquote>
<p
style="color:#262626;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:165%;text-align:left">Most
people, Hesse laments
while watching his
contemporaries, are
instead “robbed of their
peace of mind and better
feelings” by the
newspapers they read
daily — the social media
of his time — through
which the world’s
power-mongers manipulate
our imagination of the
possible. “The end and
aim of it all,” he
prophecies, “is to have
the war over again, the
next war that draws
nearer and nearer, and
it will be a good deal
more horrible than the
last.”</p>
<p
style="color:#262626;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:165%;text-align:left">That
is what happened. The
next war did come, the
world’s grimmest yet — a
phase transition that
nearly destroyed every
particle of humanity.
And yet something was
left standing, stirring
— that same creative
force that made of the
chaos a new era of
possibility never
previously imagined:
civil rights and women’s
liberation, solar panels
and antibiotics, <em>One
Hundred Years of
Solitude</em> and Nina
Simone.</p>
<p
style="color:#262626;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:165%;text-align:left">On
the other side of that
war’s ruins, another
thinker of uncommon
depth and sensitivity
considered the role of
the artist and of art in
the collapse and
reconfiguring of
civilizations. In a 1949
address before the
American Academy of Arts
and Letters, later
included in his lifeline
of a collection <a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b860740830&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"><strong><em>Two
Cheers for
Democracy</em></strong></a>
(<a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=35de141f0e&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"><em>public
library</em></a>),
the English novelist,
essayist, and
broadcaster <a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=86ac8d5269&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">E.M
Forster</a> (January
1, 1879–June 7, 1970)
celebrates the
stabilizing power of art
in times of incoherence
and discord:</p>
<blockquote
style="display:block">
<p
style="color:#595959;font-family:Arial,Sans-serif;font-size:15px;line-height:170%;text-align:left"><img
src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png"
align="left"
width="50"
style="border:0;height:auto;line-height:100%;outline:none;text-decoration:none;padding:5px 30px 10px 0px;display:inline;width:50px!important"
moz-do-not-send="true">A work of art… is the only material object in the
universe which may
possess internal
harmony. All the
others have been
pressed into shape
from outside, and when
their mould is removed
they collapse. The
work of art stands up
by itself, and nothing
else does. It achieves
something which has
often been promised by
society, but always
delusively. Ancient
Athens made a mess —
but the <em>Antigone</em>
stands up. Renaissance
Rome made a mess — but
the ceiling of the
Sistine got painted.
James I made a mess —
but there was <em>Macbeth</em>.
Louis XIV — but there
was <em>Phèdre</em>.
Art… is the one
orderly product which
our muddling race has
produced. It is the
cry of a thousand
sentinels, the echo
from a thousand
labyrinths; it is the
lighthouse which
cannot be hidden.</p>
</blockquote>
<img
src="https://i2.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/virginiawoolf2.jpg"
width="600"
style="border:0;height:auto;line-height:100%;outline:none;text-decoration:none;display:inline;width:100%"
moz-do-not-send="true">
<p
style="color:#8c8c8c;font-family:Arial,Sans-serif;font-size:0.8em;line-height:165%;text-align:left;border-bottom:1px solid #bfbfbf;padding:0 0 4px">Art
by Nina Cosford from the
<a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=20045c5209&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">illustrated
biography of Virginia
Woolf</a>, who wrote <a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a92f66e561&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"><em>To
the Lighthouse</em></a>
in a transitional time.</p>
<p
style="color:#262626;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:165%;text-align:left">Because
art is the antipode to
the destructive forces
sundering society, the
artist — endowed with <a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=4d3308c21d&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">the
personal and political
power of the sensitive</a>
— will invariably tend
to be an outsider to the
society in which they
are born. A decade
before Auden observed
that <a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=834fee67fe&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">“the
mere making of a work
of art is itself a
political act,”</a>
before Iris Murdoch
observed that <a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c90ae4f279&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">“tyrants
always fear art
because tyrants want
to mystify while art
tends to clarify,”</a>
Forster writes:</p>
<blockquote
style="display:block">
<p
style="color:#595959;font-family:Arial,Sans-serif;font-size:15px;line-height:170%;text-align:left"><img
src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png"
align="left"
width="50"
style="border:0;height:auto;line-height:100%;outline:none;text-decoration:none;padding:5px 30px 10px 0px;display:inline;width:50px!important"
moz-do-not-send="true">If our present society should disintegrate — and
who dare prophesy that
it won’t? — [the
figure of the artist]
will become clearer:
the Bohemian, the
outsider, the
parasite, the rat —
one of those figures
which have at present
no function either in
a warring or a
peaceful world. It may
not be dignified to be
a rat, but many of the
ships are sinking,
which is not dignified
either — the officials
did not build them
properly. Myself, I
would sooner be a
swimming rat than a
sinking ship — at all
events I can look
around me for a little
longer — and I
remember how one of
us, a rat with
particularly bright
eyes called Shelley,
squeaked out, “Poets
are the unacknowledged
legislators df the
world,” before he
vanished into the
waters of the
Mediterranean… The
legislation of the
artist is never
formulated at the
time, though it is
sometimes discerned by
future generations.</p>
</blockquote>
<p
style="color:#262626;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:165%;text-align:left">This,
he assures us, is not a
pessimistic view — it is
a kind of faith in the
future, made of our
creative devotion to the
present. (I am reminded
here of his contemporary
Albert Camus’s
insistence that <a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=bdd60a262a&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">“real
generosity toward the
future lies in giving
all to the present,”</a>
and of C.S. Lewis, who <a
href="https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d317493299&e=bad860c913"
style="color:#c33737;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">reckoned
with our task in
troubled times</a>
from the middle of a
World War to remind us
that “the present is the
only time in which any
duty can be done or any
grace received.”)
Forster writes:</p>
<blockquote
style="display:block">
<p
style="color:#595959;font-family:Arial,Sans-serif;font-size:15px;line-height:170%;text-align:left"><img
src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1/images/2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png"
align="left"
width="50"
style="border:0;height:auto;line-height:100%;outline:none;text-decoration:none;padding:5px 30px 10px 0px;display:inline;width:50px!important"
moz-do-not-send="true">Society can only represent a fragment of the
human spirit, and that
another fragment can
only get expressed
through art… Looking
back into the past, it
seems to me that that
is all there has ever
been: vantage-grounds
for discussion and
creation, little
vantage-grounds in the
changing chaos, where
bubbles have been<br>
blown and webs spun,
and the desire to
create order has found
temporary
gratification, and the
sentinels have managed
to utter their
challenges, and the
huntsmen, though lost
individually, have
heard each other’s
calls through the
impenetrable wood, and
the lighthouses have
never ceased sweeping
the thankless seas.</p>
</blockquote>
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