The Artistic Spirit (re-edited)

I.

For too long has man trampled the good reputation of Faith by approximating it, on the one hand, with “hope”, that most debauched, diseased and pitiful of man’s sentiments which neutralizes – by way of well-wishing platitude – the upward audacity of the Will, and on the other, the observance of a certain religious creed; “faith” seen here as simply another word for “belief” or emotional conviction.

No, true Faith is, in fact, opposed to these: it the most palpable manifestation of the Will’s desire to overcome Reason’s tendency to burden man with the want of egalitarian rationality and empirical evidence; Faith best articulated by the expressions of pride, courage, naivete, unruliness, obstinacy, doggedness and unflinching resolve towards everything rational and reasonable within: towards the so-called “highest” and “best” a man has set for his own supposed good, the attainment of which in no way calls forth what-is from what-is-not, but, in fact, sacrifices the true potential achievement of a man’s brightest and most beautiful, however indeterminate and nebulous such potential must remain in the interim .

Ex Nihilo (National Cathedral, Washington), Frederick Hart

II.

The Artistic Spirit is that which endeavors to blur, obscure and, if possible, perpetually alter, if not completely demolish, the linguistic boundaries that delineate certain cultural paradigms and their respective lexicons so as to aesthetically expand the conceptual and linguistic frontiers that might enable a people to grow, evolve and become.

The Scientific Spirit, on the other hand, is that which – through rational and reasonable exactitude – colonizes, civilizes and finally sanitizes such frontiers as frontiers; sanitation which later seeks to entrench, defend and reinforce those now-definitive linguistic demarcations so as to satisfy man’s lesser instincts that lust always after predictability, convenience and emotional certitude; Certainty which, because of its perennial inability to answer the deepest cries of a man’s heart, the Artistic Spirit will always seek to subvert, pervert and revolutionize; revolutions whose sensual grandeur is so often fraught with such emotional difficulty that man will inevitably find it impossible to enduringly maintain the fervent intensity that Art perpetually demands, impossibility which will eventually be exhausted by the Scientific Spirit that always attrits the trajectory of the Artist and brings his streaking glory crashing to earth.

For such is the nature of life that animates the passions: here the overweening, there the unsustainability; here the recovery, the boredom, the cry and over there that frightful answer that each one of us cannot avoid being drawn closer into its grasp.

III.

The greatest of men, “The Artist”.

And the greatest of these, “The Writer”: a man (in no uncertain terms) “of letters”, those perhaps possessed by a certain philosophical spirit, sure, but in the end, still letters, still Writer.

IV.

The “grand view of history” is that which sees civilization lean towards epochs that structure themselves towards and around ever more rarefied heights of hierarchical order in which every participant has an unquestionable existential place and function if only scant sensual license, and then it inevitable collapse and subsequent atomization that witnesses the everywhere amplified access to bodily gratification gained at the price of the sense of place and proper collective belonging.

V.

That great unknowable “I” who speaks in various ways at various times throughout History is that which would never, under any circumstance, supply man with an “ought”, much less a “should”.

Moses on Mount Sinai, Jean Leon Gerome