King and Lionheart - Of Monsters and Men

Because I need this as a lullaby. - AC

The Romantic Manifesto: Introduction

The dictionary definition of “manifesto” is “a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives, as one issued by a government, sovereign, or organization.” The Random House Dictionary of English Language, College Edition, 1968)

I must state, therefore, that this manifesto is not issued in the name of an organization or a movement. I speak only for myself. There is no Romantic movement today. If there is to be one in the art of the future, this book will have helped it to come into being.

According to my philosophy, one must not express “intentions, opinions, objectives or motives” without stating one’s reasons for them ---i.e., without identifying their basis in reality. Therefore, the actual manifesto---the declaration of my personal objectives and motives---is at the end of this book, after the presentation of the theoretical grounds that entitle me to these particular objectives and motives. x x x

Those who feel that art is outside the province of reason would be well advised to leave this book alone: it is not for them. Those who know nothing is outside the province of reason will find in this book the base of rational esthetics. It is the absence of such base that has made today’s obscenely grotesque degradation of art possible.

To quote from Chapter 6: “The destruction of Romanticism in esthetics --- like the destruction of individualism in ethics or of capitalism in politics --- was made possible by philosophical default…In all three cases, the nature of the fundamental values involved had never been defined explicitly, the issues were fought in terms of non-essentials, and the values were destroyed by men who did not know what they were losing or why.”

“xxx” 

I must emphasize that I am not speaking of concretes, nor of politics, nor of journalistic trivia, but of that period’s “sense of life”. Its art projected an overwhelming sense of intellectual freedom, of depth, i.e., concern with the fundamental problems, of demanding standards, of inexhaustible originality, of unlimited possibilities and, above all, of profound respect for man. 

“xxx”

Renunciation is not one of my premises. If I see that the good is possible to men, yet it vanishes, I do not take “Such is the trend of the world” as a sufficient explanation. I ask such question as: Why? --- What caused it? --- What or who determines the trends of the world? (The answer is: philosophy)

The course of mankind’s progress is not a straight, automatic line, but a tortuous struggle, with long detours or relapses into the stagnant night of irrational. Mankind moves forward by the grace of those human bridges who are able to grasp and transmit, across years or centuries, the achievements men had reached --- and to carry them further. Thomas Aquinas is one illustrious example: he was the bridge between Aristotle and the Renaissance, spanning the infamous detour of the Dark and Middle Ages.

Speaking only of the pattern, with no presumptuous comparison of stature intended, I am a bridge of that kind --- between the esthetic achievements of the nineteenth century and the minds that choose to discover them, wherever and whenever such minds might exist.

It is impossible for the young people of today to grasp the reality of man’s higher potential and what scale of achievement it had reached in a rational (or semi-rational) culture. But I have seen it. I know that it was real, that it existed, that it is possible. It is that knowledge that I want to hold up to the sight of men --- over the brief span of less than a century --- before the barbarian curtains descend altogether (if it does) and the last memory of man’s greatness vanishes in another Dark Ages.

“xxx”

As for the present, I am not willing to surrender the world to the jerky contortions of self-inducedly brainless bodies with empty eye-sockets, who perform, in stinking basements, the immemorial rituals of staving off terror, which are dime a dozen in any jungle --- and to the quavering witch doctors who call it “art”.

Our day has no art and no future. The future, in the context of progress, is a door open only to those who do not renounce their conceptual faculty; it is not open to mystics, hippies, drug addicts, tribal ritualists--- or to anyone who reduces himself to a subanimal, subperceptual, sensory level of awareness.

Will we see an esthetic Renaissance in our time? I do not know. What I do know is this: anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.

(Excerpt: Intoduction of The Romantic Manisfesto – Ayn Rand)    

On Time and its Texture

1975: Vladimir Nabokov || Photograph by: Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis ||guardian.co.uk

             We can imagine all kinds of time, such as for example “applied time” --- time applied to events, which we measure by means of clocks and calendars; but those types of time are inevitably tainted by notion of space, spatial succession, stretches and sections of space. When we speak of the “passage of time”, we visualize an abstract river flowing through a generalized landscape. Applied time, measurable illusions of time, are useful for the purposes of historians or physicists, they do not interest me, and they did not interest my creature Van Veen in Part Four of my Ada.

            He and I in that book attempt to examine the essence of Time, not its lapse. Van mentions the possibility of being “an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration”, of being able to delight its sensuality in the texture of time, “in its stuff and spread, in the falls of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum.” He also is aware that “Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors”.

            Time, though akin to rhythm, is not simply rhythm, which would imply motion --- and Time does not move. Van’s greatest discovery is his perception of Time as the dim hollow between two rhythmic beats, the narrow and bottomless silence between the beats, not the beats themselves, which only embar Time. In this sense human life is not a pulsating heart but the missed heartbeat.

(excerpted from Vladimir Nabokov’s Strong Opinion Chapter 19)

Down by the Water - The Drums (2010)

(Three years ago, I kind of sang this song to someone)