Beyond The Breakthrough

Modernism or Anti-Modernism?

 

To plunge into the depths of the Abyss, to Heaven or Hell, who cares? To the bottom of the Unknown in order to find something new! – Baudelaire, 1859

 

That evocative phrase ‘the modern breakthrough’ is attributed to Scandinavian controversialist critic and exponent of cultural radicalism, Georg Brandes. Like all such tectonic shifts, however slight, the Modern Breakthrough was – and still is – somewhat divisive; expect a backlash of stereotypical reactions: panics, outrages and counter-movements. For some time it has been clear that one focus of reaction to Modernism and Modernity is the interrelationship between technology, the mass media and the arts. The period 1870-1914 is often considered the era of the Second Industrial Revolution: a time that saw the introduction of electric power, light bulbs, the telephone, aviation and the motor car, not to mention an incipient leisure class, mass circulation journalism, advertising, the beginnings of conspicuous consumption and celebrity culture.

It is self-evident that our contemporary, secularised mass media – especially media based on visual images –is inseparable from various forms of recording technology. Yet such technologies and cultural innovations find their origins in the pre-history of Modernity. One must agree with Walter Benjamin that it was the nineteenth century diorama ‘which signalled a revolution in the relationship of art to technology’. Here we can discern the first signs of an emergent historical phenomenon that, by the 1950s, would overthrow age-old aesthetic standards and compromise, or, at least, complicate, more recent ideas of ‘revolutionary’ or avant-garde Modern Art.

If the formative era of mass media reached its zenith in 1905 with the opening of the Pittsburgh Nickelodeon, subsequent waves of development have proved equally momentous. Fears about the insidious manipulative power of entertainment and advertising raised by Cultural Marxists like Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), or by more popular social commentators such as Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders (1957) or Christopher Booker in The Neophiliacs (1969) have been further amplified in more recent times.

 Although the shared social concerns of both Cultural Marxists and anti-modernist Cultural Conservatives resurfaced in the mid-1970s, as can be seen by the popularity of such ‘explosive’ best-sellers as The Culture of Narcissism (1979) by historian Christopher Lasch, these worries have been heightened even further since the 1980s. This is mainly caused by the emergence of global ICTs (Information and Communications Technologies: the Internet, electronic financial markets that function beyond the control of the state and so forth) and associated methodologies such as Hypertext, invented in 1965 by computer scientist Ted Nelson who also coined the term ‘Hypermedia’. Anti-modernists find the Internet particularly threatening because, for the time being at least, its global reach, speed of access and decentralised architecture denies the possibility of assimilation into traditional power structures, hence the recurring outbursts of moral panic associated with access to harmful, deviant or subversive content and paranoid fears about the perceived deleterious effects of Social Media. For disciples of Lasch and others the socio-cultural effects of global hyper-technology have amplified perennial conservative fears centred on the quasi-mythical theme of ‘lost innocence’; often defined as a continuing and specifically modern degradation of ‘spontaneous feeling’ and other emotive idealisations beloved of moral vigilantes.

The evolutionary processes of cultural change are rendered complex by infinite socio-economic variations and geographic factors. Such complexity can cause cultural ‘time lag’ and related temporal phenomena such as resurgences or revivals. For instance, due to the politics of the era, French Romanticism found acceptance in its home country much later than German or English. While the ‘Neo-Classicism’ of the eighteenth century is perceived as a revivalist phenomenon, it will be seen that, in the later part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century there were periodic revivals of ‘Neo-Romanticism’, in various guises, including forms of ‘Gothic’ which can be interpreted as the dark side of the Romantic movement. It has been argued that Modernism itself is, in essence, an extension of the Romantic impulse – an impulse viewed as intrinsic to the human condition.

Again, for obscure reasons, cultural tendencies can reach high points of ‘intensity’ or peak moments of heightened activity that may vary depending upon locale. The period in Europe between, say 1890 and 1914 may, for many, epitomise the apogee of ultra-Modernism. This was an era when all art forms and genres appeared to exhibit an inter-related set of crucial developments and continuities: Cubism, Futurism, ‘pure architecture’, ‘open field’ poetry, the interior monologue, Expressionist theatre, vers libre, Atonal Music, the Free Dance and Expressionist dance innovations of  Loie Fuller, Ruth St Denis, Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman and Rudolf von Laban. To some observers it appeared that there was a clear trajectory of innovation from Canova’s ‘Three Graces’ (1817) via Manet’s ‘Olympia’ (1863) to Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d'Avignon’ (1907). Having reached this evolutionary apex all subsequent developments must be characterised by a sense of diminution or of failing momentum. From such a ‘high point’ there is nowhere to go but down: Modernism, or the avant-garde inflexion of the Modernist trend, entered a long, slow, if irregular, fade-out due to natural dissipation of energy and loss of motive power.

However there is an apocalyptic slant to much talk about ‘the modern world’ and Modern Art. This ensures that almost any ‘era’ can be defined as an age of crisis, an ‘age of anxiety’, a time of the absolutely different, or an Age of the New (the New Novel, the New Drama, the New Woman) separated from the past by a vertiginous abyss. Perhaps, between the ‘Three Graces’ and ‘Les Demoiselles d'Avignon’, there is no connecting thread of continuous development at all. Perhaps the difference between the two works reveals an unbridgeable gulf in sensibility – a disconcerting black hole in the fabric of ‘culture’, one of those ‘unexpected solutions of continuity’ identified by Joseph Conrad in his prescient terrorist novel The Secret Agent (1907). Perhaps it might be the case that an underlying indeterminacy ensures that both possibilities are viable, depending upon the analytical perspective of the observer.

Roland Barthes isolated the mid-nineteenth century as the moment when a distinctively ‘modern’ tendency arose in European culture. In literature he notes a qualitative difference between the literary style (ecriture) of Balzac and that of Flaubert whose novel Madame Bovary caused controversy in 1857. For Barthes this transition in French literature from Balzac to Flaubert represents a Conradian sudden hole in space and time, une rupture essentielle. For art historians the transition from Romanticism to Realism in the works of Courbet and the theories of Champfleury may mark a similar rupture or divide in the fabric of cultural life.

Different chronological profiles can be ascribed to the historical phenomenon of Modernity.

It has been said that both the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists are the true initiators of ‘the New’ in art. In the 1850s the caricaturist and photographer Nadar launched his Pantheon-Nader portraits of celebrated contemporaries thus, for some commentators, inaugurating a new style of celebrity culture. Nadar was also a pioneer of aerial photography. For Georg Brandes, as for Andre Breton, the point of departure, or the ‘modern breakthrough’ occurred in the 1870s, the period of the Franco-Prussian War and the heyday of the actress Sarah (the ‘divine Sarah’) Bernhardt, one of the first ‘modern’ celebrities. In 1873 it was Rimbaud who wrote in A Season in Hell that ‘one must be absolutely modern’.

Alternatively, for Victorian sage John Ruskin (Modern Painters, 1843) the authentic voice of Modernity in painting was that of Turner, a master of turbulent atmosphere, a pioneer of English Romanticism, while, for other critics ‘La Musique aux Tuileries’ (1862) by Manet may count as the first ‘truly modern’ painting because of a sense of detachment which appeared to one commentator (Sandblad) to exemplify the urban ‘realism of the flaneur’. The image also included a portrait of Baudelaire among the crowd signifying how Manet, along with Guys, quickly came to embody ‘the painter of modern life’ as expounded in the poet’s aesthetic theories.  

For historians of the theatre the modern era began with Ibsen’s plays A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1880). For cultural historian Roger Shattuck the modern era began with the death of Victor Hugo in 1885, and was actualised during la Belle Époque, between 1890 and 1914. For Shattuck the pre-eminent symbol of Modernism was the Eiffel Tower (1889) whereas, for Jacques Barzun, writing in 1943, Modernity in ‘the contemporary sense’ dated from the Armistice of 1918. For other cultural historians the high watermark of ‘the modern’ is the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age of Art Deco symbolised by the triumph of the moderne style at the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Moderne.

But, by 1960, or so Barzun claimed, the term ‘Modernism’ was beginning to sound rather archaic; it was ‘beginning to acquire the tone of the past’. It is certainly the case that some emerging features of ‘postmodernism’, or Post-Modernism, can be found in both the mainstream culture and the ‘counter-culture’ of the Sixties, even though its roots can be traced back at least as far as the Cabaret Voltaire (1916). Historian Arnold Toynbee, writing in the late thirties, dated the ‘Post Modern Age’ from the schism or cultural rupture of the First World War.

It was the 1850s that saw not only the rise of Realism in both literature and painting, but also a new ‘heroism of modern life’.

This vision of ‘the new’ was exemplified both by the aesthetics and poetry of Charles Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857) and by the first stirrings of modern architecture in the prefabricated glass and steel of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851) famously derided by anti-modernist Dostoyevsky in his Notes From Underground (1864) and elsewhere as a pagan totem (the god Baal) of bourgeois materialism. It is, perhaps fitting that one of the most sensational scientific publications of the modern age, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, appeared in 1859 at the close of this mid-century watershed decade. Like the writings of Darwin, works by Flaubert, Courbet and Baudelaire attracted that particularly modern phenomenon – the cultural, literary or artistic scandal. It may be that the essential rupture in the edifice of ‘culture’ apparently caused by such ‘radical’ images as The Funeral at Ornans (by Courbet, 1850), or by such ‘scandalous’ poetical works as Les Fleurs du Mal or architectural outrages such as Crystal Palace helps to create a climate of moral panic. A climate that is still with us, as may be judged from the hysterical media ‘outcry’ against plays like Sarah Kane’s brutalist  ‘in yer face’ drama Blasted (1995), or the synthetic ‘fury’ directed at films such as Cronenberg’s Crash (1996). Of course this is nothing new. In the modern world, the intellectual, or the artist, or the entertainer or the subcultural outsider, may soon become a folk-devil; back in 1937 Duke Ellington found it necessary to defend ‘hot’ jazz against the accusation that it incited sex crimes among the young, while guardians of propriety railed against the salacious implications of the Shimmy or Little Egypt’s Hootchie-Kootchie.

It is also typical of this ethos of manufactured scandal that a defender of The New may, in time, become an opponent of innovation – such was the career path of John Ruskin.

Ruskin, who championed Turner in the 1840s, attacked Whistler’s Nocturne: Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket (1875) in 1877, much to his discredit – as readers of Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890) will no doubt agree. In an instance of Jungian enantiodroma, a champion of the ‘modern’ was transformed into a reactionary anti-modernist, who, insofar as he was unable to appreciate the new aesthetics of Impressionism or Whistler’s semi-symbolist, proto-impressionist, semi-abstractionist technique, soon appeared ridiculously ‘Victorian’ and ‘out of touch’. On the other hand Whistler’s notion that ‘painting was the poetry of sight’ and that subject matter has ‘nothing to do with harmony of sound or colour’ sounds prophetic, confirming his aesthetic radicalism. In 1859 Whistler moved from Paris to London and began to put into practice the ‘realism of the flaneur’ with a series of images depicting life on the Thames Docklands, including ‘Black Lion Wharf ‘and ‘Rotherhithe’, and a key painting in the genre entitled ‘Wapping’ (1864). Even before the Ruskin affair, these urban modernist subjects (the ‘profound and intricate poetry of a vast capital’ to quote a review in Le Boulevard by Baudelaire himself) attracted much negative reaction from guardians of propriety apparently scandalised by depictions of Social Evil and moral degradation. A similar outcry greeted the painting ‘On The Thames’ (1876) by society painter James Tissot showing a (presumably) promiscuous threesome lounging in a boat depicted with exact realism but which was condemned as a scene of questionable virtue when first exhibited. One more recent critic noted, however, that Tissot had managed to penetrate beyond the fashions of his era and seduce the viewer with the ‘ambivalence of modernity’. The same might also be said of Whistler’s images of Docklands life.

The seeds of this cultural shift in values have always been part of the Modern project. They have been present from the earliest days of the Proto-Modern into the Nineteenth Century. This was period that saw alarming new descriptions of the human condition – derived not only from Darwin, but also from Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and sociologists such as Durkheim and Weber or, even earlier, from Hutton’s Theory of The Earth – exert a drastic influence on the socio-cultural climate. These new doctrines heralded a new culture, a culture ‘with no visible means of support’, no foundations and no centre; a culture that rejects the hegemony of any particular perspective, a culture without a ‘moral compass’. According to Durkheim, in a statement that sounds very similar to principles developed by Freud, ‘social life should be explained not by the conceptions of those who participate in it, but by profound causes which escape consciousness…’

This is the nightmare of the anti-modernists, of all those socio-political elements who, after the seismic shock of the proclamation of the Goddess of Reason (1793), metamorphosed from advocates of the counter-Reformation into counter-revolutionaries. Opponents would stigmatise the counter-revolution as anti-progressive and reactionary, but the anti-modernists – as defenders of the old order and the strong state, as opponents of mob rule and the machine age, as promoters of monarchic restoration, as ‘ultras’ or theocrates – would take up their position on the moral high ground. This wave of anti-modernism was represented in Victorian England by cultural commentators, those revered ‘sages’ or ‘prophets’, such as Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, who expended considerable effort trying to reconcile the horrors of the machine age with traditional moral precepts of the good and the beautiful and with notions of the just society.

In 1829 Pope Leo XII had forbidden vaccination against small pox; by 1864 the Vatican had consolidated its view on Modernism, and, in the Encyclical Quanta Cura (‘The Syllabus of Errors’), denounce all those features of the modern world to which it was implacably opposed. These included Socialism, Pantheism, Rationalism, Natural Ethics, Modern Liberalism and other matters of concern or threat to the hierarchy. The pontiff assured the faithful that he would never ‘reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism and modern civilisation.’ By 1910, two years after Adolf Loos, one of the pioneers of Pure Architecture, had, in a semi-satirical article, condemned all ornamentation as crime, Pope Pius X required all new priests to take an oath against Modernism, the Sacrorum Antistitum. This oath remained in place until 1967 and still defines the Anti-Modernist worldview of the priesthood even today.

Alongside this ‘official’ Anti-Modernism flourished the occult underground. This was a subculture that overlapped both ‘the fantastic’ and artistic bohemia. From Swedenborg (via Blake) to Theosophy (via Mondrian), occultism influenced the course of Modern Art in a subterranean way. The nineteenth century Occult Revival started in the Year of Revolutions (1848) with the Spiritualist ‘rappings’ at Hydesville in the USA. Subsequently this neo-spiritual, occult tendency manifest a number of developmental peaks, from the writings of Eliphas Levi in the late 1850s to the founding of the SPR (Society for Psychical Research) in 1882 and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888). In France the Rose-Croix Kabbalstique (1888) of Guaita and Peledan was founded at the same time. Occult ideas such as universal analogy, the hidden geometry of reality, the meaning of symbols, initiation, the astral plane, the Hermetic androgyny and the mediumistic dictation of spirit writing, permeated the avant-garde on various levels, providing an impetus for the development of Abstract Painting (Hilma af Klint) and, via Strindberg, artistic techniques of ‘automatism’.

If the revival of Hermetic philosophies and magical societies is interpreted as ‘flight from reason’ or a rejection of contemporary life, then the Occult Revival may be viewed as anti-modernist backlash tendency (as in the case of W. B. Yeats). However many occultists (following the example of Levi) sought to reconcile Science and Religion and, by developing heretical strands of unorthodox thought, occupied an intermediate position between establishment anti-modernist reaction and radical, anarchic, pro-modernist trends (as in the case of Rimbaud). In the nineteen twenties the Surrealists sought to detach various aspects of occult thinking from traditional interpretations and quasi-mystical accretions in the pursuit of a revolutionary aesthetic of chance, automatism, mad love and ‘the marvellous’ as predicted by the progenitor of poetic urban modernism: The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvellous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvellous; but we do not notice it… - Baudelaire
 
Select Bibliography

Barthes, Roland, Writing Degree Zero, Hill and Wang, 2012
Barzun, Jacques, Classic, Romantic and Modern, University of Chicago, 1961
Baudelaire, Charles, The Complete Verse, Anvil Press, 1986
Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Phaidon Press, 2006
Benjamin, Walter, The Work Of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), in Blackwell, 1993
Breton, Andre, Manifestos of Surrealism, University of Michigan, 2007
Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent, Oxford University Press, 2004
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Notes from Underground, Penguin Books, 2009
Harrison, Charles/Wood, Paul, Art in Theory 1900-1999, Blackwell, 1993
Koval, Anne, Whistler in His Time, Tate Gallery, 1994
Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, Abacus, 1980
Sassen, Saskia, A Sociology of Globalization, W. W. Norton, 2007
Shattuck, Roger, The Banquet Years The Origins of The Avant Garde in France 1885 to WW1, Random House 1968

Illus: Waveform Fantasy, 2001 

 

A Very Decadent Idea

In The Painter of Modern Life Baudelaire asserted that ‘sublime thought’ is associated with a neural phenomenon – a ‘nervous impulse’. The notion of such an impulse (a reverberation in the cerebral cortex) displaces the basis of aesthetic response from the metaphysical to the biological – a very ‘decadent’ idea. Why?  

Because the specific form of Aestheticism derived from this proposition treated ‘Beauty’ solely as a stimulus of the nerves – thus art need only address the nervous system. It can, in pursuit of psycho-physical stimulation, safely ignore deadly serious didactics, social polemics and the idle chatter of metaphysics.

Illus: Anxiety of Glamour, 2002 (detail)

 

Visionary Or Nothing

I reach the real through the dream. I invent you reality.
- Clarice 'Hurricane Clarice' Lispector

 Writing poetry is not about language any more than taking a bath is about plumbing….So, galvanised, I write, splintering certain words across blank pages of empty space: why?

Academic and other definitions of poetry as ‘literature’ displace the act of poetic creation from the interior psycho-biological universe to an epiphenomenal world of cultural-linguistic constructs where ‘communication’ is all.

Do I write poetry to communicate? No.

Is my poetry a spiritual exercise? No.

Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, in their different ways, consigned metaphysics to oblivion. What has this to do with me? Everything.

Does this mean that only language remains? No.

I will never concede that poetry is literature. The cultural-linguistic paradigm presupposes that everything depends on language to the extent that Being is literally indefinable in extra-linguistic terms: very convenient – if you are a linguist, a post-modernist - or a plumber. Yet, as we all know, 'the map is not the territory' (Korzybski). 

I know my creativity is an innate psycho-active phenomenon. The raison d’etre of my paradigm is transformation, the ‘circumstantial-magical’ convulsion caused by that particular Beauty, ‘the only beauty that should concern us’ (the enigmatic sphinx, the marvelous precipitate of the ancient alchemists) invoked by the transformation of despised prime matter into pure aesthetic gold. Fantastic? Romantic? Symbolist? Surreal? Pop? Subtopian Materialism? But, of course!

The raw material of creation, rather like a chance encounter in the street, is not so much language but me as poet, my ego and all: and the essence of poetic practice is active imagination, even though it is through language that we unleash the vision thing from another world. It is inevitable that poets, in pursuit of inspiration, will engage, in some way or other, with all those innate processes of inner integration, those ‘inner workings’ that surely exist. From this perspective the poem itself may appear a by-product of the procedure; an exercise in therapy, propaganda or, let’s face it, pure entertainment. Take it or leave it.

For me, as I penetrate the archaic heritage, that archetypal forest of symbols; it is the compulsive activity of inspiration arising from the process of self-discovery that is the prime factor: it is this that dissolves those artificial barriers between fact and fiction, between sleep and waking, between dream and reality, between consciousness and the unconscious, between inner and outer space… Thus the poem is quasi-autonomous; it partakes of the de-familiarizing power of symbolic Otherness. Is it too late to get unreal?

Grounding poetic practice in the ontological matrix dissociates ‘pure poetry’ from the cultural-linguistic, epiphenomenal foreground of ‘literary’ discourse, from the dreary, enervating world of career-writers and fake self-referential experimentalists obsessed with brownie-points and prizes.

I know that unilateral engagement on an aesthetic basis with the principium individuationis does not accord with traditional models of perfectibility or divine purpose; perhaps it can be seen as a promethean affront to the established order, or as a way of repossessing everything that has been expropriated (that is to say, stolen from us) by agents of the Mysterium. This is not some kind of spiritual exercise but a way of accessing, as a psychonaut, the mythopoeic domain, the Enchanter’s Domain: a neo-shamanistic anti-quest that is certainly the very antithesis of enlightenment and salvation. Oh, yes, I know I am a spiritual flaneur, a damned poet and (eye roll) a ‘lost’ soul.

To be damned is to be modern, absolutely modern; and to be modern is to be utterly damned once and for all. The human condition evolves too fast or not fast enough, yet the horizon of change is Fear, and the closer we are to the horizon the less we care about rhyme or reason: blank verse for a blank generation. Eye roll and U bend. And that is why.

Revised version of an article from Stride Magazine, 2002

Illus: Visionary Or Nothing II, 2009

Always Bizarre

THE AESTHETIC TRANSFORMATION OF PERCEPTION

The aesthetic transformation of perception is closely linked to the purification and transmutation of language: the alchimie du verbe of which Rimbaud and the Surrealists spoke.

The transformation of perception arises from the disclosure of the Essential, the revelation of the Quintessence, and from the elimination of all inessentials, all deadly serious prosaic elements.

Cautionary tales? Not today, thank you. Weighty Issues? Oh yeah? Huge Challenges? You must be joking. The revolution? Oh, I say! The People? Oh ha ha. Devotional tracts? Give us a break.

It is this ‘alchemical’ or Hermetic theory of poetic language and aesthetic image, to which Mallarme was alluding when he referred to the task of giving ‘a purer meaning to the words of the tribe’ and which lay behind Baju’s desire to re-designate the Decadents as the ‘Quintessents’. In this sense the poet can become a shamanistic custodian of the modern – or the traditions which comprise the modern, for traditions enshrine ways of seeing the world and, contrary to popular belief, are never static, mutating in response to deep-running, impersonal, evolutionary currents. In this sense the ‘visionary’ role of the poet, uniquely attuned to these mutations, is not metaphorical – he, or she, may become the instrument of change – change, through transformation of perception.

In his seminal Lettres du Voyant Rimbaud defined the visionary role of the poet of the future as ‘the supreme savant’, the initiator of universal transmutation, the harbinger of a new era in human evolution, un multiplicateur de progres.

 

The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in the universal soul in his own time. He would produce more than the formulation of his thought or the measurement of his march towards progress.

 

Poetry, like all art, should be founded on a special vision of the world, a different way of seeing, even a new reality principle. To a degree any artist will transgress accepted ideas of normality, if only by presenting familiar objects and situations in an unusual way. Poetry is bound to conflict with consensus opinion because the special vision will incorporate the negative as well as the positive; it will be an indictment as well as an affirmation. As Sartre once said ‘literature is, in essence, heresy’. When an artist – a poet, a novelist, a composer, or an artist in any medium – adopts a different way of seeing the world he or she has taken the first step towards total idiosyncratic vision attained through various stages of initiation. This ‘initiation’ or rite of passage will involve a state known as ‘the dark night of the soul’ in which enhanced awareness of ‘supernal’ perfection, the Ideal, or, to use Mallarme’s phrase, ‘the dream in its ideal nakedness’, leads to a similarly enhanced awareness of human, existential imperfection and a breakdown of the mystified and petrified realities of the everyday social world. For Baudelaire awareness of human or worldly imperfection was called spleen, for the alchemists it was the Nigredo or ‘blackening’. Celine used the term noircissement to identify the same state of mind – a night-world of horror, viciousness, pain and dread. It is this ‘core of horror’ which, since the eighteenth century, has given rise to a current of militant pessimism in modern art and literature, represented by the works of Sade , Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Nietzsche, Jarry, Artaud, Genet, Burroughs and Beckett, among others. Here one may think of that ‘nocturnal language’ of which Anais Nin once spoke regarding the writings of Anna Kavan – that lexicon of dreams and alienation.

It is of some historical significance that this nihilistic vision is closely linked to the emergence of new stylistic trends. Most of the authors and poets in this current of development contributed to a revolution in syntax and to the deconstruction of traditional conventions. Barriers between fact and fiction, between spoken and written language, between poetry and prose, have been dismantled in order to express a vision of transmutation – in order to effect a transmutation. This disruption of syntax, literary form, musical tonality and pictorial representation is symptomatic of the dissociation and psychic dislocation brought about by the first stage of initiation. For many it has become a metaphor of cultural collapse, of the rejection of the telos, of the atomization of the world – a break-down, not a break-through.

In addition to the ultra-nhilist vision there is a second way of seeing which, like the first, was derived mainly from Baudelaire: modernity.

Many of Baudelaire’s followers regarded themselves as more modern than their contemporaries, despite their frequent denunciations of modern beliefs. Although they loathed modern society, they admired modern technol­ogy because they regarded the artificial as superior to the natural. This was reinforced by an adherence to Naturalism, a concentration on the depiction of ‘slices’ of modern (urban) life, a challenge to the taboo of ‘morality’. This Naturalism complemented a need to cultivate intensity despite all social limitations: indulgence in perversity could be masked as Naturalistic research or ‘field work’. For Huysmans, the most powerful of the Naturalist writers, such methods offered some way of coming to terms with the otherwise banal exigencies of everyday life. His transition from Naturalism to Decadence, from Downstream to Against Nature, represented a need to augment dry Naturalistic description with some ‘deeper’ more acute vision, even though his subsequent transition from Decadence to Catholicism, from Against Nature to La Cathedrale, represented a retreat into a comfort zone of ‘faith’. The traumatic identity crisis caused by the arrival of modernity; the erosion of hitherto established cultural norms, the feelings of isolation, of powerlessness and meaningless self-estrangement, can often lead to a resurgence of, or relapse into, religion (the ‘flight into faith’). This is a circumstance which can apply to both the individual (such as Huysmans in this case) and to the collectivity as a whole.

In most of his critical writings from 1845 Baudelaire, inspired by Poe and Gautier, advocated the theory of ‘the heroism of modern life’. He argued that the artist must oppose the false charm of nostalgia by extracting the essence of beauty from the everyday world – to look for the ‘classic’ in the remote was an error. In her discussion of his aesthetics in her biography of Baudelaire Enid Starkie wrote: ‘Thus all forms of modernity were capable and worthy of becoming classic, and if they did not do so the fault lay with the artist and not with his age.’ The implication of this view, its implicit relativism, and the doubt it casts on orthodox definitions of the real, renders ‘the heroism of modern life’ a disruptive, perhaps magical, idea.

From the alchemical perspective, if the essent­ial beauty of the everyday is equated with the philosopher’s stone, Baudelaire’s theory corresponds to the ancient Hermetic doctrine that the ultimate substance must be distilled from a despised and neglected prima materia. Thus, Rimbaud and Verlaine, in London in 1873, sought the marvelous and the fantastic in immediate urban images, in ‘modern-Babylonian’ architecture, in The City, in station hotels, in the docks and great iron railway bridges.

This potent urban psycho-geography prefigures the Surrealist poet Aragon, who in 1924, wrote of those other places, ‘sites... not yet inhabited by a divinity’, but where a ‘profound religion is very gradually taking shape’ as though surreality precipitates ‘like acid-gnawed metal at the bottom of a glass’. For the Surrealists these privileged locations were in Paris: the Pont des Suicides at the Buttes-Chaumont, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Tour Saint-Jacques, or the vanished Passage de l’Opera. For us London may take the aspect of a modern Babylon, of a ‘concrete jungle’, redolent with psychic portents and hermetic symbols. Like St Giles High Street, Hungerford Bridge has always possessed features associated with Gateways to Otherness, where – to use Questing jargon – the ‘veil between this world and the next is particularly thin’.

As the filmmaker Georges Franju once remarked ‘Doesn’t this mean that poetry is in reality… and that it is less a question of expressing it than of not preventing it from showing itself?’ And so the poet becomes a shaman of multiple dimensions, creating the classic from the mundane, distilling the essential from the inessential, revealing ‘heroic’, interpenetrating parallel realities, or, to use Franju’s terminology, to allow the insolite (unusual) to emerge beside or in-between the interstices of the accepted Real.

But, in order to experience, or even portray the ‘heroism’ of modernity the poet must unlearn preconditioned responses and engage in a critical, initiatory process of dissociation. August Weidmann has shown how this process of ‘dissociation of sensibility’ was a key tenet of Romanticism and fundamental to modern conceptions of art. The Romantics however, tried to gain access to a ‘primordial vision’, whereas it can now be understood that deviation from conventional perceptual norms is, in fact, a way of transmuting the world around us.

In his struggle to apprehend Poe’s ‘supernal beauty’ filtering fitfully through profane sensory mechanisms, the poet uses his or her art to deconstruct, or dismantle, a preconditioned worldview.  Under­standing of ecstasy, or The Ideal, generates a blackening, or noircissement, as the horror of existence overwhelms the subject with disgust, inducing a hellish night-world experience. However, this dissociation brings a more fantastic, if not more positive, vision – the everyday world loses its narrow, constricted frame of limitation and becomes, thankfully, bizarre.

The artist-poet, through an aloofness or detachment, fleetingly attained in reaction to the disgust provoked by the Nigredo or unregenerate night-world state, perceives that, divorced from everyday functions or assoc­iations, ordinary situations, objects, even people, may take on a surreal perspective as words and images function as ‘so many springboards for the mind’ (Andre Breton). They acquire an ephemeral, but nevertheless quintessential, glamour, or enchant­ment of absolute Beauty. But, it will be seen that this ‘absolute’ Beauty, this ‘threshold aestheticism’, is a coniunctio oppositorum, a union of opposites in the Hermetic sense. It contains not only the essential ‘gold’ of supernal beauty, but also a fearful purity of supernal horror – it is not only Naturalistic, but anti-Naturalistic – it is not only soothing but a force which consumes with a unique intensity: it is ‘subversive of perception and understanding’. It is not only sublime; it is also of The Abyss. It is not some transcendental enlightenment, but more a much sought-for diversion from the banality of the mundane or even ‘the appearance of the image of liberation’ to cite Marcuse.

It partakes of both elegance and the grotesque. “If I am not grotesque,” said Aubrey Beardsley, that most perfect example of the aesthetic sensibility, “I am nothing”.

Beauty, said Baudelaire, is always bizarre.

A revised version of an article first published in Chaos International No 15 March 1993

Hermetic Art Gnostic Alchemy of The Imagination (1985) on The Alchemy Website

Illustration: Aethyr of Le Voyant, 1979