PART THREE: ESSAYS

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LITERARY DEVELOPMENTS

The more spiritual one is, that's to say, the more biased the constitution of one's psyche towards the superconscious, the less qualified one becomes to either create or enjoy reading fiction. By which I mean most traditional and a great deal of contemporary literature. For the creation and enjoyment of fiction requires a psyche constituted in such a manner as to be more or less balanced between the subconscious and the superconscious in egocentric dualism. Such a psyche will ordinarily be bourgeois and appertain, as a rule, to a suburban rather than an urban lifestyle. Yet the proletariat cannot entirely be exempted from equation with an egocentric integrity, and, even though a majority of them live in urban contexts, there are still those among their ranks who prefer fiction to fact - the most plausible explanation probably being that, despite the artificial influence of the urban environment, such people aren't particularly intelligent.

To say that the production and assimilation of fiction corresponds to bourgeois dualistic and bourgeois/proletarian transitional levels of evolution, as opposed to a proletarian level, would not be far off the mark. For the bourgeoisie are, as a rule, dualists and, consequently, they are sufficiently acquainted with subconscious influence to be capable of either creating or enjoying fiction. Likewise the petty bourgeoisie, although less egocentric and therefore more biased towards the superconscious than their class predecessors, are capable of creating and enjoying fiction; though they will generally prefer novels with less fiction and more fact in them, and will write, if artists, more like Hermann Hesse or Arthur Koestler than, say, John Cowper Powys or Evelyn Waugh.

If, considered from a fictional point-of-view, literature should be limited in time to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois stages of evolution, when the psychic constitution of its practitioners and patrons is such as to preclude a wholly factual approach to it, what, you may wonder, will happen to literature when the proletarian stage of evolution eventually makes an official appearance on the level of post-dualistic civilization? The answer to this question must, I think, be fairly obvious: literature will cease to be written in the context of fiction. For by then the psychic constitution of the prevailing class of the day, namely the proletariat, will be so biased towards the superconscious ... as to preclude either the creation or appreciation of a literature with any concessions to fiction. Thus even the most predominantly factual petty-bourgeois novels or short stories will be found wanting and be consigned, in consequence, to the rubbish tip of cultural history. Nothing pertaining to a subconscious allegiance would be relevant.

Does this therefore mean that the novel and the short story would cease to exist in a transcendental civilization? Yes, I believe it does. The masses would be provided, instead, with fusion literature, or the combination of various genres within the overall context of a single production. Thus no volume reminiscent of a petty-bourgeois novel or a collection of short stories or even a collection of poems would be published, though something approximating to a novel (long and/or medium prose?), collection of short stories, etc., on a higher, more truthful basis within the context of fusion literature might still be read.

A proletarian civilization properly so-considered, with Transcendentalism as the official religion, would, however, be post-atomic - in contrast to the bourgeois and bourgeois/proletarian civilizations of the contemporary West. By 'post-atomic' I mean that the electron equivalents in literature, namely words, would be set free of neutron equivalents, namely meanings, and enabled to exist in complete freedom on the post-atomic level. For meaning is the neutron of a sentence, and when words are bound to meanings, as they tend to be in an atomic civilization, they become constrained by grammatical determinism, which serves to make meaning as clear or intelligible as possible. Grammatical determinism implies that words function as bound electrons in the service of meaning. There can be no bound-electron equivalents in a post-atomic civilization!

Now what applies to literature applies no less to the other arts, which have already made considerable strides towards electron freedom within the context of transitional, or bourgeois/proletarian, civilization in recent decades. In art, representation is the neutron of a subject and paint, the medium of art, functions as a bound electron when constrained by representational priorities. Bourgeois art is, as a rule, entirely representational, whereas petty-bourgeois art reflects a transitional status between naturalistic representation and artificial abstraction in some in-between realm of creative compromise. At its most radical, as in the finest works of Mondrian, Kandinsky, Nicholson, Pollock, et al., it can be entirely abstract, though constrained from true electron freedom by the retention of naturalistic materials, such as oils and canvas, which indirectly pertain to neutron determinism. Likewise in music, melody is the neutron of a phrase or sentence, and notes correspond to bound electrons when constrained by atomic convention to serve melody. Bourgeois music is, as a rule, entirely melodic, and thus atomic, whereas petty-bourgeois music, like most of the music produced by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, signifies a degree of freedom on the part of notes which, at its most radical, is suggestive of a proletarian avant-garde, while yet being constrained to a petty-bourgeois context by dint of the composer's intermittent adherence to melody and/or continuous utilization of acoustic means. For what natural materials are to art, acoustic instruments are to music, and no truly transcendental, because exclusively artificial, music can be produced through such naturalistic means. Even the most atonal Webern or Schoenberg composition remains petty bourgeois on account of its reliance on acoustic instruments. Just so, the reliance of trad. jazz on acoustic instruments precludes it from being wholly or completely proletarian. Rather, it is a form of bourgeois/proletarian music.

Having outlined the direction I believe literature and the other arts will take in the coming post-atomic civilization, a few words should be said concerning other types of writings - as, for instance, those pertaining to science and philosophy. Clearly such writings cannot be subject to exactly the same criteria as apply to the future development of literature, for intelligibility is of their essence in the dissemination of, for the most part, utilitarian, pragmatic and factual knowledge. If literature is destined to become totally abstract on the proletarian level, then those writings which are not literary must retain allegiance to an atomic integrity, and thus to a degree of grammatical determinism, in fidelity to intelligibility for practical or evolutionary ends. A scientist dedicated to the discovery of means whereby, come the millennial stage of evolution, brains may be artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts, is not going to derive much profit from a volume of abstract literature. As a member of that category of human beings whose principal responsibility is to lead humanity at large towards the 'promised land' of the millennial Beyond, it is not for him to enter it himself, nor any interim 'promised land', such as might be signified by the assimilation of abstract literature. On the contrary, it is his duty to stand back from it at a kind of bourgeois remove, in loyalty to his vocational responsibility. For while the masses are perfectly entitled to avail themselves of every crumb of evolutionary progress in loyalty to their essentially passive, self-indulgent mentality, the leader, be he scientist, politician, philosopher or whatever, must refrain from participating in such crumbs to anything like the same extent himself, in order that he may continue to struggle on behalf of mankind and so bring it closer, by degrees, to that ultimate 'promised land' which will only be attained with the culmination of evolution in the heavenly Beyond. Thus the leader, while not being entirely debarred from sampling the fruits of evolutionary progress himself, must remain committed to intelligible writings, in order that he may learn from them - and indeed contribute towards them - ways by means of which the quality of life on earth may be improved.

On the materialist side, one has science and politics; on the spiritual side - art and religion. Philosophy, which functions as a kind of bridge between materialism and spirituality, must also retain allegiance to intelligibility in the interests of its synthesizing vocation. And the same will of course apply to philosophical literature, which is but a more philosophically-biased mode of literature - too literary to be literally philosophy, but, at the same time, too philosophical to be subject to such evolutionary criteria as pertain to literature-proper. The philosopher, that hybrid writer in between the scientist and the artist, may lean towards the spiritual more than the material or, conversely, towards the sciences more than the arts, but, whatever the case, he can never become wholly committed to either discipline, since that would spell his end as a philosopher. His primary task is to attempt a reconciliation of science and art, or politics and religion, on a new, higher level, and thus act as a 'bridge builder', in Aldous Huxley's apt phrase, between the various disciplines, integrating them to an end that will transcend the pitfalls of exclusivity which make, on the materialist side, for scientism, and, on the spiritual side, for aestheticism. Scientism and aestheticism are alike in that they pursue their respective bents without recourse to a wider, more comprehensive perspective which, if comprehended, would preclude the emergence of those dangerously anarchic and nihilistic tendencies accruing to them. The scientist who pursues experimentation for its own sake, without reference to a higher moral purpose, is no less destructive and misguided than the artist who excludes scientific progress from his world-view in fidelity to a narrowly aesthetic bias.

But if scientism and aestheticism are two sides of the one exclusive coin, then what may be called politicism and spiritism are two sides of another, and they must be criticized or countered by the philosopher too, since politics divorced from a moral perspective is no less dangerous than scientism, while religion divorced, through spiritism, from political reality is no less fatuous than aestheticism. The one results in the emergence of a Stalin, the other in the emergence of a Ghandi or, translated into literary terms, a Propter - watching his own navel. The fact, however, that politicism and scientism will prevail in a barbarous post-dualistic state is only to be expected, in light of the materialist lopsidedness of such a state, which conforms to an opposition to existing levels of (decadent) civilization. Naturally, it is impossible for a philosopher to exist in such a society. For his vocation conforms to civilization, in which the various disciplines exist in a kind of symbiosis or equilibrium of warring tensions, and the spiritual side has not capitulated to the materialist side nor, as in the case of religion in Marxist-Leninist states, been officially banned. When art is made to serve politics no such symbiosis exists, and consequently there is no place for the philosopher, since politicism and scientism are taken for granted.

A post-dualistic civilization, however, would once again free art and religion from materialist constraint, only this time they would be even freer from such constraint than had been the case at lower stages of civilization. Yet not so free that there was no place for science or politics in society, and therefore no place for the philosopher! His task would probably be easier than at any previous stage of civilization but, even if the danger of scientism and politicism was not so great, he would still have to warn people against the danger of aestheticism and spiritism, which, in a post-atomic civilization, could only be greater!