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Modernism: An Oriental Interpretation
In the past we used to see the world, experience and express life, mainly if not exclusively, in terms of the mind and the heart. These were the two fundamental categories or basic forms in and through which we built up our universe. It was our ideas and ideals, our notions and conceptions, our imagination and sentiment that viewed and interpreted, guided and shaped our earthly existence and creativity. Whether morally or esthetically, the domination of the mind and the heart over life was the characteristic stamp of the movement of the human spirit in the past. Modernism means the release of life from this subjugation; it means the expression of life's own truths in its own way, life's self-determination: that is the great endeavour and achievement of today. It was a rationalised, emotionalised, idealised life that man sought to live and create yesterday; his art too consisted in showing life through that mask and veil, because it considered that that was the way to bring out the beautiful in life. The history of the emancipation of the different psychological domains in man is an interesting and instructive study. For the heart and the mind too were not always free and autonomous. An old-world consciousness was ruled or inspired by another faculty – the religious sense. It is a sense, a faculty that has its seat neither in the mind nor even in the heart proper. Some would say it is in an inmost or topmost region, the Self, while others would relegate it to something quite the opposite, the lowest and most external strand in the human consciousness, viz., that of unconsciousness or infra-consciousness, ignorance, fear, superstition.
The domination of the religious sense reached its apogee Page – 144 in the Middle Ages when it almost swallowed up and annihilated all other faculties and movements in man. The end of that epoch and the first beginnings of the Modern Age were signalised by the Mind, i.e., the Reason, declaring its independence. This was the Renaissance; and it was then that the seed was sown of modern science and scientism. Mind – mind in its rational mode – thus emancipated, exercised in its turn a domineering control over man's entire nature. All other members were made a subservient tributary to that which was considered the members par excellence in the rational animal. The seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries form the period of its rule – the former its bright period when it expressed itself in its truth and power, as embodied in what is called classicism in literature; the latter its darker phase, its decline, the manifestation of its weakness. Its death-knell was first sounded by Voltaire who symbolised the mind's destructive criticism of itself, the same which Anatole France in France and Shaw in England have continued in our days almost to a successful issue. Rousseau brought in the positive element that determined the new poise of humanity. It was the advent of the heart, the coming in of the Romantic-the man of sentiment and sensibility. * But life had not yet had its chance. Life, pure life – the biological domain – first declared its autonomy in art, for example, through the Realists and Naturalists. These pioneers, however, could bring forward mainly the facts, the constituents, the materials that compose life. The stuff was found, but the movement, life's own rhythm, was not there. It was new wine, but more or less in the old bottle. Zola or Maupassant or the Goncourts sought to express a life intrinsic and independent, but the instrument, the mould was still the old one; the manner and the movement, germane to mind and heart, continued to persist. That mould was broken, and something of the mystery of Life's own rhythm first revealed by the Impressionists. But the Impressionists were too vague and had too much of a generalised sense to enter into the core of the matter. They touched
*Another similar cycle can be traced farther back in the
past. The classicism of Græco-Latin culture dominated by mind
and reason – although it was a kind of higher mind and intuitive
reason – was supplanted by the heart movement that Christ and the
Christian cult initiated. Page – 145
life, caressed its contour and periphery and larger lines, but '1 did not penetrate it, grasp and grip it, bring out the kernel, as it were, break it and express if in its atomic structure and: movement. This is what is being done today. Life undefiled, without any admixture or influence whatsoever from other elements and domains-that is the one thing that we envisage and create. Life as it 'is in its own substance and truth, as it lives and moves in its own rhythm, life in its stark naturalness, albeit raw and crude, the living ore found in the earth's vein, unpolished but utterly authentic: this is the supreme secret of which we of the modern age are worshippers. Thus life has come to mean today the life exclusively of the senses, the life that is instinctive, reflexive, automatical in its elan, which is beyond the control of the conscious will and intelligence, the life that is interwoven and unified with body and matter. For it was this life which could never come to its own – not even in man's primitive stage which was more or less a rigid system of taboos, religious and social, in spite of contrary appearances; it was this life which could not express freely and fully its own truth and reality in its own way, under the domination of what are known as the higher movements of the human consciousness. Life in another sense, as part of this higher and aristocratic movement, had had some autonomy and a field and scope of its own even under the old regime. The life-force that inspires noble ambitions, high enterprises, large' creations, vast enjoyments, and proud renunciations, and violent and sweeping passions, has always been to us a familiar element. Today, however, in pursuit of the mystery of life we have entered into darker and more obscure regions – of cells and genes, of colloid actions and neuron reactions: the elementary instincts, the primary reflexes, the tangle of short and brief vibrations, and half-articulate pulsations of the most physical and material consciousness are the stuff of the life we seek to live and to capture and mirror. The creative and active force in life as well as in art is now invested in the nervous dynamism and sensational perception. The old morals and æsthetics and the sentiments and notions around them are considered today merely conventional and bourgeois; they have given place to
Page – 146 a freer life-movement, the expression and embodiment of an unrestrained and authentic life, life in its natural, original; unspoilt (and crude and coarse) verity. We are probing into the mystery of the crust. It appears then that we have come down perilously near the level of the sheer animal; by a curious loop in the cycle of evolution, the most civilised and enlightened type of mankind seems to be retroverting to the status of his original ancestor.
Not quite so, certainly. The consciousness (rather, the
self-consciousness) that man has gained in place of the
unconsciousness or semi-consciousness, characteristic of the
general mass in the past, and the growing sense of individuality and
personal worth, which is an expression of that consciousness, are his
assets, the hall-mark of his present-day nature and outlook and
activity. The consciousness may not have always been used wisely, but
still it is a light that has illumined him, brought him an awareness
of himself and of things, that is new and in a special way close and
intimate and revealing. The light is perhaps not of the kind that
comes direct from high altitudes – it is, as it were, a transverse
ray cutting aslant; nonetheless, through its grace a self-revelation
and a self-valuation have been possible in spheres hitherto
unsurveyed and lost in darkness, and on a scale equally
unprecedented. Life has found a self-light. It is indeed as yet a
glare, lurid and uncertain, but it has the capacity to develop into,
and call in, the white and tranquil effulgence of the Soul-light and
the Supreme Light of which it is the image and precursor. Page – 147
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