RonPrice
03-10-2008, 12:52 AM
TRAGEDY AND DESPAIR
"I AM NOT FRANCIS BACON"
As with all artists who have created a substantial body of work, it is possible to speak of Francis Bacon(1909-1992) in terms of his themes: his obsession with the physical form; his interest in wrestling, copulation, bodily movement and impairment; or his use of religious iconography such as the Pope and the Crucifixion. But to focus on any of these categories is to miss the violent strength of each painting. For what Bacon portrays, again and again, is human frailty. The shortcomings of the physical form, rendered in smudges and whorls beneath chalky lines, imply the shortcomings of the inner self, whether the subject is the terror of his screaming Popes or the clinging fear and isolation of his "Two Figures in a Window"(1953). Though some critics believe Bacon to be condemning humanity, what comes across in his work is human despair and terror, Everyman’s and, if not Everyman’s, at least that portion of the human community for whom the words despair and terror have a very real meaning. Art at its best makes its audience see the world in a different way; throughout his life Frances Bacon forced those who were open to his work to look at themselves with a directness that frightens even as it mesmerizes.(4)
It is certainly possible to speak of my writing in terms of my themes: my obsession with the infinite forms of autobiography and memoir; my convictions and interests in the Baha’i Faith, its history and teachings; an immense variety of topics and subjects integrated, as far as I have been able, into a unity in diversity, into a great synthesis around three foci: my life, my society and my religion. But to focus on any one of these categories or themes, on any one of these foci, or on any one of the thousands of topics or subjects in my prose-poetic oeuvre is to miss the strength of my writing, if indeed there is any strength at all that is perceived by readers.
The strength of my writing, at least as I experience it, as I see it and feel it, as well as how I revel in its pleasures and on its labyrinthine paths, is in the new life it has given me just at that point in my lifespan when I was beginning to wear-out, to feel old, to want quietness and solitude; when I started to believe that I may have accumulated a deadly poison in my veins as a result of an excess of speech, a poison that insinuated itself insidiously into my veins or perhaps, more accurately, my spirit when I was not overtly conscious of this silent and devouring process but was simply getting very tired of listening and talking. If American critic Gore Vidal was right when he said that listening was one of life’s most painful and difficult arts, then perhaps decades of listening may have had subtle and deleterious affects on my soul, or so I hypothesized. Perhaps it was decades of bipolar disorder, its trials and tribulations, medications and mood swings, that took the edge off my sociability instincts, my once heightened gregariousness and turned me to solitude and the pleasures of writing. It was hard to know for sure; there were so many factors and mysteries associated with my writing, both its strengths and weaknesses and with what Rilke calls its "intensified and deepened aloneness."(2)
As the years of my late middle age(55-59) and those of early late adulthood(60 to 64) crept on their petty and not-so-petty pace from year to year, I craved more and more the isolation that Henry Adams wrote of in one of his letters.(1) It was not a total isolation but a more moderate one. I did not feel the despair or terror that comes across in Francis Bacon’s work, the despair experienced by millions of humanity’s sufferers. Life had certainly possessed, for me, its share of suffering. On reflection, though, and as I looked back over more than sixty years of living, both mine and the collectivity of the billions of lives that made up the global society I had been a part of since, say, the end of WW2, I could not help but feel that there were forces operating on the planet which were leading both myself and humanity out of whatever valleys of shame and suffering we had lived through and which would still be ours in this travailing age--to "the loftiest summits of power and glory."(3)
It is not, therefore, a sense of despair or the world’s terror, not its meaninglessness or absurdity as was the case with Bacon, that underpins my writing but, rather, a sense of life’s tragedy, its romance and a fascination with what one could call intellect and the cultural attainments of the mind. My sense of life’s tragedy was born and found its origins in the tempest and convulsion of this age, the catalogue and the magnitude of horror and ruin over its several epochs at least as far back as the Great War(1914-1918). This tragic sense was born, too, from my association with and work in a religion which claimed to be a model for the planet’s new spiritual centre, its new institutional life form, its emerging chrysalis, the global civilization of this new age, the great process of planetization and unification of the children of men in the last century and a half and in the decades and centuries into the future.
The tragedy was to be found in many places and around many themes, one of which was and is humanity’s failure to appreciate and respond to this new Revelation. There is within my work, too, much of that romanticism of the type envisaged by the 19th century essayist William Hazlitt who saw romantic beauty arising from associated ideas that the imagination was stimulated to conjure up, in my case stimulated by the Baha’i Revelation. I like the idea that "art at its best makes its audience see the world in a different way."(4) I have no idea if I achieve this for others, but I certainly achieve it for myself. There is much else in my writing as well, but the above will suffice for now.
The potency of the written word for me lies in the possibility of its enduring as the potency of the image for Bacon resided in the possibility of its longevity. Sensation and thought both played enormous roles for both Bacon. This is certainly true for me. The words of poet and writer Guy Debord, words which echo Bacon’s views of art, will conclude this short essay: "Art can cease to be a report on sensations and become a direct organisation of higher sensations. It is a matter of producing ourselves, and not things that enslave us."5 –Ron Price with thanks to (1)Henry Adams in The Letters of Henry Adams: 1838-1918, 2 Volumes, Houghton Mifflin, 1930, Vol.1, p.314; (2) Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, WW Norton, NY, 1954(1934), p.54; (3)Shoghi Effendi, The Promised Day Is Come, Baha’i Publishing Trust, New Delhi, India, 1976(1941), p.129; and(4) Art and Culture.com, Internet Site; and 5Guy Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution: Guy Debord and the Situationist International, The MIT Press, 2002
Art can be seen completely
as a game by which man
distracts himself: yes, yes,
Francis.....how true this is,
but I do deepen the game
and it becomes something
worth more than anything.
Ron Price
Updated on:
13/10/'11
"I AM NOT FRANCIS BACON"
As with all artists who have created a substantial body of work, it is possible to speak of Francis Bacon(1909-1992) in terms of his themes: his obsession with the physical form; his interest in wrestling, copulation, bodily movement and impairment; or his use of religious iconography such as the Pope and the Crucifixion. But to focus on any of these categories is to miss the violent strength of each painting. For what Bacon portrays, again and again, is human frailty. The shortcomings of the physical form, rendered in smudges and whorls beneath chalky lines, imply the shortcomings of the inner self, whether the subject is the terror of his screaming Popes or the clinging fear and isolation of his "Two Figures in a Window"(1953). Though some critics believe Bacon to be condemning humanity, what comes across in his work is human despair and terror, Everyman’s and, if not Everyman’s, at least that portion of the human community for whom the words despair and terror have a very real meaning. Art at its best makes its audience see the world in a different way; throughout his life Frances Bacon forced those who were open to his work to look at themselves with a directness that frightens even as it mesmerizes.(4)
It is certainly possible to speak of my writing in terms of my themes: my obsession with the infinite forms of autobiography and memoir; my convictions and interests in the Baha’i Faith, its history and teachings; an immense variety of topics and subjects integrated, as far as I have been able, into a unity in diversity, into a great synthesis around three foci: my life, my society and my religion. But to focus on any one of these categories or themes, on any one of these foci, or on any one of the thousands of topics or subjects in my prose-poetic oeuvre is to miss the strength of my writing, if indeed there is any strength at all that is perceived by readers.
The strength of my writing, at least as I experience it, as I see it and feel it, as well as how I revel in its pleasures and on its labyrinthine paths, is in the new life it has given me just at that point in my lifespan when I was beginning to wear-out, to feel old, to want quietness and solitude; when I started to believe that I may have accumulated a deadly poison in my veins as a result of an excess of speech, a poison that insinuated itself insidiously into my veins or perhaps, more accurately, my spirit when I was not overtly conscious of this silent and devouring process but was simply getting very tired of listening and talking. If American critic Gore Vidal was right when he said that listening was one of life’s most painful and difficult arts, then perhaps decades of listening may have had subtle and deleterious affects on my soul, or so I hypothesized. Perhaps it was decades of bipolar disorder, its trials and tribulations, medications and mood swings, that took the edge off my sociability instincts, my once heightened gregariousness and turned me to solitude and the pleasures of writing. It was hard to know for sure; there were so many factors and mysteries associated with my writing, both its strengths and weaknesses and with what Rilke calls its "intensified and deepened aloneness."(2)
As the years of my late middle age(55-59) and those of early late adulthood(60 to 64) crept on their petty and not-so-petty pace from year to year, I craved more and more the isolation that Henry Adams wrote of in one of his letters.(1) It was not a total isolation but a more moderate one. I did not feel the despair or terror that comes across in Francis Bacon’s work, the despair experienced by millions of humanity’s sufferers. Life had certainly possessed, for me, its share of suffering. On reflection, though, and as I looked back over more than sixty years of living, both mine and the collectivity of the billions of lives that made up the global society I had been a part of since, say, the end of WW2, I could not help but feel that there were forces operating on the planet which were leading both myself and humanity out of whatever valleys of shame and suffering we had lived through and which would still be ours in this travailing age--to "the loftiest summits of power and glory."(3)
It is not, therefore, a sense of despair or the world’s terror, not its meaninglessness or absurdity as was the case with Bacon, that underpins my writing but, rather, a sense of life’s tragedy, its romance and a fascination with what one could call intellect and the cultural attainments of the mind. My sense of life’s tragedy was born and found its origins in the tempest and convulsion of this age, the catalogue and the magnitude of horror and ruin over its several epochs at least as far back as the Great War(1914-1918). This tragic sense was born, too, from my association with and work in a religion which claimed to be a model for the planet’s new spiritual centre, its new institutional life form, its emerging chrysalis, the global civilization of this new age, the great process of planetization and unification of the children of men in the last century and a half and in the decades and centuries into the future.
The tragedy was to be found in many places and around many themes, one of which was and is humanity’s failure to appreciate and respond to this new Revelation. There is within my work, too, much of that romanticism of the type envisaged by the 19th century essayist William Hazlitt who saw romantic beauty arising from associated ideas that the imagination was stimulated to conjure up, in my case stimulated by the Baha’i Revelation. I like the idea that "art at its best makes its audience see the world in a different way."(4) I have no idea if I achieve this for others, but I certainly achieve it for myself. There is much else in my writing as well, but the above will suffice for now.
The potency of the written word for me lies in the possibility of its enduring as the potency of the image for Bacon resided in the possibility of its longevity. Sensation and thought both played enormous roles for both Bacon. This is certainly true for me. The words of poet and writer Guy Debord, words which echo Bacon’s views of art, will conclude this short essay: "Art can cease to be a report on sensations and become a direct organisation of higher sensations. It is a matter of producing ourselves, and not things that enslave us."5 –Ron Price with thanks to (1)Henry Adams in The Letters of Henry Adams: 1838-1918, 2 Volumes, Houghton Mifflin, 1930, Vol.1, p.314; (2) Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, WW Norton, NY, 1954(1934), p.54; (3)Shoghi Effendi, The Promised Day Is Come, Baha’i Publishing Trust, New Delhi, India, 1976(1941), p.129; and(4) Art and Culture.com, Internet Site; and 5Guy Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution: Guy Debord and the Situationist International, The MIT Press, 2002
Art can be seen completely
as a game by which man
distracts himself: yes, yes,
Francis.....how true this is,
but I do deepen the game
and it becomes something
worth more than anything.
Ron Price
Updated on:
13/10/'11