Dreams of Reality
The View, and the Point of View

A Dialogue about Art
Between: Roberto Calvo Macias and Dr. Sam Vaknin

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First Part

Roberto: Here we take another crux of life. Another point, the same as advanced Economics, where agreement is impossible: ART. I had been asking myself about ART for millennia, like in "opium nights".

What's the meaning of it? Its sense? Why did that Altamira Cave man paint those animals, Why? For magical purposes? as a religious act? What was his proposition? To communicate his personal views? Was he mad, as Vincent, did he see something different, that others didn't? Did he see animals in the abstract? was he the first person to think in the abstract, was he the first man? Was it a kind of pastime, a diversion, a game? Moreover, can we measure it? are there good and bad artists? What defines a great work of art? The recognition of the public? In which way, its quantity or its quality?

I have always been a bit of a dreamer, with a facility to imagine in the abstract, but years ago, when I began to read some poets, and other writers like Borges, Jünger, Neil Gaiman, something strange changed my view. What happened to my eyes? Why did my sight get so clear? Was it something mystical, the beginning of madness? What is the dividing line?

I don't know if it is schizophrenia, god's gift or some other fucking matter. Probably I am mad, but what does it matter with ART? Where is the relationship between order, hard work, etc. and the Quality of ART? Was Vincent a calvinist man?

Sam: Absolutely. Read his letters to Theo. Also study the last two years - especially the last two months of his life. The "madder" he got - the more diligent, industrious, hard working and disciplined he became.

Roberto: Which ones of this list, all of them manifestly anarchs, unstable and inconsistent, do you consider not to be great artists? Thomas de Quincey, Baudelaire, Theophile Gautier, Byron, Orson Welles, Ernest Hemingway, Ken Kesey, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Mozart, Isaac Albeniz, Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, John Lenon, Camarin, Michaelangelo, Rimbaud, Gaudi, Dali, Jimi Hendrix, Federico Garcia Lorca, Holderlin, Woody Allen.

Sam: This is quite a list. Still I think that it misses the point. Art, by definition, is the surrender of the anarchical spirit to the dictatorship of the format. A painter is limited to his rectangular piece of cloth or cardboard, to his paints, to the maxims of his language, however private. Art is the sad documentation of the capitulation of form to matter, of the subordination of the ethereal to the material. It is a white flag in the ever raging war between the eye of the spirit and the eye of the flesh. Even the most prodigious and insane of writers must sit down, face the sharply limited piece of paper, write in reasonably straight lines and succumb to the most basic rules of grammar, of syntax, of meaning, of alliterative or other resonance. Even the most deranged and non-calvinistic composer can use, as a maximum, the dodecaphonic scale. This is what I meant by order and discipline. They are imposed, inherently, in the very choice to engage in a work of art. Working habits are a natural extension of these spatial and temporal constraints.

Roberto: What about the work of art? for example, what about Dr. Jekill and Mrs. Hide? Is it a masterpiece, though it was written in just one weekend under the influence of great amounts of cocaine? Are the images of E. A. Poe, mercurial, abysmal, mathematical as they are, unfit to describe the century? Doesn't his Maelström mean anything to you, apart from a horrific picture?

Is it that my satanic images are just that? Were Michelangelo's later sculptures worse than his first ones, unfinished as they are? Mention to me, if you please, great works of art from the Calvinistic land: Le Confederation Helvetique. I love this country, my aunt is Swiss, but what great art works have come from Switzerland?

Sam: Art is the picture of the spirit shackled, furiously battling, striving to unchain itself, rebelling against the form imposed on it, mutinously attempting to reflect the world - no, to BE the world - with all its chaotic pain, convulsive features, horrific beauty. It is the spirit of God floating above the abyss, an act of creation, as detailed in Genesis. It is precisely this unnerving, unsettling, terrifying, melancholy, raging contrast that a great work of art makes. Order and discipline applied to order and discipline yield government regulations and other gobbledegook. Order and discipline applied to tumult, chaos, havoc, disorder, anarchy, decadence (ultimately to death) - yield art. You must not confuse the method with the content, the reagent with the substrate. For where do we find greater order and discipline than in the martial arts (they earned their title - "arts" - not in vain)? And where do we find more devastation, maelstrom, turbulence and disintegration of form than in war, their subject matter?

Roberto: If Art came from childhood, why must it require order, discipline... Is it not that every child is a little anarchist? Is that not true, that a child is like a terra incognita, plenty of anarchy, great views of the upper lands? Why should wild horses be less beautiful than domestic ones? Are we not talking about Beauty?

Sam: I am evidently less a romantic than you, Roberto, for I see no art in children as I see no art in primitive people (in the psychological sense, not in the historical or anthropological meanings of the word "primitive"). I see none in childhood but fear and anxiety, egotism and the curiosity to serve it, cruelty and malignancy. Indeed, we grow out of it the same as we pull ourselves out of quick sands. Children are incapable of being artists. They are manipulative Narcissists. Forever in the throes of the Big Bang of their personalities, embroiled in searing heat, unable to see a thing for the brightness of their own formation. To be an artist, one needs to die a little, to experience entropy, to be as barren as those rocks of our moon. One needs to combine that primordial fire with the cold formalisms of death. After all, our works of art are dead: letters are dead on dead, acidifying paper, paints decay, cloth frays and the greatest sculptures turn back to stone. The mystical tradition of the Jews (the Cabbala) says that the first, most comprehensive and hitherto best, act of creation involved divine light which was poured into vessels (again, the incoherent into the orderly). These vessels - owing to a cosmic accident - broke. The light dispersed, attached to the splinters of the shattered vessels. These are our souls: a measure light, a measure the mundane, a piece of broken vessel. No, beauty has nothing to do with it. Anyhow it is in the eye of the beholder, a matter of judgement, of epoch, of cultural context, of tastes, too relative for art. We are not talking about beauty - but about the law. Creation is the law - art one of its manifestations. In its cold indifference lies the beauty that you are seeking. This is the maddening thing, this apathy towards our individual fates, as though we were its slaves, not its creators. This is what makes us children once more, awed by omnipotence and omniscience. This awe lasts until we overcome this sensation, dare to be Gods again and to create, dare to engage in art. Read Kafka, the most sublime and perfect of all writers.

Roberto: Admittedly, if we mix that powerful imagination, anarchy, with a superior order, then we surely will encounter the superior works of art: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Velazquez, Goya, Beethoven, Ernst Junger, Borges, Goethe, Leonardo, Brunelleschi. But it is not a necessary condition.

Art does not depend on anything. It has nothing to do with order or anarchy, with politics, with technical conditions, with perfection... with nothing. None of all this affects Art. It deals with the deepest reality. With the sense that is hidden beyond the Wall of Time. With the secret of human beings, their inextricable condition of being in the middle between matter and energy. That is what touches our heart like a knife when we see a superior work of Art: it's a promise, a shared secret. It is the View of Something, that artist, going up the Wall of Time , sharing this with us. It doesn't have to do with the "mundane", it's just its opposite, the other side of the coin. It's the view which transcends "materia".

You said that feeling is incommunicable, but there is a kind of collective memory- aka Jungian archetypes. This seems quite correct. And , of course, it's a plastic land, with degrees. But there are leaps - for instance, the genius. There exist some basic points: the mystical, the religious, the feeling of art. This is the reason for all the persecutions: Christians, Albigenese, Eleusians, Jews, Buddhists, Palestinians, Macedonians, etc... Here, sadly, cold alienated facts contravene you. Mystic questions are very near the line that separates human beings and causes massacres.

When you talk about drugs, you talk from the mundane side of things. You can talk about drug-addicts, their problems, you can talk about the effects of drugs on humans but you should never talk about drugs. The Shu'ar men, commonly known as Jibaros, or the head-shrinkers, experience time completely differently from Western people. It is impossible to explain it in brief, it has to do with a change in the direction of the flow of time, with dreams and future-past. But, one of the consequences is that they don't know the meaning of luck. And, if we believe anthropologists, it seems to be impossible for them to understand its meaning. Same goes for drugs, or the mystical experience.

Art can make possible this miracle, to search deeper inside us to meet these unknown feelings provoked by the artist. To look below our surface, to take stock of childhood and its innocent anarchy, to access collective memories and dreams, where the material is already indivisible.

This, and no other thing is, if we may say so, what defines Art. The capability of getting trough matter to show us what is behind it. Here, there is no possible agreement. Not to see Art that way is not to see Art, period. It's like music, if you don't dig what it is about, that inextricable thing: "the real thing", then, it's like eating only the skin of a banana, letting go of its flesh. Here lies my fanaticism, inasmuch as we all are fanatics: I do believe in Art.

Sam: This was a long dissertation in favour of the possibility to communicate from the vantage points of private languages. On the one hand, you admit that we are all trapped in our private hells, unable to communicate with each other except through massacres motivated by atavistic collective archetypes. You say that some experiences (drugs, for one) can not be communicated to the uninitiated. Than, in a magnificent reversal, you say that Art is the communicative bridge. It is through it that we, poor, isolated, humans can march to meeting points where a deeper sort of information is provoked by the artist in the art consumer. Moreover, you seem to claim that Art contains both a functional sample of the world and the rules of language (of connecting objects to its idiom). In other words, you seem to be saying that art is monovalent, it will provoke the same emotional reactions in its consumers regardless of their identity. This is to say that Art is a universal language. Wittgenstein said as much about natural languages. He denied the possibility that private languages with privileged access exist. He wrote that even the speaker of a private language will not be able to understand it. Your version is softer: we all do have semi-private languages and a modicum of privileged access. But Art is the great dictionary which contains the vocabulary of the human condition. Trapped as we are between the spirit and the flesh, between energy and matter, angels and demons, heaven and the hell which is our lives - Art comes to our help. It bandages our wounds, it talks to us in the ancient, unintelligible sounds of our collective archetypes, it soothes us as our mothers did. It then continues to offer to us the possibility to communicate with each other through its objects, really through the person (or shall I say, persona?) of the artist. Art, therefore, to you, is a liberating act. It breaks through the glass containers of our very private existence which otherwise cannot be communicated benignly. I must say that I share your views with one modification, introduced by the "scientist" in me: there is no way of ascertaining that Art works.

That Art provokes emotions is undeniable. That it, therefore, must be connected to our private languages (=largely, our emotions) follows. To interact with our private languages it must gain access to what hitherto has been a shrine accessed by a priesthood order of one, ourselves. Art demolishes the privileged access maxim. Still, can we be sure that it MEANS the same to all its worshippers? Of course not. Rather it would be safer to assume that an object of art would mean different things to different people. Art resonates with our private languages precisely because it is a private language (of the artist). The affinity provokes empathy and the latter is misinterpreted as understanding. Art is as unintelligible as any other private language. Its relationship to the emotions that it evokes in its beholder - is equal to the relationship between a trigger pulled and a wounded, aching soldier. It resounds, it reverberates through us, in the process wounding us because it reminds us how IMPOSSIBLE it is to communicate, how absurd our existence is, how LONELY we are, how privileged our access is to a language which even we do not fully grasp or understand. Yes, we are sealed off from ourselves as well. This is what we discover through Art. The echoes of our very own languages perishing in the caverns of our minds.

Second Part

"The word Art can be combined with many adjectives, as it pleases, without guessing its defined task, its objective. Even assuming that a proper task or even an activity exist 'in absolutum' - still a painter has views about things, he doesn't act with an intention. The fact that Art cannot be grasped specifically provides proof of its self-sufficiency, even of its sovereignty - not to say more. Gods, titans, heroes, caesars, paupers, fiends, philistines are motives paraded by Art, to great effect, without it changing itself. It is like a wave which rises and destroys sailboats, no matter whether they serve the purposes of commerce, war, piracy or pleasure cruises."

Ernst Junger, "Die Schere" (freely translated)

Roberto: Discipline, order, Calvinistic ethos, etc., those are things that link with our eternal theme, the infinite melody which moves humanity. Free Will and fate. East meets West. Order and anarchy. Destiny against liberty. Which is first? we don´t know, but remember at "the beginning there was Chaos". Those things are represented, in day to day life, by the Law, (the Jews must know it better than anyone else, you are masters in it). The Law, how different from our current historians does it sound in Jenofonte, Herodotos, Plinio, Josephus Flavius. What law, a state of the thing itself, can survive in a dynamic world? That rupture, seen beautifully in Niezstche, is a primordial feature of history. When it happens, it already doesn't matter. Before the "avalanche", some people, with fine ears, can hear the first small stones falling. Why is Don Quixote a superior masterpiece? What did he see? What lies under the funny, melancholic history of the Knight Errant, of the Sad Figure? The progressive disappearance of Law, of Honour, of the respect that must be offered to every law? Is it the withdrawal of the Gods that disenchanted the Mad Knight? Nothing to fight for, no glory, no respect, nobody weak to protect? What is romanticism?

Is it the lack, the nostalgia of bygone epochs?

You talk about Calvinistic ethics, sobriety and other things. They are not alive anymore. Its a simulacrum, one can see it, the lack of substance, within time, in Art. Impressionism, expressionism, surrealism… the arrow of time brightens in Art. Precisely because of this I accept the law better than others. I do not believe in actual society, but this does not mean that I do not study its mechanisms and laws. In fact, due to this separation, I do better than others. E. Júnger describes in a masterly way this process in Eümeswill. This does not mean that I don't believe in "Autoritas", I believe in it more than those hypocritical actors that act in this comedy. All the time I am searching for an authority, but there is none to be found.

This is the problem. We live in a society without history. I do accept it, but I do not accept when someone is trying to convince me of these values, when they have been dead a long time ago. The dynamics are so fast, that nothing can stand up to it. Only when things quiet down, should we talk about the law. I am a football player. I always love competition, but with rules. "First the chessboard, then the game."

Sam: The death of God, I do not need to tell you, has been proclaimed a long time ago. The search for laws led first to the creation of traditional religions and than to more modern versions: to Fascism, Nazism, environmental destruction, Communism and now, Capitalism. The search for values and laws has too often led to the ideological answer. There has been no bigger curse in human history than the various stations in this quest. But the alternative is a quite, satisfied, materialistic death, replete with the American dream: a house, two cars, 1.3 children on the cultivated lawns in front. The thinnest line separates dreams from nightmares, a thread of personal predilection, natural proclivity and cultural preferences. And what is the interpretation of this dream? - it is the psychopathology of everyday life. Devoid of a search, however bloody, however futile, however sad - we are mummified, fossilized, entombed in our apartments, stuffed with our own excretions, doomed to the failure of our hearts. We are accursed, sentenced by the gods that made us to search for them forever, like those robots in science fiction movies. Our verdict is to slaughter and get slain, rape and get raped, drown in the rivers of our own blood. This is the definition of life. The alternative is plastic. We lead a life of plastic in a plastic era. The dynamism is circular and delusional. We are led assuredly down the path to nowhere. We are progressing because we remember only how to move forward, a dim, clouded memory of an ancient drive. This is the shadow of our quest for values, for laws. We were not searching for certainty. H.G. Wells described utopia in its horrifying "The Time Machine". We were searching for struggle. We were attempting to defy death. We were trying to transform our very lives into works of Art. The separation between the two in the last few centuries is not accidental. As art was externalized, projected and objectified - it lost its place in our lives and they were dulled, then numbed, then silenced. Welcome to the American world : where everything is legal but nothing is lawful, where the only values are monetary, where only fools and criminals keep searching and where dreams have the face of Mr. Gates - watery, insignificant, eyes, fixed behind glasses. Compare him to Don Quixote and you will know the long way that we came.

Roberto: Respecting the risks. Here lies another fanaticism of mine, I am Western. So I can understand why Ulysses sealed with wax the ears of his sailors, but left his own opened, telling them to chain him with big chains, to hear the dangerous Sirens. I understand why Christopher Columbus went through the sea although there was a never-ending abyss where the seas ended up. I understand why Alexander the Great cut the Gordic knot with his sword. I understand why people died trying to get to the poles. So when I ride wild Horses, I, like Ulysses, put some chains over me. But I will ride it, because it's inside me, it's Western. This human spirit is Western, and there is nothing to do about it.

There are no gods, there is no law. Without the law, there is no order, no discipline, no ethics, no ethos. Deeply, nobody respects anything, its only a masquerade, a remembrance. A comic parody of the past. We live in a titanic world, till this does not stop, until superior order, laws, are introduced, there is nothing to do. Only to wait for the gods to came. You, as with Art, can believe in this, or not, and the same as with Art, you shouldn't understand history without the myth, its a sine qua non. This is my personal opinion. You can believe in myth, titans, etc., or not. But nobody has produced a neutron and still we believe in it.

Both: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

William Blake, "Proverbs of Hell"
 

Third Part

Dreams of Reality

Roberto: The Sun is shining over the garden. Birds flare up with music. Bees and flowers kiss themselves like exalted lovers. Spring exhales its "beautiful" aroma. All is growing with merry anarchy, filled outrageously with life. There is nothing but beauty, an illuminated plenitude. Then, the boy, due to a death in the family, or to seeing a dying bird, forms the question: Daddy, what is Death? A question never asked again, but which pursues him forever.

Suddenly, a lot of clouds cover up the sky, the Sun retires and a freezing wind goes through the woods. Night enshrouds the valley. We feel its cold hand on our shoulder. And here, curiously and marvellously, starts real life. This precise moment when we say: I am I. Same as we only become men when a woman touches us.

Here starts deepest reality: our soul. Here begins the never-ending struggle: cosmic terror on one side, beauty on the other. Fear - more precisely, fear of death, other fears are its results, its "forms", its vessels - 'tis the ultimate fight, the last warrior to beat.

Like all battles, this is, of course, a love story. Some never turn back when she puts her hand on their shoulders. Some get horrified by her face. Others get fascinated, or fall in love, or strike a Faustic contract with her. Or whatever...

Sooner or later we must face her. Artists, more sensitive, sense her sooner and nearer. We can enjoy, cry, laugh, scream with them. Delight in the Beauty that they share with us. There is another lesson, more important than anything: that something is lacking. This sense, that it's inside us, is also a confirmation. Perfection, Idea... This is the only yardstick - though sometimes we measure ourselves "against" perfection - that survives in all cultures, in all arts, epochs, contexts. Art works are born, live and die: YES, but Art continues! "The show must go on!" sang F. Mercury. The Queen is dead, God save the Queen!- in an FM obituary. This promise, this shared secret is what is incomprehensible. Nobody- sometimes not even us- knows how we love- or hate- that strange woman in black.

Here lies the sense of life, the contribution of humanity. It is not that art can provide us with the answer, that is a puerile wish. It is that Art is the answer itself. It has to come with history, with pedagogical material, with Masters- "patres". All of them died searching, so there is something to search for.

But this vibe, this sense , is only a belief. And there is nothing bad in it. An artist has to trust it, otherwise he would not paint, or write, or whatever. It does not have to do with life-after-death but with some sense in the search itself. To those artists it is clear what is in the middle of the Yin-Yang.

Many people live without knowing her, supporting that cold sensation. Others burn with her love. I love both. All of them, without knowing, are talking about her. Merely this, is a signal, a symbol.

NO! Children are not egocentric narcissists! Children are children. A scorpion is not an unmerciful animal, it is a scorpion. A serpent is not a malicious animal, it is a snake. You are considering children through a mature "private language" and that's not very fair- not to say "scientific". After all, we could say that older people are narcissistic, a kind of children. But, there we go, after all this law and order, we become children again.

You vote for order, I do for anarchy. We have a dichotomy. You prefer more material vessels. I prefer divine light. We both conform to the third element: equilibrium. That's the lesson of art, that we can search inside. There is an ideal vessel filled with divine light, that we measure against. This secret is Hope.

Also, as an example of what is behind art, we could regard your writings as art works. Is there any poetry in them? I found some in these very same writings. You write: " to be an artist, one needs to die a little". Beautiful words. If art provokes emotions, it is because we discover in Art what is immortal in us- you could call it desolation, pain, or hope, happiness, light, it doesn't matter. That thing, whatever it is, is immortal. With this "petite mort", the artist becomes a man- but childhood echoes reverberate for ever through his inner soul. From this never-ending fountain, the artist draws out his creations. He puts, as you well said, this water in art vessels. "The cistern contains: the fountain overflows- W. Blake".

All this time, you, with your essays, have shown us how you feel that real life is: harshness and cold facts. Yes, it's true, life is hard. You have told us which are the laws that rule this cradle. Despite utopias, ideals, ideologies, and all those death things... You have painted how life is: horrifying, unmerciful, sad perhaps? Yes, it is.

If we were talking about chess- is it an Art of a game, or a Game of art? - we could say that you are the board- a hard board, I would add. Ok, I am a player. But you are, unconsciously, playing also. Who is black, who is white? It doesn't matter. There are a lot of comparisons in Art. The divine light had been always associated with whiteness, while the end, the law, always with black. They both are beautiful, but not transcendental here- "we are not talking about beauty". Finally, colours don't matter. Black and white are the same at the end, "lux indivisa".

In fact, we all are playing this game. Some are bishops, others knights. Some are castles, and there is also, thanks god, a beautiful woman in black - a black queen, or a white queen placed in the black square: the Queen. There is, of course, a king. Its movements are just the same as the pawn's. Its value is purely symbolic: it sums the whole game; in short, the last man. All of them have their talents, they rise from their "form", their vessels; in fact, all the pieces are made of the same wood. Some have a long view, others make unexpected jumps. Others are solid as marble. And, of course, there is the Queen. A superior piece, it accomplishes nearly all the movements - it should be noticed here, that it is incapable of the knight's moves: irrationality. An ethereal piece that can go across the whole board. And we, the rest of us, are the poor, weak, isolated pawns.

Certainly, we can sacrifice the queen in order not to lose the game. It's a sacrifice in defence of the king, more precisely, of its symbolic value.

Even the board can break with time, but surely the game will continue - we can play mentally, or invent another game. We all have the board in US. Its doesn't matter which are the rules, or the boards, all depend, as you well said, on cultures, epochs, in short, on Time. What survives is the game's passion.

Now, forget all these stupidities about Art that I have written. The World (life) is the hardest game of all. Deeply, all of us are artists, at least, of our own lives. We have the framework: heredity and the laws of nature, and we have the pencil, our liberty; the colours are also of our free choice - religions are works of art in this respect, too. Mother Earth! Its laws are unmerciful and unfeeling. Here we are. But Remember the most important Law: every pawn can become a Queen, by getting to the edge of the chessboard - aka Metamorphosis, a Kafkaesque wor(l)d.

Ok, lets play. I move: P4K

Roberto

Regarding life and death:

The reference about life comes straight from Death herself, the beautiful girl discovered by Neil Gaiman.

"Death: You know? In all parts there are contrasts. Light and shadow. If you had never felt bad; how would you know that you are feeling well? If you are a human being, then, there are a lot of things in the game: eyes, heart, days and a life. But what illuminate all are the Moments. Those moments that you live without realizing them... They are 'the time of your life'."

Neil Gaiman, "Death: The Time of Your Life" (limited edition)

Regarding Death, the reference comes from the oldest writer of our century: Ernst Jünger. A man that walked in those lands of reality and efficiency, without gods; and fortunately came back to narrate them. This book was written at the age of 95:

"We met at the crossroads. We already met ourselves over there often. Then, every point becomes important, whether noticed or not. Common remembrances reach back to the world before-life, and even further. Pain is their threshold, the instant of bliss their prelude. If a text should exist over there, we have so far only seen the blotting-paper.

'Clinical death' marks a finality, the one medical doctors imagine. These seem to not fully agree on this matter. To use an organ, it is required that this organ be 'sufficiently functional', that is to say, that it isn't already totally dead - put differently: the donor shouldn't be alive. Congealed, an organ could be alive during a long time - certain expectatives that bring back to memory Egyptian mummified cults are already emitting signals.

Hipocrates defined death as 'the moment when the soul leaves its embodiment'. That is another thing. Immediately before and immediately after this instant, a lot of disquieting events will happen."

Ernst Jünger, "Die Schere"

APPENDIX: Technical Questions

To play this chess game according to the Law, we should delineate some concepts so as to clarify them.

First, I would like to define precisely some words that can get confused during the game. The chess game started by referring to the relation between order, discipline, calvinistic ethos (i.e. "10% inspiration 90% perspiration", "succumb the mundane"). I took these words to mean, as it seemed to do in the text, a sense of constancy, of perseverance. What I meant with my list was that those free spirits, which have nothing in common with the former, like Walt Whitman, Baudelaire, etc. could be great artists. Following that, the term was connected - in my opponent's response- to a meaning of an enclosing frame, the rules of nature, or of the mind, etc. - which had nothing to do with the question. It's clear that order, in the sense of natural and mental rules, the fundamentals, is implicit in the act of creation. So I will rephrase the question. Is it that my writings are not embossed in the frame of language, captured on blank paper?

About the wild horses. Here is a list of your own words and phrases: furiously battling, convulsive features, horrific beauty, floating above the abyss, turbulence and disintegration, to be barren as those rocks of our moon, awed by omnipotence and omniscience, dare to be gods again, etc...Quite wild, mercurial, Horses! Aren't they?!

Chaos and Anarchy:

Chaos. According to the most ancient Greek Creation Myths, Chaos is the basis of all, it's in the beginning: fecundity, yet not ordained. Modern meaning refers to complex systems, whose solutions are too many or too uncertain to calculate in advance. From a certain point of view, this is one and the same meaning.

Disorder is the opposite of order. A virus which destroys an order system by devouring it.

Anarchy: Lack of order. Movement or ideology that does not recognize power, or control but from within oneself.

Here I would like to make something clear. Order, structure, have nothing to do with questions of "good or bad". In the middle of the century, even in the big places of annihilation, sobriety, hygiene and rigorous order dominated till the end - remember the Auschwitz instruction signs.

About the death of God: It is interesting to remark here that this sentence implies that God must have lived before he died. About this, it's quite clear that we are living in a titanic world. I refer to Leon Bloy's sentence: "Dieu se retire".

Idea or Chaos as divine lights: In my writing, I combined two words that seem, at first, incompatible. I am using a very narrow path - the same as between fate and liberty, so the profiles are delicate and fragile. At the end, though, they are the same. From the "maremagnum" we extract ideas, forms.

Does Art work? Is it just a resonance? That is, as mine, a matter of personal opinion. Did you demonstrate that we feel in Art only a resonance? Based on what, do you say that communication is impossible? Your own experience? Those are articles of faith. As you said well, there is no way of ascertaining that works of art work but neither is there a way of proving the opposite: that they do not. This is the reason I remarked constantly upon the "fanaticism" of my belief.

Moments: the time of your life. Regarding ecstatic, mystical, religious, drugs, dance, artistic, etc. experiences. When I talked about the impossibility of writing about drugs without trying them, I was referring to the impossibility to communicate properly such an intimate act, when substance translates to gratitude, when beauty is nothing but an intimate agreement between object and subject- like a sexual act (try to explain to a little boy what do you feel in an orgasm, a quite difficult task, isn't it? Uninitiated, he will, probably, be unable to understand you). That kind of literature is, to me, a second hand one, talk about others' feelings. "I write about what I know"- Woody Allen.

I would like to remark about your perfect descriptions of "the sign of the times", as acute as ever. That's our society. But "joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth".

On psychophysics:

Finally, this is a chess game, so I would like to try, with all due respect, for a check. Could this solicitude of sobriety be a primordial fear of oneself - aware of what is inside? Fear of that "petite mort"? The game continues...

Roberto

"Exuberance is Beauty"

William Blake, "Proverbs of Hell"

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