memo to Pegeen

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O, Pegeen, I’m sorrowed to hear that your husband was supposed to save you from suicide, but didn’t show up in time. Maybe, Sylvia Plath had a similar expectation.

Men!

“Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict” is delicious, if you can forget that, by now, the art is cliché. The art was regarded as worthless at the time! Peggy Guggenheim was an idiosyncratic savant, a naïve existentialist before Paris existentialism. She was living outsider art before it keynoted the mid-century.

I believe it’s important to recognize that modernity could have been fine without the War of the last century. The art of the century was its capacity to bridge flourishing eras in spite of war. The art of the century was less a response to war, less about coping with tragedy than about showing capacity to renew, then to renew again.

Happy artistry of the Belle Époque was by no means basically frivolity. The Gilded Age was by no means basically excess. In it all was Our species navigating modernity without precedent, winging it in Our evolving.

Though post-War Paris modernism was directly responding to the Great War’s devastation of all presumptions, modernism was generative. Ironically, the War was a liberation of 19th century modernity into thorough modernism. In a world without God, anything is possible: new gods wholly of Our evolving.

Important gains—insightful estates, secured play of value (what history valuably endows)—that are lost do set back progress, of course; but implicitly loss calls to “us” now for gaining again—
for being gained newly. We are all be-gaining.

Scars of the Great War were appropriated into luscious continuing of Our modernity, which was less a response to the death of theism than an assertion of Our capacity for renewal. (news: God is not theistic.)

The roaring twenties could not want to go back to pre-War naïveté. So, earlier modernism renewed itself grandly, in transformed dimensions—which was continued as best We could after the Crash—continued as best We could after The Bomb.

DaDa was a supremacy of individual selectivity of what is “Art.”
(It is wholly flourishing sensibility.) Surrealism was Mind spread across the landscape. Cubism was all sensible structure skewed into abstract questioning of its medium. Abstract Expressionism was its child in full play. Then, through the mid-‘60s onward, in our own way, we continued that ethos of free play. The CounterCulture was, at best, a fine art.

Though the modernism of your century, Pegeen, was haunted by nihilism, basically it was full of play! That is important to remember. Modernism was a world learning to primordially evolve itself, to be Our ownmost Basis “here,” now.

The Sixties were defined by emancipation and free play, not war. The oddball Seventies and Eighties ended the Cold War. (The happy appeal of Euro-American humanity destroyed sovietism.) We loved the Nineties, such that Our flow could not be undone by the tragic fall of towers.

Our evolving is not fundamentally a response to tragedy; rather tragedy is a horrible feature of Our learning to lead from Earth, being the planetary species that outgrows supernaturalism in order to navigate Its primordially open nature.

There will never again be a World War (that singular war of the 20th century that took a breather of two decades). But there will be tragedy.

Yet, We say what is fundamental to being. We learn important gains that are to be lasting.

The Basis of Our evolving is “us,” Now. Today, “I” begins.

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