D.
“… He was tirelessly alert to all sorts of contemporary developments in the popular media which I have ever since found a world of delight. (p.98)…
E.
“… He was an ecological observer and analyst. He was never caught in the booby trap of the ‘Peter Principle’. He never stopped needling those who had attained the level of their own incompetence in the vast bureaucracies, political and professional, that surrounded him. In THE CALIPH’S DESIGN he revealed the total incompetence of the architects and town planners of his day. In THE APES OF GOD he pilloried the literary mandarins of Bloomsbury. In THE ART OF BEING RULED he revealed the vast new Lumpenproletariat of the affluent who have since become so painfully obvious as the successors to the Marxist proletariat. In THE DOOM OF YOUTH, he explained the idiocy of the child cult long before the Dr. Spocks undertook to sponsor permissiveness. Even in the twenties, as Sheila Watson expresses it, he observed the intrusion of the mechanical foot into the electric desert. Is it any wonder that his analysis of the political, domestic, and social effects of the new technological environments had a great deal to do with directing my attention to these events?” (p.98) – Marshall McLuhan, “Wyndham Lewis”, THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY Magazine, Volume 224, #6, December, 1969, pp.93-98. ]]
6.
TIME and WESTERN MAN, 1927
“Everything in our life today conspires to thrust most people into prescribed tracks, in what can be called a sort of TRANCE OF ACTION. Hurrying, without any significant reason, from spot to spot at the maximum speed obtainable, drugged in that mechanical activity, how is the typical individual of this epoch to do some detached thinking for himself?”, p. XI
“Such an invention as wireless, for example, which, in the first years of its appearance, runs wild, left to its own devices, as it were, will certainly in the end be subjected to critical discipline, for the good of all of us. It is the philosophical intelligence, broadly, that reviews the claims of such a phenomenon of mechanical creation for survival, and fixes the terms.”
“The great technical inventions – wireless, the petrol-engine, the cinema – affect radically the life of everybody, no one can fail to observe; but mere notions, or philosophical theories, not incarnated in any physical discovery, are not so palpably influential. Yet the metaphysics of Relativity, the doctrine of ‘Behavior’, of ‘Gestalt’, of ‘Emergent Evolution’, and so forth, have an even more intimate, and a more insidious, effect. People feel themselves being influenced, but their brain and not their crystal set is the sensitive receptive instrument. As the mechanism of the brain is not visible, the inventions of theoretic thought remain undefined for the Plain Man. Ideas, or systems of ideas, possess no doubt an organism, as much as a motor-car or wireless set: but their TECHNE, or application, and their components, the stuff out of which they are manufactured, are facts that are in a sense too vague to be readily accessible, it is generally felt.”, p.XII
“But unlike social revolution, art is not dependent on fortuitous technical discoveries. It is a constant stronghold, rather, of the purest human consciousness; as such it has nothing to ‘revolt’ against – except conditions where art does not exist, or where spurious and vulgar art triumphs. Modern industrial conditions brought about organized ‘revolutionary’ ferment in the political sphere. They also rapidly reduced the never-very-secure pictorial and plastic standards of the European to a cipher. The present ‘revolution’ in art is not a revolt against tradition at all. It is much more a concerted attempt, on a wider and subtler basis (provided by recent research and technical facilities), to revive a sense that had been almost totally lost, as the Salons and Academies witnessed.
“The only art at the present time about which there is any reason to employ the word ‘revolutionary’, or that sentimentalist cliché, ‘rebel’, is either inferior and stupid, or else consciously political, art. For art is, in reality, one of the things that Revolutions are about, and cannot therefore itself be Revolution. Life as interpreted by the poet or philosopher is the objective of Revolutions, they are the substance of its Promised Land.
“If, on the other hand, you wish to use ‘revolutionary’ in the wider and more intelligent sense which I generally give it here, then there is a form of artistic expression that has attempted something definitely new; something that could not have come into existence in any age but this one. Art of that type is confined to a very small number of workers. And it is one of the tasks I have set myself here, to mark this off distinctly from the much greater mass of work which uses a very little of that newness to flavour something otherwise traditional enough, and which, if properly understood, is in no sense revolutionary; or else which looks novel because it is attempting to get back to standards or forms that are very ancient, and hence strange to the European.”, pp.23-4
“All that is necessary to say is that it is essential, if you wish to understand at all a great deal of contemporary art and thought, even the developments of positive science, not only to gather up all the dispersed manifestations of this strange fashion, but – having done so – to trace this impulse to its source in the terrible and generally hidden disturbances that have broken the back of our will in the Western countries, and have already forced us into the greatest catastrophes. Whether these great disturbances are for the ultimate good of mankind or not, no one can claim that they are pleasant, or that they do not paralyse and weaken the system they attack. Many complaints break out in consequence in the midst of our thinking; and the instinctive recoil of the stricken system makes it assume strange shapes.”, p.51
“The theoretic truth that the time-philosophy affirms is a mechanistic one. It is the conception of an aged intelligence, grown mechanical and living upon routine and memory, essentially; its tendency, in its characteristic working, is infallibly to transform the living into the machine, with a small, unascertained, but uninteresting margin of freedom. It is the fruit, of course, of the puritan mind, born in the nineteenth century upon the desolate principles promoted by the too-rapidly mechanized life of the European.”, pp.91-2
“Can language hold out in any degree against politics, when politics are so extremely fluid, and, inevitably, so indifferent to the arts engendered in words? It would be a pity if we were prevented from communicating lucidly and grammatically with each other. There I must leave that question; its applications to the work I have been discussing will be immediately apparent.
“For any intelligent European or American the point has certainly been reached where he has to summon whatever resolution he may possess and make a fundamental decision. He has to acquaint himself first of all with the theory of, and then decide what is to be his attitude towards, the time-cult, which is the master-concept of our day. This essay may, I hope, provide him with an adequate conspectus of the positions and source of the issues involved; and it has the initial advantage of not being an arbitrary or frivolous statement, nor one that can be represented as put forward just in order to be ‘contrary’, since it embodies the practical reactions of a worker in one of the great intellectual fields, threatened by the ascendancy of such a cult.”, pp.114-15
“What I am trying to show by these remarks is that what we call Revolution, whose form is spectacular change of the technique of life, of ideas, is not the work of the majority of people, indeed is nothing at all to do with them; and further, is even alien to their instincts, which are entirely conservative. From one century to the next they would remain stationary if left to themselves. And, again, all the up-to-date, ‘modernist’ afflatus consists of catchwords, and is a system of parrot-cries, in the case of the crowd. Even so they are vulgarizations, of the coarsest description, of notions inaccessible to the majority in their original force and significance. The cheap, socially available simulacrum bears little resemblance to the original. And all the great inventions reach the crowd in the form of toys (crystal-sets, motorcars), and it is as helpless children that, for the most part, it participates in these stirring events. (That it is as children, as resolute and doctrinaire Peter Pans indeed, that most people WISH to live, is equally true; but that is not here the issue.
“That a very small number of inventive, creative men are responsible for the entire spectacular ferment of the modern world is then the fact. In the course of democratic vulgarization, the energy of these discoveries is watered-down and adapted to herd-consumption. As FASHION – and politically or socially ‘revolution’ is itself a fashion – we get the reflections of energies in their scope and ultimate implications unguessed at by the majority….
“… So the only true ‘revolutionary’ is in the melodramatic or political sense not a revolutionary at all. He is to be sought in those quarters where the shocks originate, with those who make Revolution, in all its phases, possible; stimulating with subversive discoveries the rest of the world, and persuading it to MOVE a little. The man-of-science could certainly exclaim, I am Revolution! If when it moves, it moves violently and clumsily and destroys itself, that is certainly its own doing and not his. But the change effected upon the social plane, with a wealth of cackling and portentous self-congratulation, is neither what interests the mind of Revolution, nor yet the political directorate, naturally. Neither it, nor the current doctrines of social reform or economic class-war, bear much relation, either in magnitude or intensity, to the forces released at the fountainhead.
“The legislation, again, that is stimulated by scientific advance is, like the surface-movements of the social life, by no means always the true reflection of the thing from which it derives….
“… Sir Henry Maine noticed, in short, at the time he wrote his “POPULAR GOVERNMENT”, that revolutionary legislation usually arose on the plane of vulgarization, where common things are coloured with Science; and not where Science is made, that is, where the impulse originates.
“If we turn to art, we find that experiment in the arts, or REVOLUTIONARY experiment, if that word is desired, has almost ceased since the War. By experiment I mean not only technical exercises and novel combinations, but also the essentially new and particular mind that must underlie, and should even precede, the new and particular form, to make it viable.
“Very few people, it is probable, belong other than quite superficially to what is ’new’ in present life. It is very literally the word, ’new’, and the advertisement connected with it, rather than the thing itself, which attracts them. If you take a new popular art-form like jazz, it is doubtful if the majority of English people or Frenchmen, if they had never heard of it before, and were offered it along with a dozen other forms – from the viennese waltz to the horn-pipe, breton gavotte, or sardana – would choose it rather than the others. The same people would take to any of the other forms just as readily, that is what I mean; not that, once it is there, they do not enjoy it. A few musicians and artists are more fundamentally attracted to it, and to similar new forms (or new at all events to the European); but the dancing mass conforms, because jazz is there, being exclusively supplied to it, and because it has had the advertisement to start with of a novel and experimental fashion in music.
“It would be possible, of course, to go much farther than this, and to say that the average European or American is fond of jazz, for instance, because of its strangeness; that it is only as a sort of PERMANENT NOVELTY, as it were, that such a musical form (so out of key, or out of time, with the rest of his beliefs and habits, inherited through many generations) can exist.”, pp.120-3
“The finest creations of art or of science, today as ever, only more so, reach the general public in a very indirect fashion. If that contact could be more direct it would be much more sanely ’stimulating’ – to use the favorite word of the present period, when everything is valued in terms of a drug destined for a debilitated organism. It is upon the essentially political middleman, the imitative self-styled ‘revolutionary’, that I direct my main attack. It is he who pollutes on the way the prime issue of our thinking, and converts it into a ‘cultural’ or ’scientific’ article, which is a masked engine of some form of political fraud, which betrays the thought of its originator. So it is that ‘revolution’, in the true intellectual sense, and the only helpful one, miscarries. It is the man of INTERPRETATIVE intelligence at whose hands we all suffer. For the interpretation is usually political: whereas the original thought – such is my contention – is not political or merely practical at all, when it is of the highest order.” p.129
“These ‘climates of opinion’ of Whitehead are as peculiar and exacting a medium as are the time-atmospheres of Spengler, and presuppose organs and morphological variations to match. Whitehead’s account of Western science is much the same as Spengler’s. ‘The inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles,’ that was for Whitehead the necessary, naïf basis of the Western scientific impulse.”, p.259
7.
THE ENEMY, Vol.3, p.70, 1929
“Now disregarding if you can whatever your political views may be (and mine are partly communist and partly fascist, with a distinct streak of monarchism in my marxism, but at bottom anarchist with a healthy passion for order)… ” – Wyndham Lewis, THE ENEMY, Vol.3, p.70, 1929
a.
“The Waste Land’s polyphonic array of voices, vignettes, and jaggedly layered allusions cut one from the next in the way a television might switch from channel to channel. Banal infomercial, the weather, action flick, ads, soap opera. Unburied corpses, dissolution of national identity, the Rape of Philomel, Tiresias witnessing far too much, and so on. The disciples on the Road to Emmaus, the Agony in the Garden, Coriolanus, Dante, the Chapel Perilous, the Upanishads. Images of coherent belief and traditional sources of meaning are piled up next to each other – The Waste Land’s spiritual channel surfing – in a formless attempt to construct enough meaning to preserve life. The misery is felt intensely.
“In Everything Everywhere All At Once, director Daniel Kwan employs the same technique. Evelyn takes on qualities from alternate Evelyn’s haphazardly: kung fu Evelyn, sausage fingers Evelyn, pinky kung fu Evelyn, blind singer Evelyn, rock Evelyn, and so on. Moreover, the precondition for verse jumping is doing something really strange, and, in certain parts of the film, Evelyn and other characters go from one bizarre action – blowing on someone’s nose, eating chapstick – to more and more hilariously off actions. The film’s characters constantly cycle through different identities, each more absurd than the last. In the end, EEAO’s
spiritual channel surfing all becomes a kind of joke. Nothing matters, but we can be funny.” – Nicholas Hallers, THE APOCRYPHAL TIMES: On A Hundred Year Difference, April 22, 2024
https://apocryphaltimes.substack.com/p/everything-everywhere-all-in-the
