The Inconceivable That Resounds


     Men go from experiment to experiment.  They will soon have
examined all states and constellations of nature.  It strikes me
that they are returning once more from the visible world of the
exterior to the interior even though the latter is not always
synonymous with the mind.
     I know of paintings which friends of mine have literally
wept over, which they have branded with their own hands.  These
painters have rigorously obeyed the orders of nature, their own
nature.  They have dropped snow, hail, dust, and lightning on
their paintings.  They have bled themselves white, red, green,
black.  They have whirled on them and wiped themselves out with
a stroke of a rag.  These are sometimes decalcomanias, sometimes
psychic recordings, experiments on the appearances of the micro-
cosmic world.
     This tidal wave seems to be breaking now against dreams.  
The dream is reappearing like a miracle.  It contains what it
has always contained: imagination, faith, reality.
     Which reality is true?  Which reality is real?  Which re-
ality engenders dreams?  Which dream is true?
     The dreamer who organizes the world by a restrained choice
of similar forms, for example a series of squares and ropes, is
a reality, a miracle.  The sculptor has always been limited by
a content, a construction.  He cannot indulge in a mist or a
muddle.  The sculptor is a builder, an architect of dreams.
     Why shouldn't poets, painters, and sculptors try to approach
the inconceivable, the divine?  The inconceivable inside is no
more inconceivable than the inconceivable outside.  The very 
moment that we conceive the conceivable, it begins to resound
in us and become inconceivable.  When Raphael was painting,
the conceivable and the inconceivable were in balance, but
the inconceivable did not resound.  Today it is the incon-
ceivable that resounds!

BACK TO 1958

BACK TO ARP MAIN PAGE