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<b><font size="4">Modernism:
An Oriental Interpretation</font></b></p>
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<FONT SIZE=3>In the past we used to see the world, experience and
express life, mainly if not exclusively, in terms <I>of </I>the mind
and the heart. These were the two fundamental categories or basic
forms in and through which we built up our universe. It was our ideas
and ideals, our notions and conceptions, our imagination and
sentiment that viewed and interpreted, guided and shaped our earthly
existence and creativity. Whether morally or esthetically, the
domination <I>of </I>the mind and the heart over life was the
characteristic stamp <I>of </I>the movement of the human spirit in
the past.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Modernism means the release <I>of </I>life from this
subjugation; it means the expression of life's own truths in its own
way, life's self-determination: that is the great endeavour and
achievement <I>of </I>today. It was a rationalised, emotionalised,
idealised life that man sought to live and create yesterday; his art
too consisted in showing life through that mask and veil, because it
considered that that was the way to bring <I>out </I>the beautiful in
life.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The history <I>of </I>the emancipation <I>of </I>the
different psychological domains in man is an interesting and
instructive study. For the heart and the mind too were not always
free and autonomous. An old-world consciousness was ruled or inspired
by another faculty – the religious sense. It is a sense, a faculty
that has its seat neither in the mind nor even in the heart proper.
Some would say it is in an inmost or topmost region, the Self, while
others would relegate it to something quite the opposite, the lowest
and most external strand in the human consciousness, <I>viz., </I>that
<I>of </I>unconsciousness or infra-consciousness, ignorance, fear,
superstition.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The domination of the religious sense reached its apogee</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 144</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>in
the Middle Ages when it almost swallowed up and annihilated all other
faculties and movements in man. The end of that epoch and the first
beginnings of the Modern Age were signalised by the Mind, <I>i.e.,
</I>the Reason, declaring its independence. This was the Renaissance;
and it was then that the seed was sown of modern science and
scientism.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Mind – mind in its rational mode – thus emancipated,
exercised in its turn a domineering control over man's entire nature.
All other members were made a subservient tributary to that which was
considered the <I>members par excellence </I>in the rational animal.
The seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries form the period of its
rule – the former its bright period when it expressed itself in its
truth and power, as embodied in what is called classicism in
literature; the latter its darker phase, its decline, the
manifestation of its weakness. Its death-knell was first sounded by
Voltaire who symbolised the mind's destructive criticism of itself,
the same which Anatole France in France and Shaw in England have
continued in our days almost to a successful issue.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Rousseau brought in the positive element that determined
the new poise of humanity. It was the advent of the heart, the coming
in of the Romantic-the man of sentiment and sensibility. * But life
had not yet had its chance. Life, pure life – the biological domain
– first declared its autonomy in art, for example, through the
Realists and Naturalists. These pioneers, however, could bring
forward mainly the facts, the constituents, the materials that
compose life. The stuff was found, but the movement, life's own
rhythm, was not there. It was new wine, but more or less in the old
bottle. Zola or Maupassant or the Goncourts sought to express a life
intrinsic and independent, but the instrument, the mould was still
the old one; the manner and the movement, germane to mind and heart,
continued to persist.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>That mould was broken, and something of the mystery of
Life's own rhythm first revealed by the Impressionists. But the
Impressionists were too vague and had too much of a genera&shy;lised
sense to enter into the core of the matter. They touched </FONT>
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<FONT SIZE=3>*Another similar cycle can be traced farther back in the
past. The classicism of Gr&aelig;co-Latin culture dominated by mind
and reason – although it was a kind of higher mind and intuitive
reason – was supplanted by the heart movement that Christ and the
Christian cult initiated.</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 145</FONT></P>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>life,
caressed its contour and periphery and larger lines, but '1 did not
penetrate it, grasp and grip it, bring out the kernel, as it were,
break it and express if in its atomic structure and: movement. This
is what is being done today.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Life undefiled, without any admixture or influence
whatsoever from other elements and domains-that is the one thing
that we envisage and create. Life as it 'is in its own substance and
truth, as it lives and moves in its own rhythm, life in its stark
naturalness, albeit raw and crude, the living ore found in the
earth's vein, unpolished but utterly authentic: this is the supreme
secret of which we of the modern age are worshippers.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Thus life has come to mean today the life exclusively of
the senses, the life that is instinctive, reflexive, automatical in
its <I>elan, </I>which is beyond the control of the conscious will
and intelligence, the life that is interwoven and unified with body
and matter. For it was this life which could never come to its own –
not even in man's primitive stage which was more or less a rigid
system of taboos, religious and social, in spite of contrary
appearances; it was this life which could not express freely and
fully its own truth and reality in its own way, under the domination
of what are known as the higher movements of the human consciousness.
Life in another sense, as part of this higher and aristocratic
movement, had had some autonomy and a field and scope of its own even
under the old regime. The life-force that inspires noble ambitions,
high enterprises, large' creations, vast enjoyments, and proud
renunciations, and violent and sweeping passions, has always been to
us a familiar element.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Today, however, in pursuit of the mystery of life we
have entered into darker and more obscure regions – of cells and
genes, of colloid actions and neuron reactions: the elementary
instincts, the primary reflexes, the tangle of short and brief
vibrations, and half-articulate pulsations of the most physical and
material consciousness are the stuff of the life we seek to live and
to capture and mirror. The creative and active force in life as well
as in art is now invested in the nervous dynamism and sensational
perception. The old morals and &aelig;sthetics and the sentiments and
notions around them are considered today merely conventional and
bourgeois; they have given place to</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 146</FONT><BR>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>a
freer life-movement, the expression and embodiment of an unrestrained
and authentic life, life in its natural, original; unspoilt (and
crude and coarse) verity. We are probing into the mystery of the
crust.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>It appears then that we have come down perilously near
the level of the sheer animal; by a curious loop in the cycle of
evolution, the most civilised and enlightened type of mankind seems
to be retroverting to the status of his original ancestor.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Not quite so, certainly. The consciousness (rather, the
self-consciousness) that man has gained in place of the
uncon&shy;sciousness or semi-consciousness, characteristic of the
general mass in the past, and the growing sense of individuality and
personal worth, which is an expression of that consciousness, are his
assets, the hall-mark of his present-day nature and outlook and
activity. The consciousness may not have always been used wisely, but
still it is a light that has illumined him, brought him an awareness
of himself and of things, that is new and in a special way close and
intimate and revealing. The light is perhaps not of the kind that
comes direct from high altitudes – it is, as it were, a transverse
ray cutting aslant; nonetheless, through its grace a self-revelation
and a self-valuation have been possible in spheres hitherto
unsurveyed and lost in darkness, and on a scale equally
unprecedented. Life has found a self-light. It is indeed as yet a
glare, lurid and uncertain, but it has the capacity to develop into,
and call in, the white and tranquil effulgence of the Soul-light and
the Supreme Light of which it is the image and precursor.</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 147</FONT></P>
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