A Little History of the Romantic Imagination
What is man before beauty cajoles from him a delight in things for their own sake, or the serenity of form tempers the savagery of life?
— Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
After the apocalypse, art descends upon a decimated, uninhabitable globe of white snow, rambling around the sun’s carcass in a dark, velvety universe. Angels and Archangels gift the desolated Earth with extraordinary cathedrals and colorful glass palaces, an architecture whose sounds of life resuscitate the dead and bring back to life slaves and masters, kings and clowns, priests and craftsmen, from every time and civilization. Life springs plenty of beauty and happiness to rejoice in the new angelic architecture. The air becomes packed with unheard-of sounds, the infinite variations on language by a child to whom the entirety of things past offered countless teachers and limitless materials to be fashioned at will. Everyone, an infant crazed by their own demon, longs for something different and new, unsatisfied with anything that summons up the quietness and stillness of their recently escaped “nature.”
Paul Klee, A Leaf from the Book of Cities, 1928. Kunstmuseum, Basel. Pubhist.
They were creatures for which the natural was only chaos and meaninglessness, as long as they could not truly love it. They needed thus to teach each other how to do this and invented for this reason the story of a boy, a “Little One”, who, inspired by genius, happily misunderstood everything — including his epithet-name, owing to which he thought himself very large. His task was simply to shepherd nature: to feed, preserve, and cultivate. But in the expansiveness of the landscape, he easily forgot himself and let the animals go; he started to shape them in a rock, in the sand, on the clouds. He was found carefully taking them into himself, literally internalizing each at first, and then expanding his grasp to all of creation. He was told what nature was — his cattle and sometimes also some rivers and trees — but since he always misunderstood everything, he was lured into a marvelous world of multicolored, poisonous forms, the finest figures that ever had enraptured a curious mind. He was intoxicated by everything he found others had made before he arrived. Little by little, he reproduced and transformed the history of the imagination — a history so vast that they expected it would suffice for everyone to take part at their individual pleasure, although I am not entirely sure whether the boy ever came out of it.
Unfortunately, the temples were too small and the beauty too ephemeral; they could not offer sufficient shelter for everyone. As time passed — naturally, as it were, — the old life grinned at the people. There again cropped up those evil ones who dare ask for bread — wretched and ungrateful — and the good ones, who, although they have not themselves created the world, would certainly not wish it substantially different. The first would soon be wiped out: the angels do not like complaints, especially from the ignoramus. And the good people were passively petted. Fortunately, perhaps, as long as the architecture remained standing, they would both resurface as bad grass.
Among those who survived, some started to build monuments in celebration of the death object: often of people or past historical moments estimated as somewhat representative. Plates and statues for industrialists or angels, childhood, lovers, or battles, events six hundred years old clad in two-hundred-year-old mannerisms — and with names irretrievable, even with our digital encyclopedias. They were pleased by their memorials of coldness, where all infant curiosity to imaginatively enliven the necessities of life was sacrificed. Their monuments sealed the landscapes with memories of death.
Others who still wish to rejoice — those who could not live without their share of happiness — gathered in a small cult of beauty. In their search, they climbed steep rocks and tramped torturous ways, unexplored by even the most adventurous fortune hunters. They could find only empty palaces. They saw signs but weren’t sure if they were traces or traps. They all appeared lifeless at first.
“The art that you dreamed up is always dead. The palaces have no life. Trees live, animals live, but palaces do not live!” A voice shouted at them.
“Therefore,” I responded, “I want the dead!” [1]
And they knew what they wanted — silence even if without pleasure — perhaps as the highest pleasure — the departure into infinity!
And the dead palaces trembled — even if only for a fraction of second (measured by the infinite time of the angels) — they trembled! //
Joseph Cornell, Medici Slot Machine: Object, 1942. Box construction, Fancois and Susan de Menil Collection. Christie’s.
Marc Chagall, Theater, Music, Dance, 1920. Oil on canvas, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
J.J. Grandville, “The Juggler,” from Another World, 1844. Archive.org.
[1] Paul Scheerbart, “The Dead Palace: An Architect’s Dream,” In The City Crown, by Bruno Taut, ed. Matthew Mindrup and Ulrike Altenmüller-Lewis (Routledge, 2016), 141–42.
Other works referenced:
Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: And, Letters to Prince Frederick Christian von Augustenburg, trans. Keith Tribe (Penguin Books, 2016).
Paul Scheerbart, “The New Life: An Architectonic Apocalypse.” In The City Crown, by Bruno Taut, ed. Matthew Mindrup and Ulrike Altenmüller-Lewis (Routledge, 2016), 35–40.
Paul Scheerbart, The Stairway to the Sun & Dance of the Comets: Four Fairy Tales of Home and One Astral Pantomime, trans. W. Bamberger (Wakefield Press, 2016).
