6

From one century to the next

“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.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, appendix, p. 123.

Creative art is a spell, a talisman, an incantation

“The poet or philosopher in the non-religious Greek states occupied, we are told, much the same position as the priest or witch doctor or magician in a more religious or superstitious community. It was for that reason that a poet or philosopher was held responsible for his slightest or most casual utterance in the way that he was. He was recognized as the custodian of the spiritual consciousness of the race.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book II, ch. IV, p. 193.

The alleged progress in social life

“Here the progress implied is always a progress towards the shaking-off of a parental control or inherited religious compulsion; and in a tremendously wise, cool, insouciant, slangy and rather wicked state of ‘modern’ up-to-dateness, unashamed nakedness, sweet ‘scientific’ reasonableness, removing all veils, fig-leaves and fusty obstructions, a weakest-go-to-the-wall, healthy middle-class, animal Utopia is predicted. The modernist mother, with a perhaps ungraceful shoppiness, introduces her child of eight or ten to the chamber of horrors of sex with both pride and delight. The fact that she herself is the chamber of horrors out of which they have popped adds a piquancy to the demonstration.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, appendix, p. 125.

The smaller you are, the more remarkable

“I prefer the chaste wisdom of the Chinese or the Greek, to that hot, tawny brand of superlative fanaticism coming from the parched deserts of the Ancient East, with its ineradicable abstractness. I am for the physical world.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 113.

Overshadows

“My standpoint is that we are creatures of a certain kind, with no indication that a radical change is imminent; and that the most pretentious of our present prophets is unable to do more than promise ‘an eternity of intoxication’ to those who follow him into less physical, more ‘cosmic’ regions; proposals made with at least equal eloquence by contemporaries of Plato.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 112.

This peculiar spectacle

“So he collected like a cistern in his youth the last stagnant pumpings of Victorian Anglo-Irish life. This he held steadfastly intact for fifteen years or more – then when he was ripe, as it were, he discharged it, in a dense mass, to his eternal glory. That was Ulysses.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 93.

Strange to the European

“London , for example, is periodically startled by some work in sculpture or painting which would have seemed a commonplace to Amenhotep III., or to a fifth-century Tartar Khan.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. V, p. 24.

For ensuring the true freedom

“I now believe, for instance, that people should be compelled to be freer and more ‘individualistic’ than they naturally desire to be, rather than that their native unfreedom and instinct towards slavery should be encouraged and organized. I believe they could with advantage be compelled to remain absolutely alone for several hours every day; and a week’s solitary confinement, under pleasant conditions (say in mountain scenery), every two months, would be an excellent provision.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, appendix, p. 121.

Bringing to life ghosts

“But there is nothing so ‘new’ and so startling as the Past, for most people. All the supreme novelties come from the most distant epochs; the more remote the more novel, of course. The ‘Future’, it is true, contains nothing but potential novelties. But they are not yet in existence, and so cannot be educed.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. VIII, p. 36.

The Objective of revolutions

“The present ‘revolution’ in art is not a revolt against tradition at all. It is a more 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 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 Revolutions are about, and cannot therefore itself be Revolution.” Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. V, p. 24.

Returns II

“All the most influential revolutions of sentiment or of ideologic formula to-day, in the world of science, sociology, psychology, are directed to some sort of return to the Past. The cult of the savage (and indirectly that of the Child) is a pointing backward to our human origins, either as individuals (when it takes the form of the child-cult) or as a race (when it takes the form of ‘the primitive’).” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. VIII, p. 36.

The actual matter revealed

“It is like a gigantic Victorian quilt or antimacassar. Or it is the voluminous curtain that fell, belated (with the alarming momentum of a ton or two of personally organized rubbish), upon the Victorian scene. So rich was its delivery, its pent-up outpouring so vehement, that will remain, eternally cathartic, a monument like a record diarhoea. No one who looks at it will ever want to look behind it. It is the sardonic catafalque of the Victorian world.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 92.

A critical engine

“But unlike social revolution, art is not dependent on fortuitous technical discoveries. It is a constant stronghold, rather, of the purest of human consciousness; as such it has nothing to ‘revolt’ against – except conditions where art does not exist, or where spurious and vulgar art triumphs.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. V, p. 23-24.

The cold body of the fish

“The amount of stuff - unorganized brute material – that the more active principle of drama has to wade through, under the circumstances, slows it down to the pace at which, inevitably, the sluggish tide of the author’s bric-a-brac passes the observer, at the saluting post, or in this case the reader. It is a suffocating, moeotic expanse of objects, all of them lifeless, the sewage of a Past twenty years old, all neatly arranged in a meticulous sequence.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 91.

Battered and deadened

“All idea of a true value – of any scale except for the pragmatic scale of hypnotism and hoax - is banished for ever from the life of the of the great majority of an advertising zone, such as any great modern city. They are now almost entirely incapable of anything except sensation; for to think is to be able to traverse the scale of values from the nadir to the zenith.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. II, p. 13.

An age is simply its instruments of research

“The political orthodoxy or new world-phase that is taking shape, whether for good or ill, has still immense forces to contend against and to manipulate. In the past, peoples the whole of whose mind has been bent to a practical end have not usually been very speculative or intellectually free. The man-of-action is not very speculative, usually, nor is he a ‘free intelligence’ as a rule, but an extremely narrow, unreflective, functional person. The Roman has left a little behind him compared with the Greek or the Chinese. So, on the same principle, how can an age, so bent on practical tasks as ours, be intellectually free or very speculative? It is only when a community is secure (and usually soon after, owing to its freedom and speculative licence, it begins to disintegrate, or else it takes a plunge or a series of plunges back into a self-defensive obscurantism) that it can become free and creative. And although there are great forces established in the world to-day, their power is very fluid and by no means secure; and they have no time for play.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book II, ch. II, p. 160.

The structure of human life is entirely transformed

“The average man is invited to slice his life into a series of one-day lives, regulated by the clock of fashion. The human being is no longer the unit. He becomes the containing frame for a generation or sequence of ephemerids, roughly organized into what he calls his ‘personality’. Or the highly organized human mind finds its natural organic unity degraded into a worm-like extension, composed of a segmented, equally-distributed, accentless life. Each segment, each fashion day (as a day of this new creature could be called) must be organically self-sufficing.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. II, p. 12.

What Marinetti named passéism

“The Fascist Revolution again, to revert to the political scene, is an imitation of antiquity. The fasces are the axes of the lectors; the roman salute is revived; and the Roman Empire is to be resuscitated, Mussolini continually announces. It is interesting to remember it did not begin that way, but in an exclusive glorification of the Present. For fascism is an adaptation, or prolongation, only, of futurism.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. VIII, p. 35-36.

The movement of the narrative

“The method that underlies Ulysses is known as the ‘telling from the inside’. As that description denotes, it is psychological. Carried out in the particular manner used in Ulysses, it lands the reader inside an Aladdin’s cave of incredible bric-a-brac in which a dense mass of dead stuff is collected, from 1901 toothpaste, a bar or two of Sweet Rosie O’Grady, to pre-nordic architecture. And immense nature-morte is the result. This ensues from confining the reader in a circumscribed psychological space into which several encyclopaedias have been emptied.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 91.

Where do you propose that that should lead us?

“For me art is the civilized substitute for magic; as philosophy is what, on a higher or more complex plane, takes the place of religion” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book II, ch. IV, p. 193.

Two opposite things

“Mr, Joyce could never have performed this particular feat if he had not been, in his make-up, extremely immobile; and yet, in contradiction to that, very open to new technical influences. It is the craftsman in Joyce that is progressive; but the man has not moved since his early days in Dublin. He is on that side a ‘young’ man in some way embalmed.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 92.

5

The cheap, socially available simulacrum

“And all the great inventions reach the crowd in the form of toys (crystal-sets, motor-cars), 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.)” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, appendix, p. 124.

Everything is put into it

“For the head of a crowd is like a pudding en surprise.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XIV, p. 67.

4

On the video screen scenes of a gondola floating down a canal. “Of course music will be added later,” said the filmmaker, “this is the early stages”. We’d met him at one of Ficino’s parties and he had invited us over to view some of what he called his raw footage. The camera zoomed in on the Chinese gondoliers face. “This was taken in Venice Aquatic City in Hangzhou,” said the filmmaker, “an imitation Venice in China. I also have footage of an imitation Venice in the United States, and an imitation Venice in Japan. My plan is to film all the imitation Venices in the world so people can experience imitation Venice without leaving their homes.”

There is nothing so ‘romantic’ as advertisement

“Advertisement is the apotheosis of the marvellous and the unusual.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. II, p. 11.

“The world in which advertisement dwells is a one-day world. It is necessarily a plane universe, without depth.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. II, p. 12.

Brewery and laundry receipts

“At the end of a long reading of Ulysses you feel that is the very nightmare of the naturalistic method that you have been experiencing.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 91.

The poor craftsman

“The painful preoccupation with the exact place of things in a room, for instance, could be mildly matched in his writing. The things themselves by which he is surrounded lose, for the hysterical subject, their importance or even meaning.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 91.

External nature of the machine age

“There is nothing for it today, if you have an appetite for the beautiful, but to create new beauty You can no longer nourish yourself upon the past; its stock is exhausted, the Past is nowhere a reality. The only place where it is a reality is in time, certainly not in space. So the mental world of time offers a compensating principle.

From this devastating alternative – the creation of new beauty – most people shrink in horror. ‘Create!’ they exclaim. ‘As though it were not already difficult enough to live’ – But it is questionable if even bare life is possible, denuded of all meaning. And the meaning put into it by millennial politics of the current type is as unsubstantial as a mist on a Never-Never landscape.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 83.

So dead

“Gertrude Stein’s prose-song is a cold, black, suet-pudding.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XIII, p. 61

Returns

“Feminism, to take another political movement, is a revolution that aims at reversing the respective positions of the sexes, and so returning to the supposed conditions of the primitive Matriarchate.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. VIII, p. 36.

3

A dissolute summer of sex and perplexed speculations. We abstracted the many relations from the one thing, until we were left with nothing. I’m told she lectures at a small college in the Midwest these days, her bored students oblivious to her penchant for not wearing underwear.

Our incurably romantic outlook

“Our civilization is much more artificial than that of Greece or Rome; and the main cause of this is the Christian ethic. Where Romance enters the sphere of morals is at the gate of sex; nearly all the diabolism (helping itself to the traditional Sadic and invert machinery), springing up so eagerly in Puritan soil can be traced to a sex-root. It is even extremely easy in the modern West to sexify everything, in a way that would have been impossible in the Greek world, for instance.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. III, p. 15.

2

“The monumental is my sickness,” he said, “so naturally I was attracted to the Generalissimo, to the possibility of expressing my need for monumentality.”

Ficino and I had been surprised to learn he was still alive and living in the city, and now here we were in his tiny apartment.

“In an age of bureaucrats and salesmen-“ he jabbed a thick finger at us “- to discover a man with broader ambitions...so rare. I could not resist him. I could not miss my chance.”

He showed us the original plans for a tower which, if it had ever been built, would’ve been the greatest of what he called his Apocalyptic Towers.

"What was to go inside the tower?" Ficino asked.

“It would have been a museum, or possibly a prison. What’s important is the scale.”

This Obscure Point

“The less you are able to realize other people, the more your particular personality will obsess you, and the more dependent upon its reality you will be. The more you will insist on it with a certain frenzy. And the more ‘individualist’ you are in this sense, the less ‘individualist’ you will be in the ordinary political sense. You will have achieved a fantastic hegemony with your unique self feeling.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. I, p. 8.

1

Tell me, was it you I saw that night, or some gentle ghost? My view was obscured by the encroaching bougainvilleas.

I then ask you

"In the necropolis of images or mummies of its dead selves is there a live self that moves? What is it?" - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book II, part III, ch. II, p. 363.