four-thirty-three

Interesting fact: The last words attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (the prominent German man of letters) are often said to be “More light!” This is usually taken to be a spiritual proclamation… but, alas, it’s ripped from the real context. According to J. A. Froude, this statement was not only made three days before Goethe’s death, but was actually part of a request to a servant: Macht die Fensterladen auf, damit ich mehr Licht bekomme (literally, “open the window shutters so that I can have more light”).

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I.

Rabo Karabekian (fictional), "The Temptation of St. Anthony" (1973), attribution in comments

“The painting did not exist until I made it,” Karabekian went on. “Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.

“I now give you my word of honor,” he went on, “that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal - the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us - in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”

“I just heard from this cocktail waitress here, this vertical band of light, a story about her husband and an idiot who was about to be executed at Shepherdstown. Very well - let a five-year-old paint a sacred interpretation of that encounter. Let that five-year-old strip away the idiocy, the bars, the waiting electric chair, the uniform of the guard, the gun of the guard, the bones and meat of the guard. What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two unwavering bands of light.”

Ecstasy bloomed on the barbaric face of Rabo Karabekian. “Citizens of Midland City, I salute you,” he said. “You have given a home to a masterpiece!”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions [1973]

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II.

Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world.  The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals.  Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness.  But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.  Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness.  As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.  It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.

– C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections [1962]

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III.

“O Nata Lux” for a cappella chorus, by Morton Lauridsen (from the choral song cycle Lux Aeterna, 1997)

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