All Art brings a message into the world

                                  “The Vision of  the Holy Fool”

                     Illustration of the Divine … Inspired by Cecil Collins

All Art  brings a message into the world.  It is the message of Life, of Life itself and it can be understood through the essence implicit in the nature of the medium incorporated to express it.

Art springs from essence, addresses itself to essence, and is eternal.

But now, the modern world which has promised the artist all things, will scarcely leave him/her the bare means of subsistence; founded upon two unnatural principals of the fecundity of money, and the finality of the useful, multiplying its needs and servitudes without any possibility of there ever being a limit, ruining the leisure of the soul, imposing on man its puffing machinery, and its speeding up of matter, the modern world is shaping human activity in a properly  inhuman way.

So directed,  a human being must consequently disregard anything which for any reasons bears the mark of the spirit -- the hero, the fool and the saint will pay for their dreams, pride and devotions  with poverty, and loneliness as currency.

The Fool is the poetic imagination of Life. This poetic Life is alive in children, but systematically destroyed by the abstract mechanisation of  Society, and by the teaching of “norms”. These abstract phantoms of the normal have come to tyrannise all spontaneous and natural creative reflection and speculation, reducing the ordinary person to a norm of philosophical mediocrity into which the inert masses are relieved to sink with a sigh of relief.

The saint, the poet, and the artist, are all one in the Fool

and society will only allow them a place if they are respectable educationalists, who have reassured  the public that they are efficient, useful and sensible.

The Divine Fool cannot be exploited because he is troubled by longings of transcendence. because she is a child of life, and essence of Life cannot be contained. The Fool is a quality of consciousness, overflowing with cosmic fun,  in a culture of the heart, an inviolate eternal innocence, and  with a passion for beauty.

The  creative impulse is an aristocratic one. Its quality is wisdom of spirit, and visionary perception of Life. Civilisation is only sustained by its spiritual wisdom.

The saint, the artist, the poet, and the fool are one. They are the eternal virginity of spirit, which in the dark winter of the world continually  proclaims the existence of the spring in an invisible kingdom and the coming of light.

with refs  and quotations from Cecil  Collins

“The Vision of the Fool”

isbn090745402X

and

Jaques Maritain