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World Order

SUMMER 1975

THE LANGUAGE OF AESTHETICS

Editorial

TOWARD CRITICAL FOUNDATIONS

FOR A WORLD CULTURE OF THE ARTS

Ludwig Tuman

THE ECONOMY OF A WORLD COMMONWEALTH

John Huddlestan

RECENT AMERICAN POETRY—

PORTFOLIO II

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 9 NUMBER 4 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY J. FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

ROBERT HAYDEN

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

Editorial Assistant

MARTHA PATRICK

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly, October, January, April, and July, at 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091. Subscriber and business correspondence and changes of address should be sent to this address. Manuscripts and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to 2011 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts should be typewritten and double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end. The contributor should keep a carbon copy. Return postage should be included.

Subscription rates: USA, 1 year, $6.00; 2 years, $11.00; single copies, $1.60. All other countries, 1 year, $7.00; 2 years, $13.00; single copes $1.60.

Copyright © 1975, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

1 The Language of Aesthetics

Editorial

4 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

8 Toward Critical Foundations for a World

Culture of the Arts

by Ludwig Tuman

37 The Economy of a World Commonwealth

by John Huddleston

44 Recent American Poetry—Portfolio II

Introduced and Selected

by Robert Hayden

74 Authors and Artists in This Issue

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The Language of Aesthetics

STUDENTS OF AESTHETICS are more and more convinced that the arts have much in common with language. Like language, art divides material into units recognizable in their relationship with each other, in terms of similarities, differences, and distances between them, and organizes these units into patterned combinations which are said to have meaning. Like language, art imposes order upon a chaos of impressions, feelings, and motions.

The various arts differ among themselves superficially according to the materials which they exploit and more essentially according to the categories of human experience they come to reptesent. The most precisely rational system of signs is the one we call language in the restricted sense of the word. Music, however, has the capacity to symbolize, as well as to evoke, emotions, feelings, affects not accessible to verbal expression; the visual arts employ a subtle combination of symbols, whose arbitrariness recalls that of the symbols of language, and of representation or imitation of visible objects, such representations being only marginally symbolic.

Without further elaboration it may be taken as a point of departure that the symbolic power is that peculiarly human faculty which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá refers to variously as the rational soul, the rational faculty, the human soul. We find in the Bahá’í Writings that the words arts, sciences, trades, crafts, professions are associated with each other in various combinations according to the function being stressed: the creation of useful artifacts, the deepening of knowledge or understanding, or the procurement of pleasure, joy, or exaltation. Although there is no specific theory of aesthetics explicitly presented in the Writings, there are many clear indications of the role assigned to the arts by the primary Figures of the Bahá’í Faith.

One of the first principles is that art does not exist for its own sake. This is not to say that it must be representational in the crude sense or that it should be, again crudely, propagandistic. Whatever a given art object refers to and however a given art medium manages to signify, it is true that art does have signification. That art work which seems to refer to nothing but itself and which, therefore, invites a solely and purely formalistic analysis has, nevertheless, a certain effect (with its accompanying affect) on its perceiver, who incorporates it into his system of meaningful phenomena. Since all human experience is interconnected and forms a unity, art and its effects can never be separated from all other aspects of that experience. Meaning is, then, everywhere; and formalism is useful only insofar as it helps us to discover meanings. The consequence is that the artist has a responsibility to people as well as to art; the artist cannot, any more than anyone else, escape from the divine injunction to know and love God. When ‘Abdu’l-Bahá speaks of understanding, of reason, of knowledge, He speaks of all kinds of knowledge and of all modes of expression. Is not the following statement as applicable to the artist as to the philosopher or the politician? “I hope that you [Page 2] will use your understanding to promote the unity and tranquillity of mankind, to give enlightenment and civilization to the people, to produce love in all around you, and to bring about the Universal Peace.”

‘Abdu’l-Bahá also praises the social utility of art: “when the studying of art is with the intention of obeying the command of God this study will certainly be done easily and great progress will soon be made therein; and when others discover this fragrance of spirituality in the action itself, this same will cause their awakening. Likewise, managing art with propriety will become the means of sociability and affinity; and sociability and affinity themselves tend to guide others to the Truth.”

There is a famous passage, the “Third Tajallí,” concerning “sciences, crafts and arts.” In it Bahá’u’lláh says that “To acquire knowledge is incumbent on all, but of those sciences which may profit the people of the earth, and not of such sciences as begin in mere words, and end in mere words.” This is not to be taken as an indictment of literature, of poetry, of forms of art, in short, whose medium is words. Has not ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said, “in this new century the attainment of science, arts and belles lettres, whether divine or worldly, material or spiritual, is a matter which is acceptable before God and a duty which is incumbent upon us to accomplish.”

In the “Third Tajallí,” Bahá’u’lláh emphasizes the results of knowledge, which “is the means of honor, prosperity, joy, gladness, happiness and exultation.” This is clearly a reference to the aesthetic side, the affective facet of the mental and spiritual life. Knowledge is not simply information, the kind of information that leads to inventions whose effect is to improve material existence. “Singing and music,” says ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, referring to the Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh, “are the spiritual food of the hearts and souls. . . . music . . . is highly approved and is considered to be the cause of the exaltation of sad and desponding hearts.”

There is, then, no art for art’s sake. But this is no denigration of art, for there is no activity of man which exists for its own sake. Art is one of the modes of apprehending reality, of attaining understanding, of which Bahá’u’lláh has written that “the Almighty hath conferred upon man . . . the gift of understanding. His purpose in conferring such a gift is none other except to enable His creature to know and recognize the one true God—exalted be His glory. This gift giveth man the power to discern the truth in all things, leadeth him to that which is right, and helpeth him to discover the secrets of creation.”

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

WORLD ORDER, we state on our masthead, is “intended to stimulate, inspire, and serve thinking people in their search to find relationships between contemporary life and contemporary religious teachings and philosophies.” Implicit in that statement is the conviction that the world of the future must be different from the world which we now know, bound as it is with parochial interests and outmoded philosophical and spiritual notions. It is inevitable that many who are committed to the emergence of a new order characterized by a new culture Will, over the next three or four centuries, turn their attention to seeking new philosophical bases for the divers aspects of human existence.

Therefore, with a long perspective on history and a sense of the importance of recording these first efforts to articulate philosophic bases for the future, WORLD ORDER is always delighted to offer its readers articles which attempt to articulate aspects of the coming world order— whether it be in the fields of education, economics, or architecture, to name a few. We have from time to time published articles which speculated about the place and role of the arts in a future world culture: Eliane A. Hopson’s “The Bahá’í Faith and the Arts” (Spring 1970); Dennis W. Shimeld’s “The Presence of the Arts” (Spring 1972); and, more recently, Emo Marconi’s “Bahá’í Theater?” (Summer 1974) and Tom Kubala’s “Architectural Implications of the Bahá’í Community” (Fall 1974). It is with particular pleasure that we offer in this issue Ludwig Tuman’s “Toward Critical Foundations for a World Culture of the Arts,” yet another attempt to find a philosophical basis for one aspect of the coming world civilization.

* * *

Mr. Kazem Kazemzadeh’s letter commenting on Denis MacEoin’s statement on the station of the Báb as compared to that of John the Baptist in his article “Oriental Scholarship and the Bahá’í Faith” (Summer 1974) has evoked lively response from several of our readers. We are printing one letter taking issue with Mr. Kazemzadeh. It expresses quite fully the views expressed in other letters.

To the Editor

CONCERNING JOHN THE BAPTIST

I was very interested in the letter from Mr. Kazem Kazemzadeh in the Winter 1974-75 issue of WORLD ORDER regarding John the Baptist and how he is viewed in the Bahá’í Writings. . . .

The first problem in the discussion of the divine personages spoken of in the Qur’án and the Bahá’í Writings is the variety of terms used in the original and the inadequacy of certain English words, particularly the term “prophet,” to differentiate their stations. Thus in the original Arabic of the Qur’án and some Bahá’í Writings, two very particulur words are used: nabí‘ (plural: nabíyún, anbiyá) and rasúl (plural: rusul). Nabí‘ is usually translated as “prophet,” and rasúl as “Apostle” or “Messenger.” In Islám there have been centuries of debate over the nuances of the two terms and which people mentioned in the Qur’án fit into the two categories. The Shorter Encyclopedia of Islám (Cornell University Press, 1961) explains [Page 5] that, in general, a nabí‘ is one who acts as a warner or prophet much as the prophets of Israel, whereas a rasúl is a Messenger endowed by God with a Book and laws and is the head of a religious community (Arabic: umma). Among those generally considered as rusul are Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muḥammad. The Encyclopedia also explains that all rusul or Messengers may at the same time be nabíyún or prophets, but not all nabíyún are rusul. Bahá’u’lláh, while using these terms, has introduced a new idea to describe the Messenger-Lawgivers: mazahir-i-ilahiyyih or “Manifestations of God,” thereby helping to redefine what the Messengers do, and dispelling some of the confusion in the use of nabí‘ and rasúl.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in Some Answered Questions, clarified these distinctions for the western mind, when asked how many kinds of Prophets there are. He says:

“Universally, the Prophets are of two kinds. One are the independent Prophets who are followed; the other kind are not independent, and are themselves followers.

“The independent Prophets are the law-givers and the founders of a new cycle. . . .

“The other Prophets are followers and promoters, for they are branches and not independent; they receive the Bounty of the independent Prophets . . .

“The Manifestations of universal Prophethood who appeared independently are, for example, Abraham, Moses, Christ, Muḥammad, the Báb, and Bahá’u’lláh. But the others who are followers and promoters are like Solomon, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. For the independent Prophets are founders . . .” (p. 188-89).

Those that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá lists as “Manifestations of universal Prophethood” are those Whom Bahá’ís call Manifestations, and Whom the Shorter Encyclopedia of Islám lists as rusul or “Messengers.” The “others who are followers” are those called nabíyún or “prophets” in the Qur’án.

Let me now speak to some of the passages cited by Mr. Kazemzadeh in his letter. He mentions the Qur’anic verse quoted by Bahá’u’lláh in The Kitáb-i-Íqán: “God announceth Yaḥyá to thee, who shall bear witness unto the Word from God, and a great one and chaste, a prophet and righteous.” (Qur’án 3:39) If I am not mistaken, the Arabic word used in this verse is nabí‘, which would indicate John the Baptist is a lesser prophet. Again, Mr. Kazamzadeh quotes from one of the epistles of Bahá’u’lláh that John “having the station of prophethood [Nubuvvat] . . . proclaimed to man the glad tidings of the Manifestation of the Spirit [Jesus].” Note that the root of the word for prophethood is from the word nabí‘, still signifying, from the foregoing explanation, a lesser prophet, and not an independent Manifestation of God.

Mr. Kazemzadeh also quotes from the Kitáb-i-Badí, presumably from his own translation from the original . . . Again, however, the word that appears to have been used in the original is nabí‘. Only in a statement without specific reference does Mr. Kazemzadeh say: “Further, Bahá’u’lláh adds that John was a Prophet and Messenger (Nabí‘ va rasúl),” this being the only case where rasúl is even mentioned in relation to John.

Mr. Kazemzadeh also quotes from Epistle to the Son of the Wolf in which Bahá’u’lláh says that the disciples of John spoke against Jesus, saying: “‘The dispensation of John hath not yet ended; wherefore hast Thou come?’” It is then suggested that the word “dispensation” suggests that John was “indeed a Prophet in his own right” (independent Prophet?). Webster’s Dictionary defines the theological meaning of dispensation as “the divine ordering of the affairs of the world.” The word has been used by Christians to refer to various periods of time mentioned in the Bible without any specific reference to the Manifestations, such as the terms apostolic dispensation or dispensation of the Holy Ghost. The word dispensation may refer to Christian, Islamic, or Bahá’í Dispensation [Page 6] in the sense of an era inaugurated by a Manifestation, but it need not necessarily.

Shoghi Effendi’s God Passes By is also cited in reference to the Báb: “He the ‘Qá’im’ . . . promised to the Shí‘ahs, the ‘Mihdi’ . . . awaited by the Sunnis, the ‘Return of John the Baptist’ expected by the Christians . . .” That the Báb, Himself an independent Manifestation, was the “return of John the Baptist” does not make John the Baptist of the same station, any more than does the fact that the Báb fulfills the prophecy of the “return of the twelfth imám” make the twelfth imám a Manifestation.

It is very important that we examine one very specific reference by Shoghi Effendi to the Báb’s relationship to Bahá’u’lláh and its uniqueness: “That the Báb, the inaugurator of the Bábí Dispensation, is fully entitled to rank as one of the self-sufficient Manifestations of God, that He has been invested with sovereign power and authority, and exercises all the tights and prerogatives of independent Prophethood, is yet another fundamental verity which the Message of Bahá’u’lláh insistently proclaims and which its followers must uncompromisingly uphold. That He is not to be regarded merely as an inspired Precursor of the Bahá’í Revelation . . . is a truth which I feel it my duty to demonstrate and emphasize. . . .

“There can he no doubt that the claim to the twofold station ordained for the Báb by the Almighty . . . constitutes the most distinctive feature of the Bahá’í Dispensation. It is a further evidence of its uniqueness. . . .” (The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 123)

Indeed, if the twofold station of the Báb, as Forerunner and as independent Prophet or Manifestation, is distinctive and unique, then the analogy with John the Baptist is not entirely correct. If the Báb were only an “inspired Precursor” or a lesser prophet, we would be contradicting the inspired interpretation of Shoghi Effendi. If we regard John the Baptist as an independent Prophet or a Manifestation, we are saying that this feature of a twofold station is not unique in the Bahá’í Faith.

It appears, then, that the analogy of the Báb and John the Baptist is relative and requires close definition. The Báb in relation to Bahá’u’lláh is a Foretunner; so is John in relation to Jesus. However, the Báb is an independent Prophet, a Manifestation of God in relation to the period of His own Dispensation; John the Baptist is referred to as a nabí‘ and fits the definition given by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá of a lesser prophet, but not a Manifestation.

It is supremely important that we remember how Bahá’u’lláh, in such works as The Kitáb-i-Íqán, points out the relativity and multiplicity of understanding of passages of Sacred Scripture. This applies as much to Bahá’u’lláh’s Writings, in the reading of which we should always bear in mind the other Writings and interpretations by the Central Figures of our Faith, so that we may view the teachings with that balance and clarity which they imply.

WILLIAM P. COLLINS

Middlebury, Vermont

ARCHITECTURE IN A NEW SOCIETY

Tom Kubala’s recent article [Fall 1974] on the architecture of a Bahá’í community is an exciting mental exercise attempting to envision an environment inspired by Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings and designed to house a spiritually unified society.

However, in the light of Mr. Kubala’s awareness of the deepest roots of architectural design . . . in man’s individual and collective spiritual aspiration, it is surprising that he chose as his example such a narrow aspect of the community, that of homes for the infirm elderly. A key aspect of the community which is united, dynamic, organic—alive—is its integration. This article, by reducing its focus to one facility of the Mashriqu’l-Adhkár complex, has overlooked the tremendous level of integration achieved at the center of this community. . . .

For example, many of the needs of orphaned children coincide with those of the infirm elderly —both are incapable of helping themselves and have no family to provide their needs. Common dining facilities, craft and hobby areas, (some) recreational activities, and private or open “quiet” spaces, would provide an interaction between these groups of young and old which would be spiritually beneficial to both. In addition, the proximity of such other facilities of the Mashriqu’l-Adhkár as a library, schools, a hospital, and the administrative center and gathering point for the entire community, suggests many dynamic paths of interaction and mutual support, focused on this spiritual center and radiating throughout the community.

Mr. Kubala’s recognition of Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings on unity, service, and the organization of the local, national, and international communities implies an understanding of this organic integration (and its implications for [Page 7] architectural planning), but as we begin to examine the full implications of Bahá’u’lláh’s Message on the many spheres of our individual and collective lives we must seek a greater and more detailed understanding of the interconnectedness of these various spheres. This is a task in which WORLD ORDER can and has played a significant role as a forum for discussion and discovery.

ROGER DAVIS

Reston, Virginia

SPEAKING OF ECONOMICS

I have read Dr. Hatcher’s article on economics and moral values which appeared in the Winter 1974-75 issue of WORLD ORDER. While there is much merit in his exposition of the Bahá’í approach to economic organization and philosophy, I have been puzzled by his unsubstantiated assumptions upon which he has built his arguments. In his opening paragraph, which underlies his later arguments, the author states that “There is a pervasive modern sentiment that economics and morality are peculiarly incompatible.”

I am wondering where such pervasive sentiments exist or where its advocates are. A sample of some of the most widely used introductory texts (P. A. Samuelson, Economics [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975], p. 10), and C. R. McConnell, Economics [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975], pp. 1-10) start with the notion that the discipline deals with value judgment. The authors emphasize that economic facts are vehicles for economic policy makers whose decisions include a variety of factors other than mere raw data.

The theme of value judgment and its place in economic decision making is not relegated to oblivion beyond introductory texts. It often appears in more specialized studies. For instance, Dr. J. P. Gittinger in a work on cost-benefit analysis (Economic Analysis of Agricultural Projects [Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1972], p. 3) indicates that economic analysis is of great help for decision making but “many factors other than quantitative or even purely economic considerations must be brought to bear.” All of these examples are “modern” and are contrary to Dr. Hatcher’s opening statement. In fact, as recently as December 1974 Professor W. Heller in his presidential address to the American Economic Association referred to the theme, saying some members of the discipline (Gunner Myrdal and Robert Heilbroner) are critical of the fact that much of the value judgment of economists is implicit (The American Economic Review, 41 [March 1975], 2).

Therefore, the issue is not whether “economics and morality are peculiarly incompatible”; rather it is what kind of morality or value judgment should be the guiding force for economic decision making. Much can be said about the kind of morality which shapes our views, and in such analysis lies the strength of an argument such as proffered by Dr. Hatcher.

I feel that the premises of Dr. Hatcher cannot be supported by the content of the most current works in economic literature. It is regrettable that the Bahá’í approach to economics should be prefaced as such.

FERYDOON FIROOZI

Department of Economics

Northeastern Illinois University

Chicago, Illinois

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Toward Critical Foundations For a World Culture of the Arts

BY LUDWIG TUMAN

Part I: A Description of the Artist’s Situation

AMONG ARTISTS of all kinds there appears to be a consensus that the present age holds, in some respects, vast potential for the arts. At the same time, there is widespread agreement that the present is perhaps the most difficult age in which an artist may live as it confronts him with problems as great as its promises. At the center of these problems lies the need to reforge the relationship between society and artist in a rapidly changing world. If global changes in the last century and a half may be taken as evidence of a general transition in human relations and environments, the transition, it would seem, has progressed far enough for us to detect its direction and to make generalized prediction of its artistic outcome possible and preparation for it realistic. The objective of this essay is to attempt to describe the major characteristics of artists’ social environment in the forseeable future, to define the basis for a durable relationship between society and artist, and to propose means whereby [Page 9] such a relationship may be put into practice. In pursuit of so complex an objective, I have drawn upon ideas from several disciplines. I am the first to admit the brashness of sallying into fields where one has no authority, but the manifold questions raised by the above objective require divers treatment. Thus I have attempted to synthesize observations and ideas from several points of view into a multifaceted paradigm and hope that my use of the various ideas in this essay will represent fairly the authors on whom I have relied. It is perhaps regrettable that an essay of broad scope and limited space should contain more generalization than documentation. For the sake of consistency, and because it is the area in which I am least ignorant, I will draw most of the examples in the discussion from the art of music.

The role of the artist in contemporary [Page 10] society is not uniform. In some countries he is subsidized and obliged to work according to the requirements of the government’s and the public’s prevailing taste and to make of his art a vehicle for the transmission of ideology. In others he is subsidized to some extent and left to create as he pleases. Elsewhere he is left both to create and to earn a living as best he may. Scarcely anywhere, however, does the artist play the same social role he played in earlier centuries. Even the most isolated cultures are one by one coming under the influence of advanced technology, undergoing the social upheaval which follows the adoption of technology, and leaving their artists blinking wide-eyed in a new environment. The rapid spread of technology and the pace of social change around the world suggest that artists everywhere are, in certain respects, in the same position. To discern the common denominators and their implications for the artist’s future social position, it is first necessary to consider the relationship which artist and society had in previous centuries and the processes which brought their relationship to its present state. Because the spread of technology has so much to do with the present state, we must focus at the outset on the civilization and the era in which modern industrialized society originated.

Historical Roots

Factors in the Breakdown of Christian Cosmology. Nineteenth-century Europe and the centuries leading to it may be viewed in terms of two complementary developments crucial to an understanding of the artist’s social role: the waxing of individualism and the waning of Christian cosmology. Having begun in earlier centuries, these twin processes culminated in the nineteenth century when individualism was openly exalted and the influence of Christian cosmology was dissolved and dissipated.

As used here, the term “cosmology” is akin to “world outlook.” It signifies the world of meaning characteristic of a given culture. As such, a cosmology may be thought of as a network of philosophic beliefs concerning the nature and purpose of human existence. Its outer fringes lead to the cultural values, attitudes, social relationships, and customs which are derived from it. Thus the dissolution of Christian cosmology in nineteenth-century Europe does not necessarily mean the decline of the Church as an institution. A religious institution may continue to be supported long after its cosmology has ceased to permeate society’s beliefs and determine social behavior. Our concern here is to trace some factors leading to the decline of Christian cosmology as a unifying agent which once enveloped Western Europe in a more or less uniform world of meaning.

Two related factors were the rise of humanism and the Protestant Reformation. The cosmology which developed in the first four centuries of Christianity had been promoted throughout the Middle Ages by a powerful Church. In the fourteenth century, however, the authority of the Church and the grip of its world outlook over the masses were severely shaken. The papacy was weakened from within by corruption and strife and attacked from without by heretical movements which presaged the Reformation. The fourteenth century also saw the beginnings of humanistic thought, under whose influence the arts and sciences gradually turned [Page 11] from the other-worldly orientation of religion to a concern for human life in this world.

The Reformation of the sixteenth century emphasized the individual’s ability to commune with and receive guidance from his Maker without the intermediary of the clergy. In that respect the Protestant movement had an element in common with the humanism of its day. The two may even be seen as the religious and the secular side of individualism. The combination of Protestant and humanistic ideas served, through the two centuries which followed, to weaken greatly the influence of orthodox Church cosmology over society. After the sixteenth century the official cosmology of the Catholic Church was to exist as one among a proliferating variety of world views in a civilization whose orientation became increasingly secular.

Another factor in the decline of Church cosmology was the stunning development of science from the sixteenth century onward. Many scientific findings directly challenged the world view of the Church. By the nineteenth century, science had grown to such stature that scientists were “no longer pleading for the right to state the truth as it was gathered from observation; they were asserting a new interpretation and picture of the world.” One of the nineteenth century’s most famous contributions to this new interpretation of the world came in 1859 when Darwin published his Origin of Species. The representatives of both Catholic and Protestant Christianity, already anxious about the numerous encroachments of science upon their cosmology, unleashed a storm of denunciation and made the issue of evolution a symbol of their estrangement from science.

The antagonism between science and Christian cosmology served to polarize reason and emotion in the public mind. For the average person, and especially the nineteenth-century artist, reason came to be associated with science and emotion with religion. The two were eventually regarded as different and mutually exclusive approaches to reality.

With the introduction of the railroad to Continental Europe in the 1830s, industrialization began on a massive scale, bringing the expectation of a higher standard of living for all. Christian cosmology was thus officially pitted against the very sciences whose discoveries promised material relief and comfort to Europe’s downtrodden. This proved to be a final factor in the dissolution of the social influence of Christian cosmology, whether Catholic or Protestant. While the various Churches continued to receive support as social institutions, the overall Christian view of man’s place in the world was fast losing ground both in credibility and in its ability to shape social behavior. To summarize, the salient factors in the decline of Christian cosmology were humanism, with its worldly orientation; the Protestant emphasis on the individuality of religious experience; the rise and challenging discoveries of science; and the emergence of industrialized society.

Consequences for Artist’s Social Role in Nineteenth Century. We may now turn specifically to the nineteenth century to see how the artist was affected by these developments. At the core of a religious cosmology lies a theodicy—that which deals with “the fundamental characteristics of the human condition.” These characteristics may be translated into three questions which all religious systems are obliged to answer:

Is there a transcendent meaning or purpose to life?

What becomes of a person at the point of death?

Why do injustice and suffering exist, especially [Page 12] if the world is governed by a just and merciful God?

The answers a religious system provides for these questions constitute its theodicy. Around that theodicy an entire cosmology may grow. For purposes of comparison, the most general tenets of Christian theodicy may be summarized as follows: the essential purpose of life is to recognize God through acceptance of Jesus the Christ as one’s Lord and to attempt to live as He did; a person’s condition after death depends upon his acceptance of Christ and upon God’s judgment and mercy; injustice and suffering exist in this world to test the believer’s faith and prepare him for a life of faith in the next world, where he will be compensated for his sufferings.

By the eighteenth century, European society had moved far from these tenets. For the “enlightened” eighteenth-century citizen the purpose of life was happiness, not salvation; and the kingdom of heaven had to be realized on earth or not at all. Deism, the belief in a God who created the universe and left it to run on its own laws, became a popular belief among the educated. Some of the French philosophes went beyond Deism to atheism. Many Protestants felt compelled “to find a compromise between Christian beliefs and the Enlightenment’s rationalism, humanitarianism, and tolerance. The result in the next century was Protestant Liberalism.” As the Protestant movement splintered into hundreds of denominations, as the credibility of Christian cosmology diminished with every bout it had with science, as its values were swept aside by a burgeoning industrial age in pursuit of higher standards of living, the nineteenth-century individual was left with no direction in which to turn for the source of his cosmology and values— no direction, that is, except inward.

A small yet momentous shift in human relations occurred when the nineteenth century took the final step from a belief in the primacy of individual religious experience to the belief in the primacy of individual experience, religious or not. What was once only a theological boundary between individual and society—implicit in the Protestant approach to religious experience—now widened to a serious rift. If man’s relationship to the Creator was susceptible of individual interpretation, so was every other aspect of life. Indeed, the notion of Godhood itself, some reasoned, could be interpreted as a projection from humanity outward: the focus and personification of human ideals. In the nineteenth century, deity lost its status as absolute, unalterable, and objectively existing; its nature and very existence became matters to be determined by the individual’s values and imagination. In this sense, among others, the nineteenth century witnessed the culmination of individualism.

With the increasing fragmentation of a once dominant and unifying Christian cosmology the number of alternative cosmologies multiplied at a dizzying rate. European society, in this respect, was reduced to a mass of individuals, each of whom had to piece together his own world of meaning. This meant being fundamentally alone. Under such conditions it is not surprising that “the desire to ‘believe in something’ was characteristic of the Romantics everywhere”:

As the French writer, Madame de Staël, wrote in 1815: “I do not know exactly what we must believe, but I believe that we must believe! The eighteenth century did nothing but deny. The human spirit lives by its beliefs. Acquire faith through Christianity, or through German philosophy, or merely through enthusiasm, but believe in something!”

Notice that Christianity, German philosophy, and enthusiasm had by this time acquired a comparable status.

Such was the environment of the nineteenth-century artist, who found himself cast [Page 13] adrift in a sea of philosophical relativity. Whereas religion had once provided meaning in life for all, the artist—as everyone else—was now forced to find it for himself, and the responsibility rested upon his shoulders alone. In contrast to the Middle Ages, where one was absorbed into Christian cosmology and thereby enveloped in a common world with other members of society, it was now the individual who could adopt or reject any aspect of Christian cosmology for his own purposes. Consequently, when religious institutions and their cosmologies no longer met the individual’s requirements, they could be and were ignored.

Isolation of Artist: Cosmological and Economical. What, then, became of the artist’s general relationship to society in the midst of these developments spanning the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and culminating in the nineteenth? The answer may be sought in the forms of patronage he received. During the Middle Ages the chief patron of the arts was the Church. The Church artist was “At all times and in all places . . . a subservient individual, and the technical description of him as a servant was extended to explain his precise social as well as ecclesiastical grading.” He was thereby a thoroughly integrated member of a religiously based society. From the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance there was a rise in courtly patronage, notably from the Burgundian and Italian courts, as well as the continued patronage of the Church. This rise paralleled the emergence and growth of humanism.

From about 1600 to 1750—the approximate dates of the Baroque era—a gradual shift occurred in the nature of Church patronage. Increasingly, it was religion as a personal experience which motivated artistic endeavor. Evidence of this shift toward personal expression could be found in the Catholic Church as far back as the late 1400s—the last decades before the Protestant Reformation—in the music of Josquin des Prez, for instance. During the Baroque era the shift was most evident in the Protestant Churches (that is, among those which had not, in their aversion to ritual, altogether shunned the arts.) J. S. Bach, for example, while in the service of the Lutheran Church, gave his texts a personal musical interpretation. But it must not be supposed from this that a Baroque artist’s sole purpose was to express his individual feelings. His purpose was, typically, to stir, uplift, and refresh “the spirits” of his audience. He was still an integrated member of the society to whom his work was dedicated, though he addressed it from a more individual point of view.

Meanwhile, courtly or secular interest in the arts continued to rise until it became the dominant form of patronage in the latter eighteenth century, at which time a growing middle class began to claim an increasing measure of the artist’s attention. The careers of Haydn and Mozart were a mixture of commissions for courtly chamber music, on the one hand, and for concert hall music such as operas, concerti, and symphonies, on the other.

In the early nineteenth century, however, the artist’s relationship to society showed signs of profound change. Beethoven, for example, accepted patronage from the privileged class of Vienna, yet resented having to depend upon it. Some of his music had an intensely introspective character while the Ninth Symphony was explicitly addressed to the masses. These are two examples of contradictory tendencies which strained, with increasing severity, the relations between nineteenth-century artists and European society. These contradictions were most evident in the artist’s attitude to the public. For some—such as Verdi—the public was a mass to be respected; for others—such as Wagner —a mass to be conquered. Yet for Schumann and Brahms, in their Lieder, the intended audience was an intimate circle prepared to [Page 14] hear the secrets of the heart. This contradictory and diverse situation in the nineteenth century was a reflection of the fact that the artist, for perhaps the first time in history, was by and large on his own without substantial patronage from either religion or the nobility.

The processes building over several previous centuries culminated in the nineteenth with two revolutions—one in the invisible world of cosmology, the other in the visible world of social structure. The two in combination practically severed the artist from society.

The decline and dissolution of Christian cosmology, on the one hand, forced the individual to develop his own world of meanings, which might or might not correspond to those of other individuals. This would help explain why the Romantic artist felt himself to be an isolated entity, why even the most popular and successful among them seemed possessed by “boundless longing” and “unrequited desire.”

On the other hand, the birth of modern industrialization combined with political revolutions simultaneously to swell the middle class, create a vast new urban working class, and topple the authority of the Church and the nobility. The artist was consequently left without the two main institutions upon whose patronage he had traditionally relied and stood facing a newly created mass public in a world without any dominant unifying cosmology.

During the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and much of the Baroque era, the artist was by and large a workman and servant fully integrated into society. By the time of the Enlightenment his role had evolved to that of a performer, one step removed from the secularized society that expected to be amused, delighted, and occasionally surprised by his inventions. Finally in the nineteenth century he became a remote observer, relating to society from an entirely individual position—whether his work took the form of bombastic appeals, subtle commentary on social conditions, or intimate soliloquy.

Present and Future

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Western artist has inherited in toto the Romantic’s position in society. Though some assistance is offered by foundations to artists in the United States and by government subsidy in Western Europe, such aid does not nearly fulfill the need for employment among artists. Nor does it answer the underlying question of what the artist’s role in twentieth-century society should be. In the words of Aaron Copland: “The worst feature of the composer’s life is that he does not feel himself an integral part of the musical community [not to mention society at large]. There is no deep need for his activities as composer, no passionate concern in each separate work as it is written.” This may well be a reflection of the fact that there is still no socially unifying cosmology in Western Europe or the United States. The artist, therefore, is still very much a remote observer in relation to society. In this respect the twentieth century is an extension of the nineteenth.

Artist in Global Context. Moreover, the artist’s position today is taking on new dimensions. First, science, technology, and industry have spread to all continents of the world and pose a formidable challenge to the traditional cosmology of most cultures. How the artist might relate both to his artistic tradition and to his swiftly changing social environment has thus become an international question.

Second, technology is dissolving the national boundaries of artistic interaction. An artist’s productions or services are becoming available anywhere in the world—that is, the [Page 15] technology of printing, reproduction, communications, and physical transportation has brought the artist within reach of any society. Consequently, his public is potentially worldwide, and the cultures of the world are opening to him as artistic resources.

Third, the advent of mass education is removing the economic basis for some traditional categories of art, such as “courtly” as opposed to “common.” Education is also gradually diminishing the cultural barriers which used to make one people seem alien and inscrutable to another. The combined effect of all this, in the near future, will be to transform utterly the social conditions in which the artist plays his role. As though the matter of relating to his immediate society and tradition were not perplexing enough, the artist now faces the prospect of relating to world society. For the first time in history, he will be in a position to avail himself of the rich variety of art in the world’s cultures and to address his work to a relatively educated public that transcends national boundaries and economic classes.

Possibility of World Culture of the Arts. In other words, the artist’s social context is no longer regional or national but global. The flow of ideas, the influence of styles, the location of the public—in sum, the matrix of artistic interaction—is extending to embrace the entire planet. Evidence of this interaction is growing. African art has had a noticeable impact on sculpture, painting, and fabrics in the West. Composers such as Takemitsu in Japan are working toward a blend of traditional values with Western technique. And schools for the cross-cultural study of art forms—such as the Center for World Music in Berkeley, California—are making their first appearances.

The more people learn to appreciate the ways of other cultures and come to regard the history and traditions of other lands as part of a general human inheritance, the more appropriate it becomes for the artist to learn from and draw upon the art of various cultures and to address his work to a multicultural public. We are envisioning here the possibility of an art whose roots are sunk in more than one continent and whose appreciators may reside on any continent—the beginnings of world culture.

The possibility of this kind of development is explored in Leonard Meyer’s momentous work Music the Arts and Ideas:

If our time appears to be one of “crisis,” it does so largely because we have misunderstood the present situation and its possible consequences. Because a past paradigm has led us to expect a monolithic, all-encompassing style, the cultural situation has seemed bizarre and perplexing. The “crisis” dissolves when the possibility of a continuing stylistic coexistence is recognized and the delights of diversity are admitted. . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

The closing of the geographical-cultural frontier and the substantial completion of our picture of the past have been complemented by revolutionary changes in communication and a staggering increase in our knowledge of other cultures—and theirs about us. . . . The artist need only choose his source of influence.

Indeed, it will apparently be a hallmark of the future that artists be able to choose their influences as well as inherit them. Such latitude of choice, while signaling the advent of a new and potentially brilliant age in human culture, carries with it a host of responsibilities and difficulties which demand immediate attention.

The absence of controls over cross-cultural influence raises the spectre of a world whose traditions are dissolved in the turmoil of a vast and swift homogenizing process. Such a process is, alas, well under way. It must be emphasized that a world culture as envisioned [Page 16] here would represent the very antithesis of such uniformity since it would rely completely on the preservation of cultural diversity and the sustained practice of artistic traditions.

World culture may be understood as the culmination of a historical process which parallels the evolution of society from the tribe to the nation and ultimately to a global commonwealth. Over the ages the currents of cultural interaction have steadily widened their scope as society has been organized in progressively larger units. Whereas exchange once took place primarily on a tribal level, cultural influences in our day sweep across whole nations and continents. Viewed in these terms, the world’s cultures appear as eddies in the currents of ideas and technologies which have wound their age-long courses across the face of the earth. The various systems of an art form around the world may therefore be regarded as comprising a diverse but organically related whole.

It appears that cultural interaction and diffusion before the twentieth century generally followed world trade routes on both land and sea, was imposed through warfare and empire building, or took place by a kind of osmosis across common borders. In the past a culture could usually absorb artistic traits from its neighbors at a manageable pace, in some cases requiring centuries. Today, however, the world’s cultures have been suddenly and intensively exposed to a welter of influences. Consequently, cultures everywhere appear to be undergoing an identity crisis as they seek to reconcile their relatively insular past with their new position in a neighborhood of nations. Meanwhile the oral traditions of many cultures have been disrupted. If the tragedy of their effacement from the human heritage is to be averted, decisive action must be taken to ensure the continued practice of such traditions.

Provided the world’s peoples uphold their indigenous cultures and eventually reconcile them with the modern environment, artistic influences will be able to flow throughout the world without posing a threat to cultural identity. With the arts thus interacting on a global scale a world culture can be expected eventually to emerge—not in place of, but in addition to, the enduring traditional cultures. In its maturity a world culture of the arts would differ from cultural relations of the past in two important ways. First, the identities of its traditional cultures would be stabilized and their relationships adjusted; contact among them would be full and continuous. Second, it would be an all-embracing culture characterized by the hybrid creations of its artists. Present-day cultures, themselves the product of regional interaction, would in their turn provide the rich soil and divers materials out of which an overarching world culture could grow—a new creation belonging to all its constituents yet having a life of its own.

A Two-Fold Challenge

Neceessity of Philosophic Premises. It is evident that a world culture of the arts would develop gradually and would require centuries to mature. Its beginnings, however, are possible in the immediate present since the requisite technology and conditions already exist. Thus two courses are now open to the artist: to preserve and extend the artistic tradition of his own culture or to take part directly in the birth of world culture. The two pursuits are not mutually exclusive but rather mutually supportive. The former artist, by sustaining the life and vigor of established traditions, provides the material (if not also the model and inspiration) for the development of world culture. The latter artist, by depending on established cultures for the material he synthesizes, indirectly supports the continued vitality of those cultures. Furthermore, the two pursuits will have something fundamental in common. Artists who practice within established traditions and those who work toward world culture must both take account of the fact that they now exist in a global setting. Artur Rubinstein and Ravi Shankar are examples of artists [Page 17] who, having mastered the traditions of their own cultures, can now share those traditions with an international public.

Today’s global context has forced the matter of the relationship between artist and society into more abstract terms. It is not only a matter of what role the artist is to play among members of his own culture but also a question of how he and a worldwide public are to relate as members of the human race—with something, presumably, in common. This is especially important to the artist working toward world culture inasmuch as it will be impossible, in time, to attribute his products to any one culture. They will rather be a unique blend of whatever materials he has drawn upon. His work, then, will be addressed to a level of experience which is common to all people, as distinguished from the characteristics which separate humanity into cultural groups. Thus the artist must now formulate a philosophic basis upon which to relate to a richly varied public. His basis must attempt to specify the common denominators of that public, if he is to succeed in communicating.

Relation between Social Environment and Art Work. At this point it is necessary to introduce a concept which, one hopes, would validate in the eyes of the skeptical the assertion that the relationship between artist and society must be conceived in philosophical terms. There is a strong tendency in contemporary art criticism to approach, analyze, and value a work of art purely in terms of its style and structure. This approach is often called “formalism.” From the formalist point of view, communication in art is essentially a matter of the participant’s recognition of and involvement with the terms of a style as they appear in a particular work of art. To the degree that the participant is familiar and involved there is communication. From this point of view philosophy would seem irrelevant to the communication between artist and public. In fact, it could be objected that a world culture of the arts would be impossible, insofar as it would generate a variety of styles too bewildering for any public to assimilate. The possibility of world culture thus hinges on whether art might convey something in addition to its purely structural aspect.

In formalism the notion that art conveys anything except the terms of its style is considered relatively unimportant if not altogether deceptive. In the painting of a tree, the formalistic approach would value the relationships of shapes, colors, and textures employed, while assigning little if any importance to the fact that the painter chose to represent a tree. The combination of shapes, colors, hues, and textures in the visual arts, or of duration, pitch, volume, and timbre in music, constitute what D. W. Prall calls the aesthetic “surface” of art. For the formalist it is the artist’s handling of this “surface” that matters in the visual arts, not the “thing represented”; the composer’s ability to render musical surface into engaging and elegant structures, not the moods or images the music may connote.

Art as a Manifestation of Cosmology. Much of this is valid within the sphere of formal analysis. However, within a larger sphere art can be shown to communicate something in addition to the terms of its style. What that something might be is indicated by the general agreement among artists, theorists, and historians that social environments have, over the centuries, exerted influence of some [Page 18] kind over the “surface” and syntax of artists’ work. Leonard B. Meyer, in Emotion and Meaning in Music, gives an example from an ostensibly formalistic point of view showing that society can influence the artist’s stylistic choices in a negative way. The example is that the restrictions placed by the medieval Church on the embellishment of Gregorian melody pressured the Church musician into experimenting with new ways to embellish, which ultimately led to the creation of polyphonic music. Outside such negative or limiting influences from society, however, the formalist point of view envisions the artist as a free and independent agent, constructing artistic styles more or less as he wills. This notion of the relation between social conditions and artistic style is summed up by Alan Walker with respect to music: “history merely offers an ever-changing series of alternatives —political, social, economic—through which music might, or might not, develop. The [composer’s] final choice is . . . always creatively determined.”

Yet it is also generally agreed, at least among nonformalists, that something of the “character” and “temperament” of the artist’s historical period is usually evident in his work. Exponents of this point of view imply that social conditions have a positive influence on artistic style, that society is in some way a determinant of “surface” and syntax in the arts. D. J. Grout writes in his History of Western Music:

By the end of the thirteenth century . . . this neatly closed medieval universe was beginning to dissolve, to lose both its inner coherence and its power to dominate events. Signs of the dissolution appeared in the motet [a musical form] as in a mirror: gradual weakening of the authority of the rhythmic modes, relegation of the Gregorian tenor to a purely formal function, exaltation of the triplum to the status of a solo voice against the accompanying lower parts.

The above notion of the relation between social environment and finished artistic product seems opposed to the one described by Alan Walker. Grout posits that social conditions are in some way a determinant since they are clearly reflected in the style of an art work. Walker maintains that the artist is more or less free to fashion styles as he sees fit. Both points of view are correct, however, and not mutually contradictory. They simply focus on opposite ends of a single process. If an intermediary were found which could translate prevailing social conditions into stylistic inclinations and preferences at work in the creative act, the two notions would be connected and reconciled. That intermediary is none other than the cosmology assimilated by the artist from his culture. At the heart of that cosmology lie philosophical views concerning the nature of human existence, its place and its purpose in the universe. From it the artist derives an understanding of what his position and purpose are in society, and on that basis he relates to his social environment.

Thus it is evident that philosophical questions play an important role in determining not only the artist’s social position but even the materials he selects and the way he fashions them. I have stated earlier that changes in the artist’s social role reflect changes in cosmology. The relation between the two may now be delineated. So long as a prevailing cosmology views society as a corporate organism whose members derive their well-being from service to the whole of society, the artist sees it as his purpose to serve the whole by affirming, celebrating, and communicating the cosmology which unifies that society, integrates the artist within it, and gives him a raison d’être. This is as true of the totem pole carver as it was of J. S. [Page 19] Bach. The artist, under such circumstances, sees to it that his work is in every detail an embodiment of the common beliefs, attitudes, and values he wishes to convey. (It is under these conditions that the overwhelming preponderance of the world’s art has been produced up to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.) It may, therefore, be asserted that the very structure, syntax, and style of art is a vivid manifestation of the artist’s cosmology. When that cosmology is the prevailing one in society, the artist’s work speaks for his entire culture. Seen from this point of view, the evolution of style in the arts of Europe or any other civilization has not been at all capricious or arbitrary but a full embodiment of the evolution of cosmology.

For evidence let us retrace the periods covered in the opening discussion. At the close of the Baroque era and throughout the later eighteenth century, the Enlightenment advanced a cosmology which deposed deity from its regulatory position and substituted “the laws of nature”; exalted reason, order, structure, and clarity as attributes of natural law; implied that the human being could ultimately be understood in terms of these laws; and tended to view society as a collection of individuals whose best interests were served by working for the common good. Dwelling in this world of meanings, the artist became an exponent of a cosmology which singled him out as an individual yet related him to others through a common interest in the welfare of society. To take music again as an example, Grout shows clearly how eighteenth-century composers of the Enlightenment, such as Haydn, Mozart, or Glück, embodied contemporary ideals in every aspect of their music from local texture to overall structure. Furthermore, one of the most striking aspects of late eighteenth-century music is that its process is governed throughout by dramatic principles of conflict and contrast, large-scale tension, and eventual resolution. Yet why should music of the classical period be dramatic? To what aspect of the composer’s cosmology can that be said to relate? It appears that the dramatic principle in classical music is a direct manifestation of the composer’s role, his position in the world—as defined by the prevailing cosmology of the Enlightenment—not as one who summons his fellow believers to a celebration of their mystic unity, but as a separate individual set before a secular audience to perform, amuse, tease, and delight. This is not to deny the pathos achieved by the masters of classical music but to emphasize that theirs is always the self-conscious pathos of one who is set apart, who is aware of being observed, and who may without warning switch to a passage of utterly different character to suit his dramatic purposes. All of this was implied in the characterization of the artist’s social role in the latter eighteenth century as a performer: one who spends his entire career on an invisible stage, whose art is governed by dramatic principles and imbued with the aura of theater.

If our hypothesis is valid, the relationships involved in every century prior to the nineteenth may be schematized as shown in the diagram on the next page. This diagram, though simplistic, gives the essential outlines of that “single process” referred to earlier. Grout compared the finished art work with its social ambience and the cosmology of its day and found striking parallels. Walker followed the creative process from stylistic tendencies to finished art work and concluded that the artist is virtually free. Missing was an explanation that would account for the parallels [Page 20] between the artist’s social environment and his finished product, without denying the free and creative element in his work. Viewing the prevailing cosmology as a mediator between social conditions and finished art work provides such an explanation.

To one side of the diagram there is a mutual influence between the prevailing cosmology of a culture and its social conditions. For example, the cosmology of the medieval Church had an influence on the structure of medieval society, while warfare and plague had a disintegrating effect on Church cosmology in the fourteenth century. To the other side of the diagram, the prevailing cosmology directly determines the artist’s social role. In centuries prior to the nineteenth, the artist’s apprehension of his social role, combined with explicit instructions he may have received from his patron, determined his stylistic tendencies—that is, once the artist’s purpose and the nature of his service were defined, he selected materials and fashioned them according to the kind of experience he intended to engender. The implication is that the artist thought in terms of an intimate relation between the finished art work and the public with whom it was to interact. (This process of interaction will be taken up later.) It was through his finished products, after all, that the artist related to society, thereby closing the cycle of influences.

What became of this cycle in the nineteenth century? The most consequential development for the artist was the final dissolution of Christian cosmology as a dominant and integrating power in European society. Subsequently, the artist was forced to piece together a private world of meanings. A schema of this situation might look as shown in the diagram on the following page. The cosmological “bubble” of the previous diagram, which sufficed both society and artist, has here fragmented into the various private cosmologies of society, including that of the artist. The cycle of influences was thus broken, and communication now became one-way. The artist could attempt to relate to society, but society no longer had a dominant cosmology through which to relate to the artist and define a social role for him. In this sense, the artist was fundamentally alone. Prior to the nineteenth century, the artist’s social role had been defined for him by the prevailing cosmology, and his understanding of that role acquired specificity with the assignments charged to him by his patrons. At the other extreme, with neither an a priori cosmology nor a patron to tell him what his social role was, the nineteenth-century artist had nowhere to turn for an answer but [Page 21] inward. It is true that a figure such as Beethoven, who “took up a position as an individual facing the world, and often even opposing the world,” soon became “a model for the Romantic movement.” The point, though, is that each artist saw in his model and in history what he wanted. In the final analysis, the only way to determine his ideal relationship to society was to base it on his own social experience. This meant, essentially, having nothing to rely upon but his self-image, which thereby became synonymous with his self-proclaimed position and role in society. In this way, it was now the artist’s self-image which would determine his stylistic tendencies and ultimately become manifest in the finished art work.

The above arguments are offered in support of the idea that art communicates not only its structure but the significance of that structure in relation to a larger world of meanings. If this is so, then it is possible that the cultures of the world would not find the variety of styles produced by a world culture too bewildering to assimilate, so long as the “larger world of meaning” associated with the art work had something in common with the cosmology of the culture which received it.

Furthermore, the idea that art communicates significance as well as structure is not limited in applicability. Returning to the first example, imagine that the painting of the tree were a cypress by Van Gogh. In terms of this discussion the most important thing would not be Van Gogh’s choice of the cypress as a subject, or what it may have symbolized for him privately but the way he rendered it in the painting. The thickness of the brush strokes, the concentration and juxtaposition of colors, the “rhythm” of the lines and spaces—all manifest and communicate not only their structural relationships but a way of being in the world that is decidedly Van Gogh. This would also apply to nonrepresentational or “abstract” paintings, for the point is that communication occurs largely through the materials of art, regardless of the existence of a subject.

It should now be clear that every artist— to the extent that he is concerned about his relationship to society, the impact of that relationship upon his art, and the impact of his art upon society—must carefully consider the set of philosophic premises which underlies and mediates these influences. This is especially true for the artist working toward world culture, whose undertaking presents him with enormous challenges from the outset.

[Page 22] Two Challenges. Inasmuch as technology has now expanded the artist’s social environment to global dimensions, the first challenge facing every artist is to determine a philosophic basis upon which to relate to that global setting. His premises must be universal enough to include all the richly varied peoples who constitute his public—that is, they must specify the common denominators of that public.

The terms in which the artist is to relate to society having been decided upon, his second challenge is to put the relationship implied by those terms into practice. This he should try to do even though society be in no position, at present, to relate to him in the same terms.

The theoretical first challenge—to select philosophic premises—is essentially the same and equally demanding both for the artist who wishes to operate within established tradition and for the one working toward world culture. (The two shall hereafter be called “the traditional artist” and “the global artist,” respectively.) The practical second challenge—to translate the philosophic terms into a working relationship with society —is quite different for the two kinds of artists. For the “traditional” artist in most parts of the world (except Europe and North America) it means relating to society through styles which are already generally accepted and understood. For him the challenge is essentially no different from (and no easier than) the one faced by artists of his culture in previous times. For the “global” artist, however, there is much more to this practical side of his relationship with society. His aim is to be able to draw materials from divers cultural sources and synthesize them into a coherent and intelligible whole. Before he can begin to do this, however, he will require an analytic approach through whose concepts he could distinguish between the indigenous and the universal aspects of his art form as found in each culture.

A successful answer to the above challenges and objectives would constitute the theoretical foundations of a world culture in the arts. The remainder of this essay will attempt, however inadequately, to present such an answer.

Part II: A Response

Basic Premises

“TO WHAT END am I engaged as an artist, and for whom?” The question is raised every time there is a major change in the cosmology of a society. It is the central question facing every artist today, and must be answered in a way which will enable him to relate to a global environment.

It has been observed that the cosmology of a society defines the artist’s social role. At the heart of the cosmology lie basic philosophic beliefs about the nature of the human being. Thus the question of the artist’s role is in essence a question about human nature, while a cosmology is in essence an attempt to describe that nature. This is why the question of the artist’s role recurs whenever the cosmology changes. The modern artist lives in a world which is physically connected by a network of transportation and communications yet utterly fragmented in terms of cosmology. If he is to relate to the emerging world public, he must start with a universally applicable concept of human nature.

Contemporary developments in the field of education appear to point the way. Attention [Page 23]

[Page 24] has recently been called to the fact that education cannot properly utilize the varied and abundant knowledge available from the sciences until it formulates a philosophic conception of human nature within whose framework it could assimilate and organize such specialized information. The Anisa Model of education offers one such formulation. The philosophy of the Anisa Model posits that man is distinguished from all other known forms of life by his ability to project, actualize, and transcend himself. Anisa describes human consciousness as actuated by the capacities to know and to love and develops a “philosophy of organism” to account for the ways these two powers interact to facilitate the learning process and the consequent release of human potential. (To come to grips with the vast implications of the knowing and loving capacities, however, one must be referred to the body of philosophy on which the Anisa Model rests.) Insofar as the process of projection, actualization, and transcendence is unique to man, and since it cannot unequivocally be attributed to laws that operate in the material world, the philosophy of the Anisa Model attributes it to the operation of a principle of higher order which it names “spirit.”

Universal Human Capacities: The Global Artist’s Touchstone. The conception of human nature as a process may be very useful to the artist. First, its dynamics are defined in terms of universals. The capacities to know and to love may be regarded as intrinsically human and, therefore, applicable to people of any culture. Second, the operation of the knowing and loving capacities may be objectively observed and studied—that is, the interaction between a work of art and a participant can be analyzed in terms of the operation of these two powers. It is, therefore, in the artist’s interest to consider the highly specialized ways in which the capacities to know and to love are at work in the perception and appreciation of his particular art form.

The artist’s role in a world environment would already be half defined if he reached some conclusion about the nature of the being for whom he produces his work. Regardless of his beliefs concerning the ultimate origins of human powers, he could, by focusing upon the knowing and loving capacities as defined in the Anisa Model, approach the world public in terms of its manifest universal characteristics and could view his work and the art of the world’s cultures in light of the operation of these powers. In so doing he would be enabled to close the theoretical cycle of influences leading from society to cosmology to artist to finished work and back to society.

The Artist’s Responsibility

Interaction between Art and Participant. Insofar as the artist’s work interacts at all with a participant’s knowing and loving capacities, it will necessarily have some effect upon the functioning and development of those capacities. Insofar as the artist, in the process of such interaction, communicates not only the structure of his work but its significance as well, he indicates to the participant what his values are. In other words, through the arrangement of shapes and colors on a canvas, or of sounds in time, or of events on a stage, the artist indicates what he believes is worthy of knowing and loving. For example, Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe, in my opinion, communicates not only an extensive structure with its myriad details of information but also the value its maker placed upon the sensuous. If we may assume that an individual’s values are subject to influence and modification, all art may be regarded as [Page 25] an influence upon the participant’s values, without being the least bit didactic, moralistic, or “message-oriented” in its intent. It exerts this influence by virtue of the fact that the artist’s cosmology and values are manifest in the very material and structure of an art work and may either confirm or conflict with the participant’s values as he perceives the art’s significance in the context of his own cosmology. Perhaps this is a basis for the ancient belief that art has an influence upon character. That the artist bears some kind of responsibility for such influence would seem a necessary consequence, but what his responsibility might be is not easily seen.

Artist Responsible for Intention. One traditional assumption about responsibility in general may be stated as follows: “to be responsible for something is the same as to be its cause.” If this assumption were justifiable, it would appear that artists cannot be held responsible for the effect which art has upon a participant or the public at large. For it could be maintained that, since the work of art (not the artist) is the immediate cause of whatever alteration occurs in the participant’s state of consciousness and hierarchy of values, it is, therefore, the work of art—not the artist—which is responsible. This assumption about the nature of responsibility, however, is challenged by John Wild in his book Existence and the World of Freedom:

Whether it is internal or external, a cause cannot gain any distance from itself. . . . [Its] operation is neither responsible nor irresponsible. It belongs to an entirely different genus which we may call pure action without a meaning (or lack of meaning) of its own.

A cause does not act for anything to anything. It simply acts. It does not carry a meaning, and is not answerable to itself or to anyone. It simply produces an effect.

For an example of the distinction Wild makes between causality and responsibility, consider the case of a person whose home is in the desert. A wanderer comes to the door in great thirst, and the dweller responds with water to alleviate the other’s need. Though the water is the cause of the restoration, it is the giver who is responsible. In the same way, whenever an art work may in some sense cause an effect in the participant, it is the artist who is, in some sense and to some degree, responsible. But for what exactly is he accountable, and to whom?

In cases of responsibility, this for-to structure is always found. The child is responsible for his public behavior to his parents; the Secretary of Defense is responsible for the acts of his Department to the President, who is responsible for the global administration of national policy to the nation as a whole, including those citizens living today and their descendents. The mature person is responsible for his acts to his conscience. or as we say, to himself.

If art were a simple matter of cause and effect, one might conclude that the artist is responsible to the participant for the effect his work produces upon the participant’s capacities and values. But the relationship is not so simple. The work of art does not act upon the public; for this would imply that the latter were a neutral object, a kind of massive knee receiving taps from the artist’s hammer. Rather, the artist’s work interacts [Page 26] with the individual participant—with his capacities, beliefs, expectations, and values. In other words, the artist places an object of aesthetic experience into the social world— whether a dance, a poem, a building, or a piece of music. And in this object a structure, a cosmology, and its values are manifest; but the degree to which they are communicated depends upon the capacity, training, and receptivity of the participant. Since the latter conditions vary widely from one participant to the next, it is evident that a work of art does not interact with everyone in the same way, nor can the aesthetic experience to which it gives rise have an identical effect upon all participants. The artist offers to society a catalyst whose effect depends upon the presence of requisite conditions in the participant. How then can he be responsible for an act initiated by himself but concluded by others—an act whose outcome he cannot predict with certainty? Does this mean that the artist’s responsibility cannot be defined in any broad sense, that it is after all an irrelevant element in the larger issue of his relationship to society? Certainly not. The question of responsibility is central to the definition of any social role, and the problems it poses are really no more difficult for the artist than for other members of society.

Being responsible for an action does not depend upon the absolute certainty of its effects. The artist may not disclaim all responsibility to society simply because he is unable to predict perfectly the effect his work will induce. The diplomat, too, is uncertain of the end of his labors. He cannot expect to be absolutely successful, yet he is still held responsible for his attitudes, his intention, and attempts to facilitate communication between two groups of people. How this may be translated into the artist’s situation is indicated by Roger Sessions: “What the human responsibility of the artist means is above all awareness of the human condition, a common involvement and a common stake in it.” Like the host with the thirsty guest, the artist is responsible inasmuch as he is aware of the human condition of the one to whom he offers his services. Although he cannot completely predict the outcome of his actions (his art), the fact that he is “aware of a common involvement in the human condition” renders him able to respond and hence responsible. We would say that the host was responsible not only for the act of giving water but for the meaning that act held for him: responsible, that is, for his ability and his intention to help. Likewise, the artist is responsible to society for the experience he intends to induce in the participant. And the essential attributes of that experience, it appears, are its structural quality and the beliefs and values which it manifests.

Basic Premises as Source of Values. If the artist is responsible for the choice of values to be conveyed by his work, he is again obliged to consider carefully the philosophic premises upon which he bases his relationship to society, since from them values are derived. For example, given the premise that the human being is universally characterized by the knowing and loving capacity, finding appropriate values becomes a matter of determining what is worthy of knowing and loving. To determine this the artist must relate human existence to some kind of cosmological schema. The construction of a world-understanding or cosmology may seem a forbidding venture, yet it is actually a continuous process and “an essential part of the living of life with which every man and woman is engaged. . . . It occurs throughout our waking hours as we eat, work, play, converse with others, and feel our way through life.” Thus the artist’s responsibility to society simply requires that he become conscious of the evolving cosmology in [Page 27] which he lives and make conscious decisions on that basis about the nature of the experience he wishes the participant to undergo.

In the process of developing a world-understanding from which to derive values, the artist may turn to and benefit from religious cosmologies already formulated and having influence in cultures past and present. Such cosmologies are found, for example, in the Bible, the Qur’án, and the Bahá’í Writings. All three indicate that the powers of human consciousness are the creation of a transcendent Being; that human existence is related to this Being inasmuch as man is invested with the potential to manifest the attributes of his Creator; that human life finds its fulfillment through consciously entering into relation with this transcendent Being; and, therefore, that the object of all knowledge and love is ultimately divine.

The above beliefs and their derivative values are found in varying degrees and forms in the traditions of many cultures around the world and are abundantly evident in their arts, including those of Europe through the eighteenth century. In a culture where they are current beliefs, they become the standard whereby artist and public may evaluate the nature and quality of the experience engendered by a work of art.

At present, however, such beliefs are not prevalent in Western Civilization and are rapidly giving way to other beliefs and values throughout the rest of the world. The once dominant cosmologies of cultures around the globe are undergoing the kind of fragmentation which occurred in Europe in the nineteenth century. If at this moment in history a universal cosmology were to take hold and flourish in all cultures of the world, incorporating the above beliefs into a vision commensurate with the knowledge and experience of twentieth-century man, it would provide a great foundation on which a world culture of the arts could grow. Were such a cosmology to be offered by religion, it would have to be a religion committed to the elimination of cultural prejudices; capable of galvanizing the aspirations of the earth’s various peoples, while respecting and preserving their cultural uniqueness; compatible with the methods and findings of science; and competent in the solution of worldwide problems. Unless or until a universal cosmology fostered by such a religion takes hold in the world, artists must continue to formulate individual cosmologies which they hope will accord with some of the beliefs and values of their public.

Society and Its Artists: A Mutual Responsibility

THE OPTIMUM realization of the relationship outlined in the foregoing pages assumes a social environment wherein the artist has a well-integrated role. At present he has no such thing. Alienation, a condition which the Romantic artist called freedom and which he bore with a mixture of pride, arrogance, and anguish, is today thoroughly accepted in Western Europe and North America by artist and public alike—as though fate had sealed the artist’s role as a fringe benefit of the industrial age, a curious onlooker from the wings of society. The fundamental reason for this state of separation is that Western Europe, North America, and a number of cultures recently exposed to advanced technology no longer have a prevailing and unifying cosmology through which the artist can be integrated into society. So long as such a state continues, there appears to be little society could do in a concerted way to fulfill its part of the relationship with its artists.

Nonetheless, in anticipation of a time when world society will have a unifying cosmology, it is proposed that an ideal relationship between society and its artists would require the reestablishment of an integral social role for the artist to play, a guarantee of his right to self-expression and stylistic innovation, the creation of educational programs aimed at sustaining and understanding the arts of diverse cultures, and the inclusion within those programs of a curriculum on art analysis and criticism. By the same token, the [Page 28] artist would have to relinquish his self-image as a law unto himself, and instead regard himself as a servant and wholeheartedly reenter social existence. The concept of the artist as one who offers a service does not inevitably lead to the suppression of originality. It means simply that the problems to which he applies his originality can be of interest not only to himself but to the society for whom he works. In such relationship both society and its artists may find contentment.

A Method Proposed

Need for Distinguishing Indigenous from Universal. Once he has determined the premises upon which to base his relation to society, the artist working toward world culture comes to the second challenge: to find a way to gather artistic materials from different cultural sources and blend them, producing hybrid works of art which could in turn be offered to a multicultural public. In order to meet this objective the artist must have some means of distinguishing between the indigenous and the universal aspects of his art form as it exists among the various cultures. If he cannot make this distinction, his art is unlikely to communicate on “a level of experience common to all people” and runs a high risk of mingling incompatible ingredients. His result might then be a superficial pastiche whose lack of discrimination would rightly arouse the indignation of “traditional” artists. (An example of an incompatible mixture, on the one hand, would be a musical composition attempting to combine the vocal style of southern India with the harmonic practice of eighteenth century classical style in Europe. On the other hand, certain aspects of classical harmonic practice have proven compatible with the characteristics of African rhythm and have produced fascinating blends in Caribbean music.)

Possible Existence of Universal Principles in Each Art Form. At present the differences between cultures are generally more apparent than their similarities. However, there is reason to believe that any given art form, once it is intensively studied and compared among cultures, would gradually reveal principles inherent in it and operative throughout the world. In other words, for each art form there may exist, in all cultures, a distinct body of principles governing its perception and involved in its appreciation. As such, these universal principles would be highly abstract, transcending the world’s myriad variations in the materials and styles of an art form. The search for and articulation of such principles would provide the “global” artist with a means for discriminating between the indigenous and universal aspects of his art form.

Some groundbreaking work in this direction has already been done in painting and music. For example, in Art and Illusion E. H. Gombrich develops a paradigm for the role of stereotyping in the process of visual perception. He shows that the concept applies equally well to everything from Egyptian hieroglyphics to Chinese landscapes and European portraits. In Emotion and Meaning in Music, Meyer discusses the perception of and response to music in terms of the psychological theory of emotions. However, both treatises deal with the culturally determined aspect of the participant’s interaction with a work of art. Though the possibility of “natural” or innate factors is acknowledged, the authors’ primary concern is to demonstrate the role of stylistic learning in their respective arts. As such their work provides important conceptual tools for understanding how cultures differ in comparable art forms.

Donald Ferguson, in Music as Metaphor, studies music in other terms. His treatise is important in that it provides some preliminary tools for the analysis and criticism of [Page 29] music in relation to the listener’s life experiences. Insofar as there are some aspects of human experience which are apparently universal, the application of Ferguson’s theory to music of different cultures, and the extension of his approach to other art forms, may produce important insights as to how cultures are alike in their respective arts.

Universal Principles Articulated in Music. In short, what we have called “universal principles” may already have been found in the case of music. Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music develops the principle of syntactic communication based on learned pattern responses —a principle at work in the music of all cultures, serving to differentiate them from one another. Ferguson’s Music as Metaphor advances a different but related principle: music as the embodiment of a valuation of experience, on which grounds a group of cultures might be found to be quite alike.

Both the above principles involve the operation of musical meaning. There appears to be general agreement today that meaning in music is of two basic kinds. One consists of formal relationships within the substance of the music as perceived by the listener, which we may call “embodied meaning.” The other consists of relationships connecting musical gesture as a kind of aural symbol with that for which it is supposed to stand. A simple example is the high flute trill which is often taken to “mean” a bird call. This kind of musical meaning may be called “referential.” Among many writers on music it is agreed that “embodied” meaning is relevant to the analysis and criticism of music in that it can be found in the material of the music itself, can be safely assumed to be the composer’s intention, and can be isolated, discussed, and evaluated in relation to the style of the entire work. In contrast, “referential” meaning, it is generally agreed, does nothing more than reduce the music to a formula that signifies an object or idea and distracts the listener from the syntactic continuity of the music at the risk of triggering a chain of mental associations and fantasies that could suspend his listening altogether. Distinguished contemporary composers, critics, and philosophers alike have emphasized that relevant meaning in music is to be found by turning to the musical material itself. (The vigor of their denunciation of referential meaning, a kind of meaning which reached a height in Romantic program music and program notes, suggests that we are still living in a time of reaction to the Romantic period.)

Ferguson’s Music as Metaphor is probably misunderstood; the title alone seems to spell “referential meaning.” However, the work is important because it does not deal with referential meaning but with some other kind. Whether or not one concurs in the opinions presented in his final chapter, it should be acknowledged that Ferguson’s analysis of “expressive content” in music makes no use of programmatic symbolism but deals consistently and intelligently with musical material itself.

Thus it should become evident that the principles advanced by Meyer and Ferguson are not only compatible but are intimately related. Meyer is dealing with syntactic or “embodied” meaning within music, Ferguson with meaning between musical and nonmusical experience. If it is possible to identify a common ground for these two kinds of meaning in music, a similar ground should be found to exist in other arts as well. Such a common ground would clarify the terms in which “universal principles” might be sought in each of the arts. The remaining discussion, therefore, focuses upon music as a medium for the interaction of processes that may be found at work in other art forms.

[Page 30] The Plausibility of Universal Principles

Search for Common Ground between Two Kind:S of Musical Meaning. Both Ferguson and Meyer explore the experience of emotion in relation to the material of music. To define a working relation between Ferguson’s kind of meaning, on the one hand, and embodied meaning, on the other, it is necessary to examine the processes whereby music arouses emotion.

In Leonard Meyer’s distinguished work Emotion and Meaning in Music the listener’s affective response to music is investigated in terms of musical syntax. The listener, through repeated exposure to a Style of music, grasps the probability relationships within the style. For example, he learns that it is highly probable for a classical piece, say by Mozart, to begin and end in the same key. When Mozart’s piece is about to come to an end, he employs devices which prepare the listener to hear the final key, thus activating a “tendency to respond” to the expected resolution. If Mozart suddenly diverts the music from its apparent goal by sending it to another key, the listener’s “tendency to respond” is arrested; he is forced out of his comfortable expectation and must consciously come to terms with Mozart’s unexpected deviant. In the process, affect is aroused.

Meyer bases his study on the assumption that “Emotion or affect is aroused when a tendency to respond is arrested or inhibited.” However, the above is not necessarily the only process by which emotion is aroused. By applying Meyer’s thesis to daily experience, one can reach the conclusion that other processes are possible. The application is complex but necessary if we are to reconcile Meyer’s “embodied” meaning with Ferguson’s meaning in relation to daily experience. If the two kinds of meaning can be reconciled, the common elements and the differentia of music from one culture to the next may be seen in mutual relation.

Psychological Theory of Emotion: Applied to Common Experience. In the process of “daily experience” human consciousness assimilates information received from the senses, derives abstractions therefrom, and makes predictions on that basis about the immediate and distant future. The future holds a complex of possibilities of which only some will be realized; the individual employs predictions in order to exert influence on the outcome of a given situation, while aware that his predictions are based on probability and not on absolute certainty. We are thus dealing with two conditions basic to consciousness. First, it is continuous; the individual’s perception of a given situation is modified from moment to moment as its possibilities alter their probability relationships. Second, the events to transpire within the individual’s lifespan are not certain, whether from moment to moment or from year to year. The length of lifespan is itself unknown. These two conditions —continuity and uncertainty—combine to ensure that human consciousness is always assimilating, abstracting, predicting—that it is, in short, perpetually in a state of anticipation.

The above are the conditions under which emotion, according to Meyer’s thesis, should be aroused. To follow the theory through, emotion is aroused when a tendency to respond is arrested or inhibited. And a tendency to respond is “‘a pattern reaction that operates, or tends to operate, when activated, in an automatic way.’” Pattern reactions of every kind are necessary for negotiating the contingencies of daily life. They have clear structure and temporal order, and they are performed in countless numbers every hour. To the degree to which they are performed automatically, without interruption, they remain unconscious. [Page 31] Whenever arrested or inhibited, however, the response becomes conscious and affect is aroused. The responses required by life range all the way from the tiny and easy—such as tying a shoelace—to the long-range and extremely complex—such as raising a child or acquiring a profession. While challenges of the latter kind obviously involve those of the former kind, the latter are more than a mere composite of all the minute and simple details out of which they are formed. Rather, when scanned as a large-scale challenge extended over several years, they are seen to have a gestalt shaped by their characteristic conditions and may be regarded as single, complex but integrated stimuli. The response made to them may, therefore, be regarded as a single, complex, and integrated response.

In short, stimuli and pattern reactions in daily life appear to be hierarchically arranged in levels of complexity and duration. Given the entire set of people who tie their shoelaces, among them will be some who lead “the life of a parent” or “the life of a student.” These latter are examples of challenges or stimuli which, due to their great extension and complexity, are bound to inhibit and modify the individual’s reaction patterns on thousands of occasions and in as many ways, and which hold the entire long-range response in suspension until it is completed after the passage of several years. Consequently, emotion of some kind should be in a state of arousal throughout the entire period.

It is thus surprising that Meyer should say there are “non-emotional states of mind,” if by this he means emotionless states. Following the premises of the psychological theory used by Meyer, it appears that human consciousness is of necessity imbued with the emotion generated from its constant state of anticipation. So long as the mind interacts with its environment, and so long as that interaction is in process and unconsummated, emotion is generated. And when, except at the point of mental death, is interaction with the environment consummated? It seems a necessary consequent of the psychological theory that emotion be regarded as the continuous concomitant of mental activity.

We are confronted here with the possibility that emotion exists on a spectrum from undifferentiated to highly differentiated. For if emotion is a concomitant of consciousness, there can be no nonemotional states of mind—only more and less conspicuous emotions. Perhaps “undifferentiated emotion”— in contrast to highly defined and directed affects such as glee, disdain, or jealousy—is unobtrusive and continuous: the quiet hum of the mind. It may be regarded as the very energy that propels the mind through its myriad interactions with the daily world.

It appears, therefore, that (1) there cannot be such a thing as an emotionless state of mind, insofar as emotion is both the product and the fuel of consciousness; and that (2) emotion ranges in a spectrum from undifferentiated to highly differentiated, depending upon the intensity and complexity of the stimulus. Thus the distinction Meyer makes between emotional and nonemotional states of mind can be understood as a distinction between states of mind whose concomitant emotions are relatively diffetentiated or undifferentiated, hence conspicuous or inconspicuous.

“Identitive Meaning.” This may seem a moot point, but it is necessary to our purpose. It means that the interaction of syntax with learned expectation, integral though it is to the experience of music, is not necessarily the sole source of affect. If emotion comes into being not only because of tendency-inhibition but exists on some level as a necessary and continuous aspect of consciousness, it would appear that the latter form is emotion in its primary undifferentiated state, from which it [Page 32] is aroused by specific stimuli into a highly differentiated state. Given these conditions, it is possible that emotion is also aroused or differentiated by some kind of process other than tendency-inhibition. And it is this possibility that provides the common grounds for musical meaning as embodied and as related to daily experience. In other words, undifferentiated emotion might be regarded as a common ground, from which differentiated emotion is aroused both by syntactic processes involving embodied musical meaning and by some other process involving what we have called meaning in relation to daily experience. To see how the latter kind of meaning operates, we turn now to Ferguson’s Music as Metaphor. He writes:

All the arts strive to evoke in the beholder’s mind an image, not of fact as it is, but of experience as it is lived. Music, if it is to achieve the same end, must evoke in the listener a conviction of reality. But experience can be distilled from nothing else than fact, and music . . . can no more escape dependence on this ultimate basis than can the other arts.

All art is thus an abstraction. Viewed as the unique embodiment of a distillation of fact into experience, it will appear as an abstraction drawn out of experience. . . . The profounder the experience—judged by those standards of significance which intelligence can erect, and of course assuming that the artist’s distillation (or abstraction) is adequate—the more significant the art-work.

The treatise goes on to define “the actual elements upon whose presence and whose normal functioning” music depends for its ability to convey a valuation of experience. Ferguson names these elements “tone stress” and “ideal motion.” Upon close examination one finds that he is not at all concerned with referential meaning in the sense of program music. Rather he is concerned with a kind of meaning that is born of the comparison between the experience defined by musical materials and conveyed to the participant, and experience stored in the participant’s knowledge from previous encounters with the world. For a full account of this process one must of course be referred to the book. It is enough for us to recognize that the meaning involved here is apparently not of any kind previously described by music theory. Consider, for instance, the kinds of meaning described by Meyer:

Meaning, then, is not in either the stimulus, or what it points to, or the observer. Rather it arises out of what both Cohen and Mead have called the “triadic” relationship between (1) an object or stimulus; (2) that to which the stimulus points—that which is its consequent; and (3) the conscious observer.

. . . A stimulus may indicate events or consequences which are different from itself in kind, as when a word designates or points to an object or action which is not itself a word. Or a stimulus may indicate or imply events or consequences which are of the same kind as the stimulus itself, as when a dim light on the eastern horizon heralds the coming of day. Here both the antecedent stimulus and the consequent event are natural phenomena. The former kind of meaning may be called designative, the latter embodied.

The kind of musical meaning discussed in Ferguson’s Music as Metaphor is not exclusively designative or embodied but combines the two to create what I shall call “identitive meaning.” The generation of “identitive” meaning in music is as capable of arousing emotion as is the interaction of “sound [Page 33] terms” with learned tendencies. The foregoing theses concerning the relation between music and affective response may now be summarized; they are formulated below in terms of general experience, with the expectation that emotion is aroused by the same processes in the “daily world” as it is in the arts.

1) Undifferentiated emotion inheres in the process of attending to a situation.

2) Participant’s emotion is differentiated as he identifies with a definition and valuation of experience conveyed to him by a situation (or work of art)—a process involving “identitive” meaning.

3) Participant’s emotion is further differentiated when learned tendencies brought to a situation (or work of art) are arrested or inhibited—a process involving embodied meaning.

The generation of affect in 2) involves the use of what we may call the “identitive power” of consciousness. It is possible that this power to identify with the world as screened through the senses precedes the power to make predictions in time. In other words, one must first turn one’s attention to, or identify with, the sound stimuli of music before one can grasp their stylistic probabilities and create embodied meanings. Consequently, 3), involving the “assimilating and predicting” power of consciousness, was placed last.

Embodied Meaning and “Identitive” Meaning Reconciled. This brings us to the central thesis in which Meyer’s and Ferguson’s descriptions of musical experience are united, and in whose terms both the differentia and the similarities of an art form as it exists among the world’s cultures might be sought: Art employs the elements of conscious experience. In the case of music, at least, the list of elements appears to be complete; for every aspect of conscious experience there is a musical counterpart. (Counterparts to the elements of conscious experience are also found in literature, theater, dance, and in varying degrees among the visual arts.) Both conscious experience and music employ the “identitive power.” In the former this gives rise to the sense of the “here and now”; in the latter it results in a similar suspension of time, as when one is absorbed in the sheer sensuality of sound. Yet both also employ the “assimilating and predicting” power which creates meaning out of past events and predicts events to come—that is, both conscious experience and music unfold in time. In both, the future is uncertain. And in both, present events are structured and directed, and transpire at a certain energy level (“tempo” in music), with a chatacteristic motion (“rhythm” in music), and carry with them certain attendant and qualifying emotions (perhaps volume and timbre in music). Does not this correspondence between the elements of conscious experience in daily life and in music account for music’s power to “put the listener through an experience”?

We thus have a concept in which the contributions of Meyer and Ferguson appear to be intimately related and whereby their approaches can be extended to other arts. Both embodied and “identitive” meanings are involved with the material or “surface” of art. Embodied meaning reveals the structure of an artistic experience and our response to [Page 34] its structure; “identitive” meaning illumines the significance of the artistic experience within the context of life as a whole. Both are indispensable to the analysis and criticism of an art form, particularly in a comparison between different cultures.

We have now come full circle since proposing that the human capacities to know and to love, as described in the philosophy of the Anisa Model of education, are somehow involved in the perception and appreciation of art. In trying to understand how an art form interacts with the participant’s consciousness we have spoken of the “identitive power” of consciousness and the “assimilating and predicting power.” These would now appear to be special applications of the loving capacity and the knowing capacity, respectively. Our discussion has gone into some detail about the way these two capacities may operate in the perception of the structure of music and of its significance in relation to a surrounding cosmology. This would seem to substantiate and expose the [Page 35] basic processes of an earlier theorem: that art manifests the cosmology out of which it is born, and is felt to be significant within the cosmology of the one who receives it—the participant.

World Culture of Arts: A Feasible Prospect. In the above, the “global” artist will find the terms in which universal principles may be sought for each art form. The existence of such principles would make it possible for the artist to discriminate between the indigenous and universal aspects of his art form, thereby rendering world culture a feasible prospect. Thus the second of the two main challenges facing the “global” artist appears not to be insuperable. Once he has determined the philosophic basis on which to relate to a worldwide social environment, as it seems all contemporary artists are obliged to do, the “global” artist may pursue the opening stages of world culture in full confidence.

[Page 36]

[Page 37]

The Economy of a World Commonwealth

BY JOHN HUDDLBSTON

AT THIS STAGE in history Bahá’ís are primarily concerned with those principles of their Faith which have immediate relevance and application to teaching and building up their own communities. The long-range objectives, however, are always there at the back of the mind, first, to give perspective to present-day struggles and, second, to answer the questions of those who are interested in the Faith. The character of the economy of the world commonwealth, whose establishment is one of the goals of the Bahá’í community, is a subject which frequently comes up in discussions with non-Bahá’í friends. Clearly, this issue is often touched upon because of the growing awareness of the serious nature of the economic problems which now affect almost every nation in the world. It is in response to questions about Bahá’í views on the economy of the future world commonwealth that I have brought together the impressions presented below. These are intended as a stimulus to further thought rather than as an attempt at a definitive statement.

Organization and Structure

BAHÁ’Í ECONOMIC views acquire real meaning only when considered in the context of a Bahá’í civilization. It is foreseen that in such a civilization man will have come to acknowledge his relationship with God, the unity of religion, and the oneness of mankind. The concept of the oneness of mankind, the brotherhood of man, would include an abiding desire for justice to all men and an appreciation of the enrichment that diversity of culture would bring. Such a society would be united under a world federal government which, like national and local governments, would be democratically elected, responsive to the needs of all peoples, and guided in all its actions by the principles of the Bahá’í Faith.

A Bahá’í society would be also united economically and socially. The internationalization of trade and commerce, already a strong movement of great benefit to nearly all even under today’s imperfect conditions, would be taken to its logical conclusion. All tariffs, quotas, and currency limitations which now limit trade and commerce, and so the overall efficiency of a world economy, would be removed. A single world currency would be created; weights and measures would be internationally standardized. One of the first functions of the world government would be to provide necessary assistance to national and local economies so that they could adjust without hardship and disruption to a united world economy. The unification of the world economic system would be given further impetus by the introduction of a worldwide system of education, the adoption of a universal auxiliary language, and the organization of a world system of communications.

However, the creation of a united world economy as envisaged by Bahá’ís means considerably more than the removal of national barriers to trade and commerce, important as this is. It also means coordination and long-range planning on a world scale. It would be the function of the world government to flatten out trade cycles, to develop the resources of the world for the benefit of all, to work for the narrowing of the differences which now separate the rich from the poor nations, to ensure the conservation of scarce resources for the use of future generations, and to protect the world’s environment. [Page 38] Shoghi Effendi has written:

The economic resources of the world will be organized, its sources of raw materials will be tapped and fully utilized, its markets will be coordinated and developed, and the distribution of its products will be equitably regulated.

. . . Destitution on the one hand, and gross accumulation of ownership on the other, will disappear. . . .

An important principle of Bahá’í administration is the devolution of responsibility. Thus in a Bahá’í society much of the role played in the economy by government would be at the national and local level. “The worldwide law of Bahá’u’lláh . . . ,” Shoghi Effendi has stated, “repudiates excessive centralization on one hand, and disclaims all attempts at uniformity on the other. Its watchword is unity in diversity . . .”

National and local governments would undoubtedly set certain guidelines and goals, within the overall world plan, for the development of their economies. They would also be responsible for the collection of government revenues some of which would be allocated to the world government according to the overall economic plan. Such revenues would include income and property taxes as well as royalties from the development of minerals and other treasure found within their jurisdiction and over which they would have full control. Thus the community rather than private individuals would benefit most from available natural resources. Local communities would take pride in providing a full range of high quality social services, such as hospitals, health centers, homes for the elderly and the orphans, schools, universities, and research centers. In a society with a balanced outlook where freedom of expression and thought is not confused with antisocial individualism, it is not un reasonable to assume, too, that local communities would provide comprehensive public transportation systems and so do away with the immense waste which comes from excessive reliance on private transportation. In short, the imbalance in capitalist society between private affluence and public squalor described by John Kenneth Galbraith in The Affluent Society would be corrected.

There seems little doubt that in a Bahá’í economy some types of industrial and commercial enterprises would also be operated by government bodies. As suggested earlier the world government might be responsible for a trunk network of world communications systems. Local or national governments might control other enterprises which proved to be most efficient under single management because of their nature or because of their vital importance to the economy.

Nonetheless, the Bahá’í writings, laying down as they do principles for a wide range of differing conditions both in time and place, seem to support considerable diversity in the management and ownership of industrial and commercial enterprises. Accordingly, I assume that large sections of the economy would be in the hands of nongovernment bodies. The whole spirit of Bahá’í society suggests that such bodies would often be organized on a cooperative basis. I also assume that there would be great scope in the economy for the individual entrepreneur, for in a free society there must be room for an individual to follow his own bent if he wishes. Moreover, there are certain types of occupations in which the individual is the most efficient economic unit. In addition, it is historically true that the individual entrepreneur has played a disproportionate role in bringing desirable innovations. Thus a thriving economy would need the stimulus of such individuals. In a Bahá’í society entrepreneurs [Page 39] who hire employees would be obliged to run their business on a profit-sharing basis. The local community government would supervise such schemes to ensure that they would give a fair distribution and did not become an empty formula as has so often happened in the past. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has written: “Therefore, laws and regulations should be established which would permit the workmen to receive from the factory owner their wages and a share . . . of the profits . . .”

The goal of a Bahá’í society is to bring together all mankind in unity. Problems and grievances, whether governmental or industrial, would be settled, not through confrontation, but through the system of participatory communal consultation operating in conformity with the laws of Bahá’u’lláh. Accordingly, there would be no place for factions such as political parties and pressure groups or for lockouts, strikes, owners’ associations, and trade unions.

An important feature of economic organization in a Bahá’í society would be the prevailing social attitudes of those involved. Mention has already been made of cooperation. Another important attitude would be that toward work. Bahá’u’lláh stated that work is worship and that the highest form of worship is work in the service of others. The logical outcome of this attitude is that articulated by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: all should take the utmost pride in their work, however humble it may seem. However, an enlightened society would not be content to exploit such attitudes but would make it easier for men and women to take pride in their work by giving them responsibility and meaningful, interesting tasks. In other words, it might be expected that there would be a reversal of the modern tendency to exaggerate the division of labor which has resulted in the conveyor belt factory, the horror of which was so effectively portrayed by Charlie Chaplin in the movie “Modern Times.” Extending this idea and connecting it with the emphasis on consultation in all levels of government, it would not be unreasonable to assume that all enterprises in a Bahá’í society, whether communal, cooperative, or profit-sharing, would be conducted on the basis of genuine consultation with all employees.

Before leaving the subject of economic structure and organization I must mention price and interest. In a Bahá’í economy a fair interest would be paid on loaned capital, and a fair price would be paid for goods and services. Bahá’u’lláh writes that, “‘it is allowable, lawful and pure to charge inteteSt on money . . . but this matter must be conducted with moderation and justice.’” A fair or just price would take into account both the cost of production and the needs of the buyer, and accordingly would follow the law of supply and demand. Rational planning in a society free of the neurotic fears of today would normally ensure that supply and demand would keep in balance and that, consequently, the economy would not be disrupted by erratic and violent fluctuations in prices. Should extraordinary or unforeseen circumstances arise which might cause drastic changes in price, undoubtedly the government would intervene temporarily to help social and economic adjustments. The cost element which comes from exploitation of monopolistic or semimonopolistic power would be absent. One aspect of pricing which [Page 40] would be of particular concern to the world government would be the value of the world currency. As inflation is unjust, highly inefficient, and disruptive, I assume that the world government would give a high priority to ensuring that the world currency would have a stable value, possibly by tying it to key indicators of the world’s productive capacity.

Distribution of Wealth

SINCE THE PURPOSE of any economy is to provide for the material needs of its participants, the question of distribution of goods and services produced is of the utmost significance. Two main principles can be seen in Bahá’í teachings regarding this aspect of an economy. One is the principle of reward and punishment which Bahá’u’lláh said is an essential prerequisite for an orderly society: “The trainer of the world is justice, for it consists of two pillars: Reward and retribution.” This would imply material reward for those who work hard and contribute to the public welfare and, conversely, economic penalties for those who are indolent. Thus Bahá’u’lláh condemned begging and recommended that every able-bodied adult work in a useful profession or trade: “Waste not your time in idleness and indolence, and occupy yourselves with that which will profit yourselves and others beside yourself.” Equity would clearly indicate that this principle would apply to the rich as well as to the poor. Thus a Bahá’í society would have no place for the drone, poor or rich. Fair reward for work would seem to imply also a major change in the structure of wages and salaries. It is inconceivable that in a Bahá’í society there would be a continuation of the present extreme and nonsensical differences which exist between those who do the dirtiest and most dangerous tasks for society and those who are able to exploit their position and power to extract greatly inflated payments for their services.

This point leads to the second Bahá’í principle bearing on the question of distribution of resources—namely, the abolition of extremes of wealth and poverty. As noted earlier this principle would obtain when dealing with national or regional communities which exhibit vast extremes in resources and wealth. One of the main economic functions of the world government would be to reduce the differences in average per capita wealth now existing between such groups. This principle would also apply to differences between individuals within a community. On the one hand, society has a responsibility to ensure that none of its members ever goes in want of the basic material necessities of life. Thus Bahá’u’lláh wrote: “‘Know ye that the poor are the trust of God in your midst.’” On the other hand, gross accumulation of wealth causes corruption and marginally less and less incentive to work. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said: “‘It is important to limit riches, as it is also of importance to limit poverty. Either extreme is not good.’”

There are many ways in which a Bahá’í society would tend to work against the accumulation of extraordinary wealth. Perhaps one of the most important would be the encouragement of voluntary giving—an idea consonant with the very tone of a spiritually advanced civilization in which voluntary action in the social interest would be a stronger force than the instruction and law of government. In such a social environment the rich would find more satisfaction and joy from giving selflessly for the benefit of their fellow citizens than in accumulating wealth indefinitely in order to live in useless luxury. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has promised that:

The time will come in the near future [Page 41] when humanity will become so much more sensitive than at present that the man of great wealth will not enioy his luxury, in comparison with the deplorable poverty about him. He will be forced, for his own happiness, to expend his wealth to procure better conditions for the community in which he lives.

Such ideas are not dreams. Even today, when there is so much fear, insecurity, and obsession with material possessions, many find that their greatest satisfaction in life is giving. The Bahá’í community itself now relies entirely for its collective activities on the voluntary giving of its members, many of whom give at great personal sacrifice.

Another deterrent to the accumulation of extraordinary wealth would be the requirement that each prepare a personal will. Bahá’u’lláh provides guidelines on the drawing up of wills which would encourage men and women to distribute their wealth at death to a much wider circle and much more evenly than is the practice in most present-day societies, especially those emphasizing primogeniture. These guidelines suggest, for instance, that provision should be made in a will for one’s teacher, as well as for one’s children, spouse, and siblings. In the absence of a will and of one or more of these classes the share which would have gone to them would be given to the public treasury. This law is of considerable significance because inherited wealth is frequently a greater cause of economic inequality than differences in earned income.

Yet another important device for eliminating extremes of wealth would be a progressive income tax system. The system would include negative taxes to assist those whose income might be less than their essential needs. Today many nations profess to having progressive tax systems, but reality is often very different, for those paying taxes see them as an unjust imposition to pay for ends which they regard as useless or undesirable. The result is massive tax avoidance, legal loopholes, and the support of a large part of public activity through other tax systems which are regressive. In a spiritually mature society those who paid large taxes would realize that they were fortunate and honored to be able to contribute more than the average to the ends desired by the community.

In addition to voluntary giving, personal wills, and progressive taxes there are a great many other factors already referred to which would tend to eliminate extremes of wealth in a Bahá’í society—for example, a fair system of wages and prices, profit sharing, cooperative sharing, communal ownership of natural resources, and provision of high quality community services, including a compulsory education system.

Goods and Services

A THIRD very important aspect of a Bahá’í economy would be the values and priorities determining the production of goods and services. Of especial significance in this context is the fundamental Bahá’í concept that man is not merely an animal endowed with exceptional intelligence but a spiritual being who finds fulfillment and happiness in the growth of knowledge of God and in the application of that knowledge to life. “Man is, in reality,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has written, “a spiritual being, and only when he lives in the spirit is he truly happy.” This suggests that in a Bahá’í society there would be a more balanced view of material things. Accordingly, one can assume that a Bahá’í economy would be directed mainly toward the production of essentials. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the Bahá’í writings indicate agriculture will play a leading role in a future world economy. Agriculture will produce all food and materials for basic needs [Page 42] such as clothing and shelter and when properly managed will harmonize with nature much more easily than industry. It is foreseen that it would be possible to develop and grow on the land materials which could be used as substitutes for plastics and other industrial synthetics which now use up in their manufacture so much oil and other limited natural resources.

In a modern scientifically oriented society the old problems of poverty and ignorance which have often been associated with agricultural economies would be eliminated, and full advantage could be taken of the basic improvement in health, both physical and spiritual, which comes from close contact with the rhythm and reality of life.

The leading role of agriculture in a Bahá’í economy suggests that there will be greater emphasis than at present on the small community rather than on the huge metropolis. This would seem to be in keeping with the trend in industrial technology which is moving away from mass employment factories and toward automated plants and small specialized workshops with highly skilled staff.

The values of a Bahá’í society would also suggest that the highest priority would be given to education, arts, and sciences and, as suggested earlier, to social and public services. They also suggest a much greater appreciation of nature and a greater willingness to pay for the protection of the environment. On the contrary, there would be much less expenditure on nonessential goods and services, especially luxuries. In this connection it is not unreasonable to assume that the advertising industry as we know it today in capitalist society, with its vulgar emphasis on cultivating ever-changing fashions and exaggerated materialistic dreams, would be completely alien to a Bahá’í economy. In view of the Bahá’í teachings on alcohol and drugs as harmful for man except when required for medicinal purposes, it can be assumed too that in a Bahá’í economy the resources now devoted to these products would be conserved for other ends. Similarly, the Bahá’í teachings discouraging smoking would suggest a much reduced tobacco industry. Though Bahá’ís are not required to be vegetarians, it is interesting to note the following statement attributed to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in the light of present concern that it is inefficient to devote a large proportion of agricultural land to the production of meat: “The food of the future will be fruit and grains. The time will come when meat will no longer be eaten. Medical science is only in its infancy, yet it has shown that our natural food is that which grows out of the ground.” The establishment of a permanent peace under the aegis of the world government would also release for more rewarding use the vast wealth which is now expended on defense. The nations of the world today expend more than six percent ($200 billion in 1970) of the world’s annual production on military affairs, which is some six times the current United Nations target for international assistance for the poor countries.

Finally, a word should be said on the quality of goods and services. The principle that work is worship and that the highest form of worship is service would restore man’s pride in what he produced, which, in turn, would clearly have a considerable impact on quality. Such a tendency would be greatly strengthened by the encouragement of the highest standards of honesty, truthfulness, reliability, and faithfulness, which come when there is a revitalization of religion and society grows more spiritual. There can be [Page 43] little doubt too that there would be a new look at low quality throwaway consumer goods and a complete abandonment of that highly wasteful practice of capitalist society —deliberate, planned obsolescence.

Conclusion

TO CONCLUDE, a Bahá’í economy would have as its principal futures worldwide coordination and planning, just distribution of resources, and a balanced approach to material needs which recognizes man as a spiritual being. To achieve such an economy it will be necessary for man to develop more advanced social values. Hence, the relationship between economics and religion. Hence, too, the phrase which has been used to suggest the Bahá’í approach to economics: a spiritual solution to the economic problem.

[Page 44]

Recent American Poetry—Portfolio II

THE POEMS in this, our second WORLD ORDER anthology, represent work by both well-known poets and those who are just beginning to achieve recognition. The selections suggest something of the diversity of modes, forms, and idioms characteristic of contemporary American poetry.

Poetry, always the barometer of its times, today clearly registers the spiritual pressures of this “Age of Anxiety,” as W. H. Auden described our period, and it has been strategically affected by them as well. The so-called “revolution” in American poetry which began in the 1950s was partly initiated by changes in moral outlook and social sensibility; and it helped, in turn, to implement these to some degree. The revolt against tradition has produced by now a poetry with its own conventions and points of emphasis: free or “open” forms, the use of subject matter once regarded as offensive or “unpoetic”; the rejection of the “literary” in favor of the experiential and spontaneous. Although this “new” poetry has not supplanted formal modes (often justifiably criticized as “academic”), it has, nevertheless, modified and in general taken precedence over them.

If the new poetry seems less controversial now than it did two decades ago, it also appears in retrospect to have been less iconoclastic than its partisans boasted. It was, really, less spontaneous combustion than the upsurge of fires kindled in the past. The current belief that poets should be free to write about whatever they choose and that poetry need not conform to academic standards of excellence are almost universally accepted as part of the gospel of “the new, the radical.” There is little, if anything, here to refute—and certainly nothing that is novel or daring. Ever since the nineteenth century, poets have been exploring territory once thought better suited to the cultivation of fiction, and their work has encompassed more and more of the quotidian, the psychological, the realistic, and so on. Whitman, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Hopkins were among the first to stake out claims which poets since the last century have fully developed. In our own era, the experiments of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson provided impetus for redefinitions of the nature and function of poetry.

Some of these redefinitions are, of course, open to question. But there is no gainsaying the vigor of our poetry at its best. Kaleidoscopic in its variety, it has tremendous range and flexibility [Page 45] as a medium for expressing all aspects of life and thought. One is aware, moreover, of an emergent world view, a growing world consciousness among our poets. An extremely large body of writing by outstanding foreign poets is available to us in translation, much of it by distinguished American poets. A developing community of feeling which cuts across racial and cultural lines has been encouraged by our familiarity with the work of poets such as Pablo Neruda, Aimé Césaire, Octavio Paz, Leopold Senghor, and Evgeny Yevtushenko. And there is increasing concern with the problems of censorship now confronting artists everywhere. American poetry, itself a significant influence on many poets in other parts of the world, has been open, as perhaps never before, to the influences of cultures and literatures different from our own. The Japanese haiku, the Persian ghazal, African and Eskimo mythology, Chinese philosophy, Indian mysticism—to cite a few examples—have all had definite impact within recent years.

There are, of course, bleak areas of parochialism and pockets of confusion in American poetry today—as in that of every period. One of our most dubious assumptions at present seems to be that the ability to “express oneself” is more important than craftsmanship, style, or aesthetic insight. Indeed, such elements are, from this point of view, synonymous with “elitism.” The rejection of “elitist” (bourgeois, genteel) criteria involves not so much the repudiation of tired conventions and official attitudes as it does the abandonment of the very qualities which differentiate poetry from other kinds of experience. An exchange of one set of mediocrities for another has resulted in a species of nonpoetry—verse that is amorphous in structure, trivial in substance, and pretentious. This kind of verse is, more often than not, informed by a crass naturalism and linguistic violence which delude those responsible for it into believing they are “telling it like it is.” Yet they have been hailed in some quarters as the “voices of revolution.”

But the truly revolutionary poets are always those who are committed to some integrative vision of art and life. Theirs is an essentially spiritual vision which leads to the creation of new forms and techniques, to a new awareness.

“Without vision the people perish.”

—Robert Hayden

[Page 46]

Joy In Balance

With no applause, to speak of, but my own,

Unless you too approve,

I walk a tightrope over depths alone,

And always I must move

With the labored grace of those who know

There is no net below.

Do not inquire what I hope to find

When once I am across,

Or say with some that what I leave behind

Entails too great a loss;

There is a joy in balance which destroys

The taste for simpler joys.

—Bruce Bennett

You and a Flower

I see you now, a woman and a wife,

And yet I see the girl I used to know

When, in the mornings of a simpler life,

We left the town below

And ranged the peaks for edelweiss, and found

A rarer flower on that fostering ground.

You chose, and you are happy in your choice,

And years have passed, and nothing is the same;

But hearing now your well-remembered voice,

Am I so much to blame

If I still see us on some mountainside

Sharing the days before that flower died?

—Bruce Bennett

[Page 47]

Two For Ted

I

FOND AND FOOLISH

Roethke longed to be a snake

He danced with bears, he danced with Blake

His mind was rent, his heart was riven

One day he danced himself to Heaven

II

THE FINAL ROUND

“Oh, to be something else”

He cried, “yet still to be!”

“All’s One,” said God to Roethke

“Save the last dance for Me.”

—Bruce Bennett

[Page 48]

For a Child Who Died in the Womb

i.

In an absolute womb,

a midnight cradle

ribbed like Ararat’s ark,

or the skeleton of Jonah’s whale,

he shuttles between death and death.

And death is hooded,

like the tribes of Mendel’s peas,

a blossom, a chance.

ii.

One year later.

You walk five miles

through February,

hungry as owl’s eyes.

And all the stars

are all one constellation,

one wheeling tremendous figure

that turns, like a breast,

to the singing mouth of a child.

iii.

Each winter clears a passage

for the surgeon of darkness;

and then each spring spits out

the mucous of darkness.

All is nest and open mouth.

Licked clean as the whelp,

he could not have been

(so the lesson ran)

without a doubleness in his death,

or a hunger in his feeding.

—Stephen Bluestone

[Page 49]

from Jonathan

#25

March: morning

The apple twigs were

shorn white, as with scissors. Cut

pine in the light: the

rabbits on last week’s snowdrifts.

Jonathan laughed. Dark

birds curled around an icy

crow’s slow wings in the

irregular air, and we

walked over a hill.

A flight of white birds made joy

and death suddenly,

over some old pear trees.

#26

April: afternoon

We spoke above sounds

of blackbird feet scattering

over a tin roof.

In the dark we spoke of a

perfect line between

us and the pure sun. We lived

in the whole shadow

of the earth that turned away.

#27

May: morning

Asparagus unfolded

into the spring, next to the

dried stalk. Jonathan wondered

if insects could hear us and

their own growth in themselves.

Pale leaves laid surface into

the shadow, sucking sun out

of the air, a camouflage

for quail. We saw one swallow

still by the wrecked shape of its

mate, drying in the road. We

saw a racoon family

that curved in grievings around

a corpse and died all evening,

sequentially in the road.

#31

I heard a breaking up of

whole things, and it was

rain on glass, and the depth of

sound was in my blood.

—Roger Dickinson-Brown

[Page 50]

Joshua

From my third-floor office window I see him.

Black boy walking home to the ghetto from high school,

Member of the high-school marching band,

Holds his books in his left hand, a trumpet in his right,

Raises it to his lips as he marches past our college walls,

Dreaming.

—Michael Cass

Coming Back to Poetry

Once I fell from death into poetry,

When I was given Homer and Herrick

And when I pried myself open to Blake.

Then I fell from poetry into life.

(Homer war and Herrick love

And Blake Imagination,

They waked me to my waking.)

Now scratching cautiously on thin paper

I may be opening a chasm,

May fall from life back into poetry.

I’m worried.

God knows

(And Blake)

Life is where I’m supposed to be.

—Michael Cass

[Page 51]

I

The complexities of

the mind, far beyond

(a profession dies) all

human comprehension,

lend each our every

reason a thousand words,

a thousand reasons

our every word

implies. Why do I

say what I do,

or do, if you think

you know you’re wrong.

This is not to

say that no deeper

meanings exist, only

that a thousand times

a thousand times two (for

me and you) equals

much too big a haystack,

too much straw, too

much alike.

II

Every just enough once

in a while some

thing happens or

someone (possessed

simply of virtue)

that causes this

perhaps easily but

certainly often

discouraged man to

throw off all better

judgment and admit,

even embrace, that

elusive and defiant

creature which as if

it were just another

anything we call hope.

—Eric Crist

[Page 52]

Nursery Night

Awake, alone,

Nothing feared was known,

Or very far.

Though the nightlights shone,

Their pale glows grew dim, thinned

In the length of the longest wall,

And died in the far corner’s deep.

Only the straight-backed desk chair’s

Varnished dowels caught that scant gleam,

And only me. All night I lay

Cradled in those blues and greens,

Eyes lively, wide, amazed

At what a flux of shadow

Shifted and played

Upon my nursery wall.

Mother, why did you set those lights

To light me, me

Who least needed lighting?

I would have hidden

In the folds of night,

Seen and not been seen,

And not lain stiff in fright,

Gripped by visibility,

An open offering in common sight.

Mother, the nightlights were no solace,

Lent no sense to help dispel

The muffled footfall upon the stair,

The shadow of the chair that fell

In aureole spokes upon my wall.

Now nightly I lie locked

Upon my altar bed, and watch

Shadows form the saintly nimbus

That darkens an archangel’s head.

—Roy Freirich

[Page 53]

Circus

(Variations on the Thought of Death)

I. When the ostrich

is admitted, it

stalks to the center

of the ring, and

every other act

shuts down.

There is, of course,

some fingering

of yellow sequined vests,

but everyone soon gapes

at the real thing.

II. Polka-dot, paddle-foot chaos

with his mutts

permits the crowd to

condescend. Cycle-

tossed, prat-flopped,

pelican perused,

he is the laugh. Yet,

black below each

phosphorescent brow, a

common, tender eye.

III. Hung by the golden toes Maria swings

over the ring of flesh

a pole below. And cares to

be seen above, but

does not care to be known

by the face a family gave,

or her walking clothes, or even to

make it—out, out, out—to the

other side (his forearm

muscles’ wrench and his

oily hair.)

IV. The delicate cup must not be broken

though an elephant balances it in air.

The whole herd would join, but

it must be just one, alone,

or the whole act is blown. Yes!

The cup of bone transferring light

must go away unbroken,

a thin white rim to

meet the jaw

when hyenas

bite.

—Josephine Gallagher

[Page 54]

Looking

I. Self of self of self of self. Into

corridors within one follows

incense, tambourine’s chink, chink; in

deepening orange dark, the trailing robes

of one whose face reflects one’s own,

half-smiling. Into moving folds

mind’s fingers press. Insinuation moves

the heavy webs, the hanging air, the tallow

flickers. Sight anoints a hundred

ceiling stones, and wishes barter

with a deepening dark.

II. Our world: all fragments must be caught.

Filed, fixed, forced forever to

match our needs: precision

in the pan to be consumed: just

reward for killing labor. (Mother

Nature called it quits, losing

the better limit.) Sing

the cerebellum engine!

Da-ta, da-ta as in

Dartmoor Prison walls.

III. Filaments of madness light an order

around. Flung out from changeable peaks

unmatching and failing to border a

sensible landscape quilted with plots,

squares cut in squares for houses, these

filaments transmit caverns that speak,

even last-questioning mists—those

chiffon chasubles sometimes

donned by truth.

—Josephine Gallagher

[Page 55]

The Awful Wonders of the Sun Bay Towers Development for Senior Citizens

I am told by several friends

there is, neatly on the wall of each

cubiculum in the looming while monu-

ment to mercantility that rises before

me, a door—two feet square, coal-bin-

hatch size, stainless steel, hinged

at the top, connecting to a chute. So,

when the pains come tingling up the arm,

one simply has to lean forward from the

waist. Then it’s zoom down the slide

to the basement, and plop in a box

of red velvet on rollers, tripping the

lid shut—the momentum carrying the

whole assemblage (with me inside) into

the back of a darkly waiting Cadillac—

station-wagon-shaped and the motor running.

—John S. Hatcher

[Page 56]

St. Paul’s Visit to Albert Schweitzer’s Jungle Mission

none of these things
can save you;
you can do nothing
to earn eternal life.	what i gave up was
	music and the
	praise of
	friends.
It is not our work that
saves us, but Faith
in the Lord Jesus Christ.	so i forsook a
	little comfort
	but not because of
	disdain.
You do not receive Eternal
Life by working for it
or by trying to make
yourself behave.	some thought the dis-
	sertation heretical
	but it was, after all,
	only an exercise.
Doesn’t it make sense
to believe the One who
came back from the dead
and trust Him for
the payment of your sins?	i suppose to
	me it was the
	living not the nails
	that mattered
He died on a cross
for your sins
and you cannot be saved
by your works
no matter how well intended.	so when He
	walked among the
	lepers and healed
	the sick,
	His words meant something
Accept the payment
He has made
for your sins	to my own life
	and that’s why i left
	and cannot
and you can rest
and be assured
you have
Eternal Life.	rest.

—John S. Hatcher

[Page 57]

house-wise

a headless doll toddles

up precious steps to

an infirmary of distilled

illusions:

the play-mother stoops

to mend the thing

and observing the frailness

for a moment hugs

it lest it

die too soon.

the mother plays and

dishwater talk spurts

out, spoiling the image—

half ghost, half bed-woman.

the bleak house-drippings

saved for a time

to come when memories

catch the monotones

of lost days and

turn them into

pain-images.

the mother who is

real combs the rags

from her stick hair

and silently sweeps

her life under the

bed. the doll also

cries when you

love her.

—Sybil Kein

[Page 58]

Album: Photo II

Before the depression

My father bought a used green Chandler.

One day he drove it right across the yard

And parked it on the scant grass

Our baseball games had spared

Between the clothesline posts

(First and second base)

To make same photographs.

My mother, awkward camera boxed in dainty hands,

Captured my brothers perched upon the running-board

Wearing plaid lumberjackets

And stiff new knickerbockers,

Their soap-sheen faces beaming toward futurity.

My face is there too, straining through the driver’s window

Between my brothers’ shoulders:

One eye, a frowning forehead, and a wilted braid of hair.

I do not remember the car.

My jacket was too tight, and the buttons

were on the wrong side.

Naomi Long Madgett

[Page 59]

November 1

for: my students

Fall 1973

All night long

The rain and wind celebrate their marriage.

Sometime, in the night,

The wind boldly opened my door and came in.

The rain refused to follow and went away.

This morning the wind scurries over the heads of grass,

Shakes the Queen Anne’s Lace,

Climbs through a lone and small tree.

The sun comes offering consolation,

But the wind runs on

Looking for the rain.

—Herbert Woodward Martin

November 2

for John Suppnick

The rain came back last night

But the wind had slipped among the blank trees.

They held among them the stare of sorrow.

The rain left traces like mirrors.

Grief drives the wind like a plague.

—Herbert Woodward Martin

[Page 60]

A Wonder with Bikes

My neighbor is a wonder with bikes.

He races,

walks,

rides them grim of face.

He is a conqueror

of wind and traffic lights;

his hands glow white

grasping the bike’s silver bars.

No slow rider, he

may be seen gliding

down hills in night,

peddling madly beneath street lights, or

upon the open fields

pushing spokes against the wheat.

—Len Roberts

A Line of Poetry

Imagine a man

tightrope walking without sleep,

his hands clutched white

upon the pole.

He hovers in air,

eyes sunken and black.

He watches every step

upon the wire.

—Len Roberts

[Page 61]

At The Eclipse

America waits for the moon

Cranking up telescopes.

Crowds of eyes

Shove in behind them to watch.

On the ocean floor

A lobster is moving with elegant

Precision, making tiny white clouds

With his feet. And he keeps

Locked up in his head

A grain of sand

From which by an invisible thread

He holds the moon like a kite.

—Joseph Salerno

An Old Man in Cold Weather

It was only a bus

he missed

standing there stuttering “I missed

my bus”

holding a plastic

bag full of clothes in his arms

you could tell

he was crying his terrified

voice “my bus my bus”

putting the bag down

stunned

his white hair every which way

in the snow.

—Joseph Salerno

[Page 62]

Reading Late At Night

You stir once in the next room,

Called back, I look up

Noticing the clock

And the walls carrying small voices

From far away.

Suddenly it seems so long

Since you were awake.

—Joseph Salerno

[Page 63]

Achilles and the Tortoise

Monsters wash ashore,

Their smell less of death than of time’s life,

Issuing from the fissures of improbable

Bodies that broke as they fell

Toward us from the inverted Everests

Of the sea. In time’s life

Vast densities press upon the tides

In which we drift hydraulic.

In time’s life furred prodigies

Come to the edge of the clearing

And stare at us to see what they

Have become. In time’s life

The phosphorescent ship hovers at twilight

Above the garden. Through translucent bows

We see the long, dispassionate face we shall achieve.

The feral footprint is there in the woods;

The garden is blackened by astral flame.

The spoor of was and will

Imprints us in time’s life;

The eyes of monsters on the beach

And our eyes move together,

Like sea pools settling their differences.

White cinerarias of the sea

Embroider mind’s canvas

Where time’s life dies.

We frolic in death’s time, in the gap

Where a sun—that has always as much life left

As it has used—waits unmoving.

—Radcliffe Squires

[Page 64]

And Now

And now, when words,

Like old friends,

Will go with me only to the gates of Hell

And not farther,

I become but word and tell

What save speechless I could not tell.

I tell

Your being.

And now, when movement

Is only about

Me and like the glance

of spirits not in me, I become but dance.

Without touching your hands, motionless,

I dance

Your being.

And now, when all faith

Has gone back to the god

That gave it, I am but faith and profess

Not what I possess (never possess)

I profess

Your being.

—Radcliffe Squires

[Page 65]

At the Close of Summer

entirely without disfigurement

putting on new green cold

sandals of water that no one else could wear

three children wading down through weeds

shaking off glittering flowers as wet light

where early morning’s other light finds petals faded

September maples gathering such colors

airy uplifted yellows and half blazing red

as those long blind will surely be given to see

should it seem Autumn when they receive their sight again

chill changing transparent mists arise or drift on every side

they were all that your pond can remember from its glacier

why may not any experience be enough for life

three children wading down through glittering weeds

telling themselves how we belong to every thing

—Robert Stilwell

Confounded by Undimming Air

zinnia petals become

white or lavender tin types

spilled on silent mornings after death frost

my Winter coat made Winter beyond all patching

one gray hand slit open by corn stalk blades

I feel new regret for every rattle snake or light

for poke berry stalks the pink green height of Arch Angels

that I shot long ago when I owned an army

issue forty five revolver with civilian bluing

crows hear me on this emptying and skyless day

while I struggle again to clean each heavy weapon of my life

—Robert Stilwell

[Page 66]

Study for Beethoven Beginning the Quartet in A Minor

here to have been

utterly abandoned by every thing

except for Music and then at last to be

abandoned even by Music

yet to know such an hour as one’s only place

from which to undertake the newly giving work

each grief that longest transformation some way out of sorrow

believing how Music is this life transfigured

Music will seem our lives increasing but made better

by Music we hold each other and are not sundered

our brother the Silence listening beside us

—Robert Stilwell

[Page 67]

Swim-Knowing

Does the salmon

start screaming

with a change of wind,

or when the water turns black?

Born out of sea knowledge,

his choice is swim,

spawn, die.

Earth knowledge

belongs to coyotes,

waiting foxes—

grass-knowing

to sunflowers,

dahlias, daisies,

zeroed in on growing.

Air-knowing

is man-knowing,

freedom to love,

die, in the act of knowing,

loving, swim-knowing

carried to perfection

from salmon to man.

—Joan Imig Taylor

[Page 68]

Answering an Advertisement: Help for Fall Cleanup

The Chrysler retiree

Rakes leaves into a canvas sack.

“You never get them all.”

He grins shyly

As if to say he doesn’t understand

Why he rakes leaves.

I help him tighten the drawstring

And lift the sack

Over his shoulder. He wobbles

And tips

On his heels like a hobo

Who has overloaded his bag.

“Come on. I’ll show you

Where to put the leaves.”

America.

The hillsides

Settling in brown light.

Five years ago

My long hair meant that I despised

A man devoted to his yard.

Now we smile at each other

Comforted by a past bitterness.

Both of us

Have learned to move

Methodically against lost seasons.

He shakes my hand.

“Do we have a contract then?”

See you tomorrow.

He waits for me to leave.

It isn’t polite but I hang around

And watch him dump leaves

Onto the wet

Black slope behind the house.

—David Tucker

[Page 69]

Grass Lake at Spring

Going home, stopping

To slide stones across

The hard lake, I listen

How the scrape changes

With the uneven

Depths, the loud

Hiss over shallows and weeds,

Groans building

Where the lake gives

Ice the undertinge

Of blue.

I travelled roads no one has travelled for months.

Branches and tracks

Were still falling through old snow,

When it was evening I carried

Armloads of wood,

Wood I set down now

And hear the first blue

Flame

Rise into the lake of stones.

—David Tucker

The Farm Widow

The corn tasselled

Pale gold and heavy.

Rain tomorrow. I can smell

Pollen in the gray mist

Blowing from the river.

Dead man, this is another rain

We won’t need.

You have plowed the fall crops

Under.

The spidery roots have come up

Stunned in the August moon.

—David Tucker

[Page 70]

from SEASONS OF THE BLOOD: POEMS ON THE TAROT

1.

JUDGMENT

The floating dead will

rise from their sarcophagi

when the Sound falls out

of the horn, echoing from

the mountains, the hermit snows.

2.

STRENGTH

If she closes

this lion’s mouth, this carnal

mouth so easily,

then the roses at her waist

must be the snake transfigured.

3.

THE WORLD

A myrtle wreath and

a dancer with wands: the beasts

of the Apocalypse.

The snake has turned into leaves.

These contain us. We contain.

4.

THE STAR

Perhaps a young girl

is in another garden

at the mountain’s base

pouring Being from silver

and golden ewers

into Earth, into Knowing.

Perhaps the mountain

can be passed, other vistas

be opened beyond.

—Lewis Turco

[Page 71]

Lament for a Fallen Waxwing

A compound fracture in his trailing wing,

The cedar waxwing slept his final night,

A matchstick for a splint, a piece of string

To hold it tight. Chokeberries red and bright,

Mulberries royal on an old tin plate

Vainly encouraged him to take a bite.

He was too new and young to have a mate.

His first flight was, perhaps, his only one.

His body stiffened to the feathers’ weight.

The children buried him where flecks of sun

Dappled through clumps of birches. On the dock

The hordes of ordered ants muster and run

To programmed destinations. On the rock

Ten feet offshore a seagull stalks and preens.

High overhead I see a circling hawk

Above the two girls in their early teens

Waterskiing in two long silver V’s;

Web-lurking spiders watch from the window screens.

A chorused mating song flutes from the trees,

And Megan sits alone with stricken eyes

And knowledge seventy years will not appease:

That in this world a waxwing falls and dies.

—Chad Walsh

[Page 72]

From Twenty-two Tremblings of the Postulant

I

13 (hair, head and neck)

Near dawn,

the women,

their hair plaited and pearled,

purl through the brush,

and appear at the stream,

sibilant and serene,

to begin the day again.

Devotees of dawns and beginnings,

they gather and read each sister’s

tribulations in the water,

and touch each hidden joy,

and thread the berry blooms

along the water’s edge

to kill the cold darkness.

This is God’s hour

that arrives unbroken,

full of stars, lotus,

donu birds, calabash

and the stolen seed,

all the fiction of God’s craft,

by which the women take command.

Each morning they appear

in the web of the water,

to stand hip deep

and pull their peacock heads

straight from the water

into the sun,

while they bend and dip,

and thrash their lovely bodies

under God’s eye,

until by sound,

or some unspoken measure,

they stop,

as though even the limits

of purity were set,

as though there were a measure

that must not sound,

able only to appear

at the limits of their keening joy.

It is by dawn or night

we learn these limits,

the stillness imposed

even on the god.

[Page 73]

It is by dawn or night

that a moment’s contemplation

is the contemplation of an age,

the ancestors’ cross from which time flows,

the orbit

of the unborn bones within these women,

the bones decaying within these women,

the bones these women honor at the stream.

Within that interval,

we learn the danger

when the women cease to dance,

cease to hear that silent measure at the water.

And yet some thing, or human body,

must escape this measure,

must be able to stare down

the danger of the women’s web,

the certainty of a singer

sitting in the half-light,

with the cock of our arrivals,

the conch of our departures,

the bell of our celebrations,

endlessly awaiting his voice.

Or perhaps there is only the ancestors’ cross,

inescapable.

Perhaps that body will return

to confront that god or singer,

a heron dream,

death without end of a stubborn death,

the virginal return.

When all the birds fade

into the coiled, reptilian night;

when finally every living body

retreats into its own beginning,

and there is only an echo

in the first, dark silence,

it will be easy to embrace

these devotees of dawns and beginnings

who gather to read our bones.

—Jay Wright

[Page 74]

Authors & Artists

BRUCE BENNETT teaches creative writing and modern American poetry at Wells College in Aurora, New York. He has had poems published in The Nation, Ploughshares, Counter/Measures, and other magazines.

STEPHEN BLUESTONE received his doctorate in English literature from the University of Michigan and now teaches at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. He has won the Hopwood Award for his poetry and has had his work published in the literary quarterlies. He is a critic and scholar as well as a poet.

ROGER DICKINSON-BROWN is a member of the English Department at the State University of New York at Oswego. He has distinguished himself as a teacher of creative writing and modern poetry. He organized and directed the 1975 Oswego Writing Arts Festival. He is a gifted poet whose work has begun to attract favorable attention.

MICHAEL CASS, who teaches at Mercer University, has published poetry in the Southern Review.

ERIC CRIST is a graduate student in natural resources at the University of Michigan. A serious poet, he is appearing in print for the first time.

ROY FREIRICH received his M.A. from the University of Michigan this year.

JOSEPHINE GALLAGHER won a Hopwood Award for her poetry several years ago. Her poems have appeared in various magazines, and she has given poetry readings.

ROBERT HAYDEN is a professor of English at the University of Michigan where he teaches creative writing. He was recently poet-in-residence at Connecticut College and has read his poetry at many colleges and universities, including Yale, Brown, and Iowa. He is a consultant and editor for Scott, Foresman. In 1971 he was awarded the Russell Loines Award for poetry by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Mr. Hayden’s works include The Night-Blooming Cereus, Words in the Mourning Time, Kaleidoscope, and Selected Poems. He is included in Interviews of Black Writers and reads his poetry in volume 3 of Today’s Poets. Mr. Hayden has work forthcoming in a number of magazines and has a new book scheduled for 1975.

JOHN S. HATCHBR teaches at the University of South Florida. The poems included in this issue are from his as yet unpublished collection Taking a Bird Apart.

JOHN HUDDLBSTON is assistant chief in the budget and planning division of the International Monetary Fund, with which he has worked since coming to the United States in 1963. He was educated at Manchester University in England where he specialized in modern history, economics, and politics. Mr. Huddleston’s “A Letter to My Friends,” which has also been published in German, appeared in the Winter 1969-70 issue of World Order. He has a book, The Earth Is But One Country, at press with the Bahá’í Publishing Trust in England.

SYBIL KEIN won the Hopwood Award with her manuscript Bessie, Bojangles, and Me, which is now being considered for publication. She is represented in this issue by a poem from that collection. She teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan at Flint and recently completed work for a Doctor of Arts degree.

NAOMI LONG MADGETT has published several books of poetry, among them Star by Star and Pink Ladies in the Afternoon. A well-known poet, she teaches English at Eastern Michigan University. She and her husband recently opened a publishing house in Detroit, the Lotus Press.

HERBERT MARTIN teaches English at the University of Dayton and has been Poet in Residence at Aquinas College. His publications include New York the Nine Million and Other Poems and The S-S Poems. His work has been widely published in magazines and anthologies. He has been largely responsible for the recent revival of interest in the life and work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, world-famous poet who was a native of Dayton.

[Page 75]

LEN ROBERTS is a young poet who studied under Herbert Martin. His career as a poet is just beginning.

JOSEPH SALERNO is working toward his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. He has twice won Hopwood Awards for his poetry and has had his work published in literary journals.

RADCLIFFE SQUIRES’ most recent volume is Waiting in the Bone, published in a beautiful limited edition by Abattoir Editions in 1973. One of America’s most distinguished poets, Mr. Squires teaches English at the University of Michigan and is editor of the Michigan Quarterly.

ROBERT STILWELL has been at work for several years on a book of interrelated poems already more than three-hundred pages long. The poems published in this issue are from that collection. Not yet widely published, although his poems have appeared in the quurterlies, Mr. Stilwell has nevertheless attracted a large circle of ardent admirers.

JOAN IMIG TAYLOR’S poems have been published in World Order and other magazines. She is a Bahá’í and lives in Arizona, a locale which has frequently given her themes and images for her poems.

DAVID TUCKER is an alumnus of the University of Michigan. He is, like his friend Joseph Salerno, a passionately dedicated poet and has recently been coping with the problem of how an American poet can survive without teaching. He has published in magazines and has won a Hopwood Award.

LUDWIG TUMAN, a pianist, is a graduate student in music composition at the University of California at Berkeley. He holds a B.A. degree in music from Harvard.

LEWIS TURCO is an Associate Professor of English at the State University College, Oswego, New York. A well-known poet, he is the author of three books of poetry— First Poems; The Sketches; and Awaken, Bells, Falling—as well as The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics.

CHAD WALSH has won many honors and awards. He has published several volumes of his own poetry and has edited outstanding anthologies and a series of highly praised textbooks on poetry. He has given lectures and poetry readings both in the United States and abroad. He is Professor of English and Writer in Residence at Beloit College. His most recent book of poetry is The End of Nature.

JAY WRIGHT is a Guggenheim Fellow in creative writing. His The Homecoming Singer, published in 1971, established him as an important young American poet. At the moment, he has at least four books in manuscript. He is a playwright as well as a poet.

ART CREDITS: Pp. 3, 36, 76, photographs by Adam Thorne; pp. 8-9, 23, 34-35, photographs by Paul Slaughter; back cover, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell.

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL is managing editor of World Order.

PAUL SLAUGHTER is a freelance photographer whose credits include Time-Life Books and Records and Time Magazine. He is appearing in World Order for the second time; his first appearance was in the Fall 1973 issue.

ADAM THORNE lives in England and is working toward a Bachelor of Education degree.

[Page 76]

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