The Pulse of Life: Reflecting on Transcendentalism + Art

Sourced from a Book about New Mexico’s TRANSCENDENTAL ART MOVEMENT out of Taos + Santa Fe, I’m sharing a timely passage from Rudhyar’s writings, written in Santa Fe in 1938, almost 100 years ago and yet still eerily relevant:

Fascism — as the term is generally used in America today — means reaction, a social system where the individual counts for nothing and the dictator-controlled state for everything. The Transcendental Movement is a forward process; the upward surge of life and consciousness, Bergson’s elan vital constantly upwelling agains the down-rush of matter. Transcental America faces the potentially Fascist America, and as well, that America which still dreams idealisticalllyof Russian Communism in spite of the stark realities of a despot-controlled state that denies its individuals the right to think as individuals.

… Against this trend for material power through the reckless spoiliations of earthly nature, stands, as in counterpoint, the trend for spiritual identification with spiritual nature. Nineteenth century transcendentalism is an attempt to merge the separate individual ego into the transcendent wholeness of life. It led to cosmic consciousness - as sung by Walt Whitmas, as philosophically stated by Thoreau. On one hand we have all the energies of aroused physical life “cornered” by egos creative for power, on the other, we have the ego reaching out with identification with the universal whole, who becomes a voice for the song of wholeness, for the transcendent harmony of the whole.

… Secure in such realizations, identified with the sweep of the cycle, the creative person needs not worry about intellectual, or technical problems. But holding positively, firmly, steadfastly to his function as agent for the release of creative life, with a clear understanding of the forces that play through him as well as through the world, such a person will know what is needful for him to know; will be directed where direction is needed; will fulfill his task whenver and wherever it is called for.

… It is not the outer personalities and words that count. It is not the claims and conscious strivings that are potent with new springs. But it is the historical necessity of the cycle, of the time and the place, the need of mankind, which send little men who are sensitive and compelled from within to pinnacles and world-significance. And today in an America confused by the clamor of the Fascist-Communist controversy, bewildered by politicans and metagogues, frantic with subconscious fear and insecurity; today, in this world seared by wars and by betrayals, by greed for power and monstrous cruelty, there is need, there is bitter need for that which calls men to metamorphosis, which summons for men vistas of creative freedom , which does no befog with illustory escapes weary souls lost in faithlessness; but instead which sounds the call of the transendent life ownward and ever onward. Not away from the earth, not away from the body — but incorporating the earth and the beautiful body in a totality of life eperience in which man at alst can feel worthy … in which every individual can experience his participation in the universal whole as one who has a task to perform — as beautiful , as noble as any other task — as one who has a work to fulfill, a creative, a heroic work second to none, because in it the whole world of life charts itself creative, focalized yet transcendent.