Spectrum - 1965 - Southgate County School

In
Our
Opinion
THE
LEGACY
John Fordham 6A Arts
IMAGINATION is a highly double-edged sword. All the
powers of creation and destruction, of birth and death
that ever flourished on our world have been a product
of or a stimulant to the creative imagination of mankind.
It is our legacy, the expression of our uniqueness. And
if it should die ....
Let us exercise it a little. A picture is forming, not
yet in time or space for the future, does not allow us to
observe its details, not then a picture of what will be,
but a picture without definition. But its meaning is the
start of a chain, somewhere there is an association.
Think of it ....
O'Brien caught himself smiling which surprised him
greatly. But it was the grotesqueness of the man's
enthusiasm. "Profound experience". One did not have
"profound experiences". They had a dangerous effect
on one's powers of logic and moreover they tended to
effect emotional stability. But nevertheless it was a
phrase he was glad to hear. It started another train of
thought in his mind, he forgot the picture before him ....
"The colouring Mr. O'Brien, the colouring. Such
richness, such strength, such conviction .... Yes that is
really it. Conviction. There is a self awareness here
Mr. O'Brien, a discipline. I can feel it ... ."
O'Brien listened for the words to fade. He stood in
a white walled room, square and cold, and somehow,
without a consciousness of beginning or of resumption
he heard a voice murmuring in the clipped precise
rhythms of explanation. It required an effort on his part
to make himself aware of it.
"I call this a perfect work Mr. O'Brien. It has
complexity and yet nothing jars. A perfect unity. A
whole. I confess I was utterly dumbfounded when it was
first revealed to me. It was in Reinhardt's studio, you
know him? An atrocious painter and utterly without
faith in himself. But to see this .... Reinhardt didn't
paint it of course and I've no idea how he obtained it.
But in his studio, amongst his trash ... one removes
the hard unimaginative oyster and here is the perfect
pearl ... it was a profound experience Mr. O'Brien,
which I'm sure you'll appreciate."
O' Brien looked at the painting and thought of the
words he heard. "Profound experience" . . . the most
empty, impotent limpness he had ever been conscious of,
here in the painting and in the words of his friend. To
feel conviction. Feeling was dead, sensitivity was dead,
and power to visualise and build and create was buried
under the archives' dust, burned on the bonfires at the
turn of the century. The raucous radio voices of the old
days came back to him .... "The year 2000 heralds a
new era that will purge every threat to mental health
from our society ... it is a new century, a century of your
freedom, freedom to be yourselves . . . ."
From that day every suggestion of mental conflict
vanished from the consciousness of the race. Music,
painting, poetry underwent a systematic yet imperceptible
change. And the old masters did not die on
the bonfires alone, O'Brien recalled. A pervasive and
concentrated ridicule, everywhere, through every medium.
The name Donne, he remembered wryly, was quite a
vigorous insult, and still in fairly common use ....
15