I.
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges often deployed the image of marble in his poetry to represent the infinite endurance of the material world. In his early work especially, marble is all of eternity collected into solid matter, a substance that bears the wear of time in its striations and fractures yet which also resists time’s ultimate corroding power. Marble, as Borges imagines it, will never completely become dust. It will wear but never totally disintegrate, never lose its basic shape or its material content. For Borges, the endurance of marble is like the insistence of infinity. Infinity presses against number and measure and yet must be mediated through the finite. Marble is infinite time hardened into crude, finite mass.
Eternity, however, is not Borges’ richest concept for timelessness. He writes also of the immortal. The distinction between the eternal and the immortal is grounded in a more fundamental distinction between the nonliving and the living. Marble is eternal but it is not vital in its essence; it is not alive as, for example, an idea is alive. As Borges writes:
And since ideas are not eternal like marble
but rather immortal like a forest or a river… *
Ideas are alive and immortal, like nature’s forests and rivers, whereas marble is rigid and unchanging in form, like time. Marble, as permanence, can never be new again. Ideas, on the other hand, because they are vital, can be refreshed and reformulated at any time. To borrow Borges’s language again, an idea may emerge as a lofty new generation of trees in a forest, or as a fresh new current flowing downriver.
Marble is eternal, the idea immortal. Marble is material endurance and the idea spiritual endurance. According to Borges, the difference in their essence is the difference of life.
II.
That there exists an essential difference between marble and ideas, the eternal and the immortal, the nonliving and the living, is, I believe, a basic truth of aesthetic theory.
Literary Laundry has expressed a commitment to making so-called “new” art. In the inaugural issue a year ago, the journal aligned itself against the going fashions of the day, against what I would call the “contemporary” approach to art, in favor of making something new. Yet aren’t we being a bit derivative if we recognize a distinction between the contemporary and the new? Borges might have said so. He once criticized the popular term “modernity” when it was invoked in contradistinction to an indefinite “antiquity,” punning that it is the burden of every present generation to be “modern,” simply because there is nothing else for the present to be. We could likewise say that it is the burden of every emergent generation to be both “contemporary” and “new,” because there is nothing else for us to be, and so there is no substantial difference between the two categories.
But I think we can use Borges’s distinction between marble (the eternal) and ideas (the immortal) against his own sensibilities in order to distinguish the contemporary from the new and in turn articulate the basic intent of Literary Laundry ’s philosophy of art.
To begin, we might say that the distinction between the contemporary and the new, in terms of making art, is much like the distinction between re-arranging available materials versus creating something new from those materials. Marble is a material that can be used for making art. An artwork erected with marble will last forever because it is made from durable material, but it will not live forever unless it is also imbued with the force of life. One can arrange marble into a familiar shape, but if the shape does not incorporate a vital content, it is merely a repetition of already existent shapes. An artwork erected in marble but fortified with breathing ideas, on the other hand, will indeed live forever because it is imbued with life and so possesses an immortal regenerative power. Such an artwork can be called “new” art.
The contemporary art against which Literary Laundry has positioned itself is like an inanimate work erected in marble. It is made of lasting material but it is really just the same old form rearranged, gathering no vital content. This sort of contemporary art is destined to repeat what has already been, molding the same shape again and again because it does not endeavor to make anything new. For the contemporary, art is always already justified and exists for itself. It is grounded in a fundamental tautology – art for art’s sake, forever and forever.
New art, the kind of art we are striving to make here at Literary Laundry , does share one important quality with contemporary art: it is not liberated of material necessity. Recall the image from Borges’s poem where ideas are compared with forests and rivers. Greenery and water, like marble, are made of hard matter, and yet, unlike marble, they possess a self-regenerating power that allows them to beget more and more life, unto temporal as well as spiritual infinity. New art, because it is generative, potentializes more new art. The relationship of newness to more newness is not that of a cause and its effect, which is a temporal relation, but rather that of life to more life, which is a spiritual relation that withstands time.
In none of this talk of “life” and “more life” am I implying that the new is not related to the old. Rather, I am trying to show the creative limits of thinking of past art as intrinsically “old” and present art as intrinsically “new.” From this perspective, the new is a given because it is temporally current, and even art itself is a given just because someone took the trouble to attempt it. Such tautological thinking gives no thought to the nature of new art and what imbues it with value. The new does not just fall into our laps because we are “contemporary” people; it must be sought intensely, as something to be achieved. Contemporary art takes newness and artfulness for granted and so has nothing “new” or “artful” to offer to its audience. This is the attitude that Literary Laundry endeavors to combat. In this sense, the contemporary is the category that mediates between the old and the new. Logically, it is the necessary third that facilitates the transvaluation of the old into the new.
We are striving for more than the temporal endurance of our art; we are striving to make art for life’s sake rather than art for art’s sake. Literary Laundry is not the conservative “movement” of our times, which wants only to preserve what already exists, as if it were already justified just because it exists (a familiar tautology), but rather a radical way of life that critiques the old and the contemporary as it strives for the new. Simply put, the new is a radical and dynamic political orientation because it affirms life and begets more life.
Immortal ideas, then, and not eternal marble!