Tags
Art History, books, culture, Elie Faure, God, history, Joseph Campbell, Life, poetry, religion, Spirit Of The Forms, spirituality, The Dance Over Fire And Water, The History Of Art, The Masks Of God, Zen
”All sing, all build, and all hearts beating together flood with such life the secret God that inhabits them, that His form appears.”—Elie Faure, last sentence of The Dance Over Fire And Water
Stupendous symphonic lines by the good doctor.
And no, I’m not talking about a doctor of philosophy, art history, or whatever branch of the humanities you might think. The early twentieth century French author of the classic four volume series The History Of Art and then the summarizing Spirit Of The Forms and The Dance Over Fire And Water was a genuine take your pulse and depress your tongue medical practitioner.
That’s to say he was not part of the Art Establishment, as every line of his writing attests.
He was an outsider.
And here at the Cafe we celebrate outsiders as individuals who have gone on the voyage and DONE THE WORK!
So why draw the curtain on his essentially six volume celebration of humankind’s plastic expression of our relationship with the Great Unknown with the lines : ”All sing, all build, and all hearts beating together flood with such life the secret God that inhabits them, that His form appears[?]”
Because like Joseph Campbell he is singing of what lies ahead for all of us, the groundswell of hunch and intuition that is rising in more and more people’s hearts around the globe.
It’s a slowly blossoming sense in seemingly diverse people’s breasts that we are in truth One with one another and with Life as a whole.
And don’t get worked up over the ‘His’ form appearing. That’s the way people wrote a hundred years ago.
Something is taking shape…
With a capital ‘S.’
Thoughts on where we are headed? Let’s have some fun with it at omphaloscafe@gmail.com!
Omphalos Cafe 
I Love Elie Faure. He is brilliant and astounding.
Wholeheartedly agree Mame! I first became acquainted with the name Elie Faure in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Fortunately I stumbled upon an entire set of The History Of Art in a used book store here in Montreal shortly after. I’ve been reading him nearly forty years now and never tire of his poetically wholistic organic approach to human culture and Life. Recently I was immensely stoked to chance upon the first two volumes of History in the original French in one of those sidewalk give-and-take libraries you find scattered around decent towns and cities. I immediately snatched them and dropped them into my bag. What a score! Thanks for the comment, Jeff
I am reading Emerson’s Over Soul right now. It goes very well with your wonderful quotes. I used to read Emerson a lot when I was younger. I am trying to get off line and read the true writers again. Social media has hijacked our attention span and to me that is far worse than the terrible world problems we are facing. I also loved the Joseph Campbell Companion book and can’t believe I gave that away. I loved it and it helped me a lot.
Couldn’t agree more about social media, Mame. The noise we moderns face, and especially our young, is overwhelming and it’s hard to believe anyone can find the space, the time and the quiet to clear the head and heart and re-integrate with their very own selves. However, having said that, I hold out great faith that many are in that very process right now, scattered about the world, alone, but filled with hope and courage. In my own tiny insignificant way this is the very essence of what I’m doing here at the Cafe. Life is a Gift, but we must do the work and never lose heart!
I also loved Henry Miller essays. The Wisdom of the Heart, Stand still like the Hummingbird and some other books of his. He was in love with life I feel. I love Thomas Merton too and want to read a biography of Teilhard de Chardin, I guess I love the writers, the philosophers and the artists. The beautiful paintings and drawings. This all makes contemporary culture look like a really bad circus. Although I like the circus too as long as there are no animals. The old amusement parks, carousels and Ferris wheels. What I really dislike is current entertainment crap.
Must admit although I’ve often heard the name Thomas Merton I’ve yet to delve into him and Chardin is even more of an unknown to me. In any given decade very few of these Giants live and teach, but as Campbell writes, viewed from a distance and perhaps above a great many of these Mountain Immortals present themselves to the questing eye and heart.
Not to sound too cranky, but to me most contemporary stuff is unreadable, unwatchable and unlistenable. Though I don’t blame the ‘creators,’ as they’ve been raised into a declining uncreative culture and fed a ton of nonsense about art for art’s sake and individuality and just about everything else that passes for our modern secular scientific minded belief system.
I rarely engage in discussions these days, finding most trite, ill-considered and uninformed. The Cafe is my response now, and lately it occurred to me that for genuine artists their works ARE their communication with the world.
Increasingly, this is mine. Jeff
I agree most contemporary stuff is horrible and poorly written and that includes films as well as books.