On a Pair of Old Boys, a Helping of Meatloaf, Circles in a Circle, and Other Points of Intersection

This week, the book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, written by artist Wassily Kandinsky and translated by another from German into English in 1914, turned up at my door. As did an opportunity to view and listen to, through my online door, the current video making the rounds of another artist, Jordan Peterson, delivering an impassioned and forthright resignation speech, after deciding to leave a job he loved and the position of influence he held at the University of Toronto since 1998.    . 

While Kandinsky’s skill with the use of line and color comes through as sharper and clearer than his handling of the written word, due (as his translator noted) to his “tendency to verbosity” with that medium; Peterson’s skill with words, his written and verbal delivery, along with his ability to integrate and hold structure and strong emotion in balance, came through as clear, succinct and sincere.  In the two very different styles of expression presented (with 100 years in between) what showed up were two distinct pictures for the observer to see and consider.  Who knew what both had to share would also fit together and accompany what’s been turning up with regard to Meatloaf, who walked through and out a different door this week?  Shared perceptions regarding his life, his music, his ability to express emotion, and musically and poetically convey and  invite connection, unexpectedly added another picture to this week’s wall of work created and attended to by Old Boys.  

From Kandinsky, this take on things in all his translated verbosity, with the fun of "one of the mightiest elements" referred to as a “she”, no feminist leanings or political correctness attached:  

"…The other art, that which is capable of educating further, springs equally from contemporary feeling, but is at the same time not only echo and mirror of it, but also has a deep and powerful prophetic strength.

The spiritual life, to which art belongs and of which she is one of the mightiest elements is a complicated but definite and easily definable movement forwards and upwards.  This movement is the movement of experience.  It may take different form, but it holds at bottom to the same inner thought and purpose. 

Veiled in obscurity are the causes of this need to move ever upwards and forwards, by sweat of the brow, through sufferings and fears.  When one stage has been accomplished, and many evil stones cleared from the road, some unseen and wicked hand scatters new obstacles in the way, so that the path often seems blocked and totally obliterated.  But there never fails to come to the rescue some human being, like ourselves in everything except that he has in him a secret power of vision. 

He sees and points the way. The power to do this he would sometimes fain lay aside, for it is a bitter cross to bear.  But he cannot do so.  Scorned and hated, he drags after him over the stones the heavy chariot of a divided humanity, ever forward and upwards. 

Often, many years after his body has vanished from the earth, men try by every means to recreate this body in marble, iron, bronze or stone, on an enormous scale.  As if there were any intrinsic value to the bodily existence of such divine martyrs and servants of humanity, who despised the flesh and lived only for the spirit!  But at least such setting up of marble is proof that a great number of men have reached the point where once the being they would now honour, stood alone." 

And from Peterson’s close, with his own body of work and extensive influence already standing in place, this admonition and prophecy:

"Musicians, artists, writers: stop bending your sacred and meritorious art to the demands of the propagandists before you fatally betray the spirit of your own intuition. Stop censoring your thought. Stop saying you will hire for your orchestral and theatrical productions for any reason other than talent and excellence. That’s all you have. That’s all any of us have.

He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind. And the wind is rising."

Followed by this observation on Meatloaf, as referenced in the previous post:

"No other experience is like listening to Bat Out of Hell. Every comparison of Meat Loaf to other artists is lacking. Nobody does what he does. The closest comparison is probably to a Broadway musical (and indeed, there is now a musical based on this album), but that doesn’t do justice to Meat Loaf’s earnestness; actors in a musical are acting, and Meat Loaf is proselytizing. Listening to Bat Out of Hell means sitting in the front pew and absorbing the spirit with every inhalation."

What do all three of these Old Boys share in common and what makes them stand out as distinct? Worth listening to? Regarding? Taking into consideration? Valuing? What appears to have moved or motivated them to engage as they did within the circle of life?  What moves or motivates you in the chaos or order of things?  

*Painting pictured by Kandinsky, entitled Circles in a Circle, 1923