Reclusland

In actual fact, words, armed with their abstract function, originally put in their appearance as a working of the logos designed to bring order to the chaos of the world of concrete objects, and expression was an attempt to turn the abstract functioning back on itself and, like an electric current that flows in reverse, summon up a world of phenomenon with the aid of words alone.  It was in accordance with this idea that I suggested earlier that all works of literature were a kind of beautiful transformation of language.  “Expression” by its very function means the recreation of a world of concrete objects using language alone.

How many lazy men’s truths have been admitted in the name of imagination! How often has the term imagination been used to prettify the unhealthy tendency of the soul to soar off in a boundless quest after truth, leaving the body where it always was!  How often have men escaped from the pains of their own bodies with the aid of that sentimental aspect of the imagination that feels the ills of others’ flesh as their own!  And how often has the imagination unquestioningly exalted spiritual sufferings whose relative value was in fact excessively difficult to gauge!  And when this type of arrogance of the imagination links together the artist’s act of expression and its accomplices, there comes into existence a kind of fictional “thing” – the work of art – and it is this interference from a large number of such “things” that has steadily perverted and altered reality.  As a result, men end up coming to contact only with shadows and lose the courage to make themselves at home with the tribulations of their own flesh.

- from Sun and Steel