Materials

It is a commonplace—that the yearning for utopia within art or leftist politics is a reduced spiritual or religious impulse, secularized, materialized. But this feels like one way of telling the story of my youth. My parents had lost their (Jewish, Protestant) traditions, and they taught me instead to believe in modernism, and to some lesser extent democratic socialism. I added my own third element, mathematical Platonism, but that fell away like Eden by my late teens, and I spent too much of my twenties reading Fredric Jameson and Benjamin Buchloh, trying to crack the aesthetic code that would blueprint communist heaven on earth. Occupy showed me that this was never going to happen, but it was not until my gradual falling into God via various tragedies and accidents that I have come to stop judging myself and our fallen world so harshly. The twentieth century’s formalisms were not only a mistake, whatever their death toll, but only a series of flawed materialisms, awaiting their future spiritualization. Retrocausality is real. Tradition is here now. We have made Bach again, and late Coltrane, and Melville and Bresson, all in some prophetic perfect. It is written. It is perfect.