-- David Jones, self-portrait
"The times are late and get later, not by decades but by years and months. This tempo of change, which in the world of affairs and in the physical sciences makes schemes and data out-moded and irrelevant overnight, presents peculiar and phenomenal difficulties to the making of works, and almost insuperable difficulties to the making of certain kinds of works [i.e., art in general, and poetry especially]; as when, for one reason or another, the making of these works has been spread over a number of years. The reason is not far to seek. The artist deals wholly in signs. His signs must be valid, that is valid for him and, normally, for the culture that has made him. But there is a time factor affecting these signs. If a requisite now-ness is not present, the sign, valid in itself, is apt to suffer a kind of invalidation. This presents most complicated problems to the artist working outside a reasonably static culture-phase [e.g., like the High Middle Ages]. These and kindred problems have presented themselves to me with a particular clarity and an increasing acuteness. It may be that the kind of thing I have been trying to make is no longer makeable in the kind of way in which I have tried to make it.
"In the late nineteen-twenties and early 'thirties among my most immediate friends there used to be discussed something that we christened 'The Break'. We did not discover the phenomenon so described; it had been evident in various ways to various people for perhaps a century; it is now, I supposed, apparent to most. Or at least now see that in the nineteenth century, Western Man moved across a rubicon which, if as unseen as the 38th Parallel, seems to have been as definitive as the Styx. That much is I think generally appreciated. But it was not the memory-effacing Lethe that was crossed; and consequently, although man has found much to his liking, advantage, and considerable wonderment, he has still retained ineradicable longings for, as it were, the farther shore. The men of the nineteenth century exemplify this at every turn; all the movements betray this if in all kinds of mutually contradictory ways. We are their inheritors, and in however metamorphosed a manner we share their basic dilemmas ...
"When in the 'twenties we spoke of this Break it was always with reference to some manifestation of this dilemma vis-à-vis the arts -- and of religion also, but only in so far as religion has to do with signs, just have the arts.
"That is to say our Break had reference to something which was affecting the entire world of sacrament and sign. We were not however speculating on, or in any way questioning dogma concerning 'The Sacraments'. On the contrary, such dogma was taken by us for granted -- was indeed our point of departure. It was with the corollaries, the implications and the analogies of such dogma that we were concerned. Our speculations under this head were upon how increasingly isolated such dogma had become, owing to the turn civilization had taken, affecting signs in general and the whole connotation and concept of sign."
-- David Jones, in his preface to his great and mysterious work, Anathémata
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