The New Romanticism

In the age of the Romantics poets, artists and musicians gazed out at the world and what they saw struck awe and wonder into their souls. With their hands, their brushes and their pens they conducted the orchestra of skies and restless seas. Inspired by their own restless natures they strode across the landscapes of Europe and made themselves a part of the imagery of the era. Today the world has changed. Artistic and thoughtful souls feel that the gaze has been reversed: nature is peering back into the human being and searching for a moral landscape it can write about, extol and travel. The axis of the world has changed.

The human being in turn creates either a shadow or a transparency. Only a solid form will generate a shadow and, in so far as the human soul has not received its share of wonder and awe, of light and color, it will remain solid. Those who lived their lives in the past with eyes firmly shut form only an opaque surface for nature today. For those who took in the truly luminous nature of the surrounding world a new field of vision opens up. They have the opportunity to learn transparency.

But there are at least three aspects of transparency. There is the luminosity on the side of nature; then there is the numinous world of the divine on the other side; and in the middle there is the self which, in its non-solid state, has to learn to see itself again. By shading its eyes it can find itself as after-thought or after-image. In a sense its own presence is no longer of such importance. The luminous world and the numinosity of the Divine are what matters. At one and the same time nature can look back through the human being and the heavenly can look down into the world. This, I believe, is the new Romanticism. Not that we are a reflecting sheet of glass - a mirror - but that we are a transparency that allows the divine and the natural to work through us equally.

These are the thoughts of one who is amazed that these things can happen and that they truly reflect the path of spiritual evolution. We can talk about saving the planet but our activism must also become so soft that we ourselves almost disappear. In what way we are painted into the picture as individuals, or as representatives of our time, is something the future can decide.

Jay

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Picture: Woman Before the Setting Sun by Caspar David Friedrich