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canvases have been resolved into a total psychic entity, freeing me from the limitations of each, yet fusing into an instrument bounded only by the limits of my energy and intuition. My feeling of freedom is now absolute and infinitely exhilarating. A
single stroke of paint
, my mocking Myrtle, a single stroke backed by a mind that understands its potency and implications, can restore to man the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apology andpictorial devices for subjugation. Imagination, no longer fettered by the laws of fear, becomes as one with Vision. The Act, intrinsic and absolute, becomes its meaning and the bearer of its passion.”
    Anders’ vatic rapture roused a murmur, and then a clatter, of earthier commentary, including drink orders to the waiter, but all were, Hope felt in the rosy flush of her youth, touched, like a crowd of doubtful churchgoers, by the possibility of any such absolute. Bernie, quick-tongued, a dapper big tout in his suit of small black-and-red checks, cut in, “Roight. The recognizable image—dead. Sensation, plasticity—dead. Beauty is dead: Impressionism began to kill it, the rediscovery of primitive and archaic art finished it off. Beauty and comedy belong to the same Christian lie. Nietzsche said it: ’Truth is ugly.’ He said, ’We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’ The only virtue left in this day and age is courage before the hopeless. The only art is one whose symbols will catch the fundamental truth of life, its tragedy. Primitive art is magical because it is shaped by terror. Modern man has his own terror, and we—”
    Strunk objected: “There’s more than that, Bernie. There is, as Roger said, everything we feel, including joy. There is a realm within; painting draws it out of us. Our self discovers its laws in what Jarl called the Act.”
    Bernie snapped, “Self—a rag doll, a fetish. The painter’s feelings, personality—who cares? Your Surrealist friends are French playboys, playing with Freud, who was playful enough. Who says that being asleep is more profound than being awake? Dreams are a muddle—brain-slime. What matters is not the psyche but metaphysics. Penetration into the world mystery; for this the painter’s mind should be as pure as the scientist’s and the philosopher’s. I call theprocess
plasmic:
the purpose of abstract art is to convert color and shape into mental plasma.”
    “My God, what pseudo-European swill,” Jarl Anders protested.
    Bernie Nova persisted: “The canvas enlists the viewer in sympathetic participation with the artist’s thought. It expresses the mind foremost, and whatever is still sensuous is secondary, an incidental accident. Truth before pleasure.”
    Roger Merebien’s luminous round head emerged from a huddle with his bushy-haired girl of the evening. Flutingly his overcultivated voice announced, “I find I ask of the painting process one of two separate experiences. I call one ‘the mode of discovery and invention,’ the other ‘the mode of joy and variation.’ The first embodies my deepest problem, the bitterest struggle, to reject everything I do not feel and believe. The other is when I want to paint for the sheer joy of it. The strain of dealing with the unknown—the absolute—is gone. When I need joy, I find it making free variations on what I have already discovered, what I know to be mine.”
    “Just watch it,” warned Bernie, “you don’t get decorative.”
    The worst word they could bestow was “decorative.” Zack so dreaded being decorative that he threw dirt and broken glass into his wet canvases; he walked on them in his filthy shoes.
    Phil Kaline, a millworker’s son from Detroit who had yet to discover his signature, big paintings in black and white, offered, “Come on, you turds, it’s not about
knowing
, it’s about
giving
. When you’re done giving, the canvas surprises you as much as anybody. For me, it’s free association from start to finish; it’s procedure that leaves