Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1210

Carbon of letter to Lewis Lane

August 10, 1937

 

 

My dear Lewis Lane:

Notwithstanding I have seen and talked with you once or twice since I had your interesting letter of July 20, I think there are at least two or three reasons why it merits more extended and specific reply; also be­cause I neglected telephoning you of my departure from New York until it was too late Saturday to call you at your office.

You certainly do have a high and kind appreciation of my attempts to communicate somewhat beyond the common­place. Probably it is your amiability that prompts such generous and graceful expression. Thus do I purr in response to your caressing words.

I think the London organist got off on the wrong foot, but when the little girl sang, “A consecrated cross-eyed bear,” I’m sure something was bruin!.

Yes, the bulls must down all the reds; that’s the only way they can keep in the black. The bears make their killings when everything is blue. Of course, this means the blooey blue. The celestial blue crowns the empyrean and turns to red only where it descends to earth at the birth and death of day. Red is the earth color, the only color distinguishable by animals and primitive man.

I do think reflection is a kind of mental digestion but I doubt if conflict is food for it. I think conflict is to the mind what nails are to the stomach — something that must be taken out before it can function. I wonder if your mind is no longer so full of food for reflection as it was formerly. I imagine you are just having a period of assimilation, perhaps a spell of intellectual fasting and prayer without need of further aliments for reflection.

Experience is the food of reflection. It buffets us on every side. But reflection builds hypotheses. These are frames or diagrams for the reception of experience. When all the data of experience can be fitted into the diagram and not too many pieces left over, then the world-pattern is mated to the mind-pattern and civilization, a puling infant, is born. I should say, will be born, for it /is/ only in the realm of the natural and physical sciences that valid hypotheses have been made. These have been exclusively the gifts of the light-bearers, those who pursue the beauty that lies in the nature of things and discover it to us in principles and laws, those whose services are esthetic and spiritual and who ask no other reward. They give the light for the fruit-bearers who give us the material things of applied science and technology and receive their material rewards. This is the key to our material civilization — the re-molding of our environing world nearer to our heart’s desires, be they base or high.

But all our arrangements of social structures and forces are still in the empirical stage, as were all the technical arts only three centuries ago. We manipulate our social and political forces now as we did our tech­nical and material forces then, some well and some ill, but without any reference ground in principle, custom, tradition and imitation being our only guide. And so our civilization, as to human and social organization remains yet to be born, but the light-bearers are beginning to feel and follow after the beauty that lies hidden in the societal world.

When the associative relationships of men yield up to the reflections of beauty-seeking minds the basic principles of social organization and a large hypothesis comes into view, consonant with all preceding established theory, then the light breaks; all of the particulars fall within the frame of the conception, and the means come to hand for building our hearts’ desires into our social environment, our societal world. Then will come the fruit-bearers of public services. Seeking material rewards, they will organize and engineer the community services and distribute them on the same basis of value and by the same technique of exchange as other technical and busi­ness services are sought to be delivered today.

The generalizations of natural science have afforded vast means for building the fulfillment of age-old wishes and desires into our physical world. So must the corres­ponding generalizations of social phenomena open the way and provide the means and technique for men to build into their social organization all of the use and beauty that have lived in the artist’s vision and the poet’s dream.

You are kind to my foibles, indeed. You seem to have extended the principles of your particular art into the artistry of life. You rouse harmonious vibrations and warm to sympathetic response. I think you must have the Greek conception of music — that it extends to all the noble arts and graces to which the muses can inspire.

I will return to New York about the 19th and “be seeing you” I hope.

Sincerely,