In the final act of Picasso at Lapin Agile, a mysterious visitor from the future, wearing blue suede shoes, enters the bar and makes a striking pronouncement.
VISITOR: ‘Cause this century, the accomplishments of artists and scientists outshone the accomplishments of politicians and governments.
The rest of ensemble, including Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and a bartender named Freddy, have no idea what the visitor is talking about. The year is 1911 and they have no idea that Archduke Ferdinand is about to be assassinated, plunging the world into some 40 to 50 years of turmoil.
In her post A Lighthouse for Dark Times Maria Popova suggests that society is constantly prone to upheaval and turbulence as it changes from one state to another. These can be positive transformations in the end, but the period of time during the transformation is chaotic and unpleasant.
She sees art as the stabilizing force around which unstable fragments of society will crystalize into a new structure. She says:
This is the elemental speaking: It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another — that the system is most pliant, most possible. This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions, during which everything seems to be falling apart and entropy seems to have the last word. And yet here it is, solid beneath our living feet — feet that carry value systems, systems of sanity, just as vulnerable to the upheavals of phase transition yet just as resilient, saved too by the irrepressible creative force that makes order, makes beauty, makes a new and stronger structure of possibility out of the chaos of such times.
Popova cites Hermann Hesse, whose work was done during the upheaval of two World Wars:
Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.
E.M. Forster felt that a work of art was the only artifact that has true integrity and internal harmony because it is free of the practical demands that are put on other objects such as tools. I disagree with this somewhat, because nature faces its own constraints and practical limitations, yet it has perhaps the truest internal harmony.
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There are strong overtones of thermodynamics in Maria Popova’s observations, calling to mind Ilya Prigogine quote about the power of “small islands of coherence”.
