Cross stared. The wife of a Communist leader painting nonobjectively?

“You don’t like nonobjective painting, do you?” she asked, putting a soft challenge in her voice. 

“But I do; absolutely,” he answered honestly. “Say, I’ve a theory about it -”

“You have?” she sad, but she did not look at him. She was evidently struggling with herself. Then impulsively: “I’d like to hear it.”

“Well, you see, maybe my notion is kind of far-fetched,” he began, glad that they had at last found some common ground. “Nonobjective painting expresses the dominant consciousness of modern man…Sounds corny, huh? But I mean it.” He hesitated, wondering what approach would get beneath her reserve. “Modern consciousness is Godlessness and nonobjective painting reflects this negatively. There is really no nonobjective painting without either a strong assumption of atheism or an active expression of it, whether the nonobjective painter realizes it or not…”

“We agree so far,” she said as thought thinking of something else.

“I mean Godlessness in a strict sense,” he argued. “There is nothing but us, man, and the world that man has made. Beyond that, there’s nothing else. The natural world around us which cradles our existence and which we claim we know is just a huge, unknowable something or other…We may find out how it works, discover some of its so-called laws, but we don’t know it and can’t know it…Nature’s not us; it’s different. A part of us is nature, but that part of us that’s human and free is opposed to nature. What there is of the natural worlds that seems human to us is what we have projected out upon it from our own hearts. We created cities, roads, factories, ect. Sunset, waterfalls, and landscapes are but a few accidental aspects of nature that we happen to like, that somehow reflect moods of ours…So we are prone to forget all of the other phases of nature that are terrible, inhumane, and alien to us…Now, my notion is that since this is true, that the world we see is the world we make by our manual or emotion projection, why not let us be honest and pain our own projections, our fantasies, our own moods, our own conceptions of what things are. Let’s paint our feelings directly. Why let objects master us? Let’s take forms, planes, surfaces, colors, volumes, space, ect., and make them express ourselves by our arrangement of them. It’s an act of pure creation…”

“You’ve said it,” she exclaimed looking fully at him for the first time. “I’m surprised.”

“Why?”

“Not many people feel like that,” she said. “I’d not have thought that a colored person would like nonobjective art. Your people are so realistic and drenched in life, the world…Colored people are so robustly healthy.”

“Some of us,” he said

“Any you’re not? How did that happen?”

“It’s a long story,” he said. “Some people are pushed deeper into their environment and some are pushed completely out of it.”

“Do you feel that much aloneness?” she asked in surprise. 

“Yes; and you?”

“Yes,” she said simply and was silent.

These two pages were so beautiful, that I couldn’t resist sharing them. 

The Outsider by Richard Wright

“We Communists do not admit any subjectivity in human life,” Gil said with a slow, even smile, as though proud that he could utter such a horrible statement with such lightmindedness.

“I see,” Cross said, striving to keep his voice neutral. He was seething with resentment at Gil’s effrontery. Who in the hell does he think he is? He had to brace himself to keep from taking issue not only with Gil’s statement but with the whole attitude toward life implied in it. Cross felt himself slowly coming awake, feeling the real world about him. Here was a challenge the measure of which might meet his needs…Keep still, he told himself.

“Do you know anything about the revolutionary movement?” 

“I know it sketchily in general outline, from 1917 onwards -”

“Where did you pick it up?”

“From books, of course. What do you think?” Cross had difficulty keeping irritation out of his voice.

“Accounts written by counter-revolutionary historians, no doubt,” Gil pronounced placidly. He brought out his pipe and began to fill it leisurely with an aromatic tobacco.

Cross had come by his account of the Russian Revolution from the pens of Russian Bolsheviks themselves, but he did not bother to correct Gil’s assumption. He sensed that accuracy was no the point here. Gil was trying to impress him, not with learning, but with some attitude of scorn so deep that argument was futile against it. Instead, he took advantage of Gil’s silence to observe Eva who sat with her shapely nyloned knees close together and regarded him with wide, enigmatic eyes. When his gaze met hers, she smiled and looked off. She seemed tense, yet rigidly contained. She was a fragile girl of about twenty-four; her attitude was so distracted that one could feel that she would never speak frankly what was really on her mind. Despite this, she seemed kind, impulsive. Her eyes were a clear hazel; her nose small and straight; and her mouth, which was only slightly rouged, was almost severe in its sharpness. The overall aspect of her face, despite the shadow of a smile the flitted over it now and then, was one of tortured, organized concentration. Cross wondered how on earth had she come to be married to a coarse, inhuman character like Blount. Cross now shifted his gaze to Gil and was chagrined to find that Gil had been observing his observation of Eva. Gil smiled tolerantly and Cross found himself boiling with rage. He thinks I’ve never met a white girl before…

Something decisive was transpiring in him regarding Gil. He knew that Gild did not take his inner life into account he felt compelled to do the same with Gil. This damn thing’s catching, he told himself. You have to descend to their level if you are to deal with them…There’s no other way out…But he really liked this; there was an absoluteness about it that appealed to him, excited him. To grapple with Gil would involve a total mobilization of all the resources of his personality, and the conflict would be religious in its intensity. 

Finished this book a few days ago and I’m now going back and looking over all the shit that I bookmarked/highlighted. 

This whole scene between Cross and Blount is intense and probably one of the best written confrontations that I’ve ever read. I don’t want to give anything else away, so I’ll let you go pick up a copy and find out what happens if you’re interested lol. 

Every time he thought he was going mad, he met somebody else who had already gone mad, but in a nice, sweet sort of way.

If you’ve a notion of what man’s heart is, wouldn’t you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man’s frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this ‘awful’ part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb…But man’s heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man’s efforts at order an attempt to still man’s fear of himself?