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MANIFESTO OF VISIONARY ART
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And it remains so. It has taught us a new way of looking, of seeing, of perceiving and beholding. Now, through dreams, meditation, deep breathing, and a variety of other means - the gate to that higher world may once more be opened, and the image itself transcended.
Most of us take reading so for granted that we forget the Visionary states it may induce. It is not merely a question of imagining the worlds which words may conjure - although that too is a visionary act. As Gustave Moreau reminds us, "I am all the more for dreams, for phantasmagorias of the imagination which I bring to my reading, with its many tales of lost and far-off civilizations - a naïvité, an impulsive child-like acceptance of everything unbelievable. ...How else could we dream of India, of the forests of the New World, of fantastic islands in the Indian Ocean or antedeluvian flowers in the heart of Africa..." (93)
As we read, words trigger images from our memory. But the simple word 'temple' for example, in all its emptiness and generality, may conjure up a whole series of specific memory-images in any one person - each image finely-detailed and described. Meanwhile, the very same word may evoke an entirely different series of memory-images in another person. Such is the power of the imagination. Where these two people begin to share their memory-images is at the level of art: actually building such a temple communally, or rendering it into a painted image recognizable to us all (and thus, a 'communal vision').
As we read, our art and imagination render into form those mysterious worlds which words describe
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Image: MOREAU: JUPITER AND SEMELE (Detail)
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