Scriabine’s later piano things have something of what I meant, and do you remember the piano parts of “Prometheus?” Stravinsky, too—you know how he uses the piano in “Pétrouchka.” But the new vision is beyond these—something more rich and shattering.... I can’t say it. Let’s just wait and see.—The Editor.
Alice Groff, Philadelphia:
“Spirit can do” absolutely nothing, without body. Social spirit can do absolutely nothing without the means of life for the body. The social ego that would “start the revolution” must aim first to get control of the means of living—food, clothing, shelter, and the resources, natural and economic, back of these. Revolutions succeed only when they get such control; if they do not get it they are soap bubbles blown by a little child.
Why waste time pelting with idle words the social egos that have such control, instead of going to work to wrench it from them, even with war?
The social ego that has such control “can do anything.” It can stop war with a turn of its hand and establish in its stead world-wide service, kindness, brotherhood, peace, joy and beauty. And there is nothing else in the universe that can do this.
It is for lack of a social ego having such control and that unity in establishing the above-mentioned principles in the social order, alone, that “men continue to support institutions they no longer believe in, that women continue to live with men they no longer love, that youth continues to submit to age it no longer respects,” and it is the only agency that can help one to be free when one wants to be free or make one a personality instead of a nonentity.
All that you say about a “deeper music” is true, though I would say a more winged music—(I would not dare use to you the word spiritual)—or a subtler music, or something of that sort; but all that you deprecate in music, by critical suggestion, is also true and necessary, scientifically and fundamentally, without which your deeper or higher or subtler or more winged or more spiritual music would be nothing but soap bubbles without plenty of soapy water to make them out of. I am one of those who can appreciate this deeper music—but I know also that it cannot be created ex-nihilo.
As to Ben Hecht, his power of expression is wonderful. His writing is literature par excellence, but it lacks a soul. If in his meticulous analyses of life he could suggest the vision of the swallowing up of the macrocosm in the macrocosm—could suggest what humanity as a whole could do to wipe out the evils that feed upon the individual—he might be god-like. But like all of the rest of you he is a dead fly in the sickening syrup of laissez faire, at the mercy of Mother Nature. Now it isn’t worth while for you to resent this. Go to work and read what I have been able to get out of The Egoist, showing up anarchy for all that it is worth.
Edgcumb Pinchon, Los Angeles:
Glad to see you get into trouble—you have the Flame! May it flash on our universal dullness and faithlessness as the sun on sword blades——