Word: arcadia
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Into this "wasteland" climate of despair, a countermyth of hope, has been introduced. It may be identified as the myth of the New Arcadia. The New Arcadians see their salvation in a return to Eden innocence. Arcadian man will not reprogram the world; externalized change is the Promethean trap. Arcadian man will change his own head. He will retap the sources within his archetypal self. A million individual religious experiences will take place, and these will change the world...
Once upon a time, says Roszak, perhaps in Old Arcadia, man was in harmony with his unpolluted universe and his unpolluted self. He had his myths, his rituals, his visions: his "sacramental awareness" of nature and of his place in it. Then he became a devotee of Reason. He lost his "energies of transcendence," and turned into that modern monstrosity, "intellect divorced of its visionary powers." According to the Roszak bill of particulars, Christianity bears a heavy share of the blame. It excluded other myths in the name of one myth. It tended to abstract God into the Word...
Between 1820 and 1900, scores of artists went west by wagon, railroad or stage: painters, illustrators, draftsmen. It was, as has often been said, one of the crucial experiences in American culture, and in their work one sees the ideal of Arcadia being identified with an actual landscape. The West was not only a place but a state of imagination, which could invest almost any tract of virgin country between the Appalachians and the Rockies with a kind of epic innocence: nature unspoiled, inhabited by prelapsarian man. One itinerant painter, Worthington Wittredge, met the legendary scout Kit Carson in Santa...
...court masque. Her tribal body painting is transmuted into an exquisite damask of skin tattoos; every detail of Le Moyne's image, from the green, parklike landscape and the rippling blonde hair to the jaunty flutter of tassel and petal, adds to the sense of a new-minted Arcadia. It is, of course, completely artificial...
...music by Erik Satie. Picasso went to Italy with the ophidian prodigy of the salons, Poet Jean Cocteau, to work on the sets and costumes. The motifs he encountered there inspired a series of stout, monumentalized "neoclassical" compositions (33-35). From then on, Picasso had a repertory for his Arcadia: the vine-wreathed gods and nymphs, the Minotaurs and classic busts, the disjecta membra of antiquity that he was to superbly transmute in the Vollard etchings of 1932 and return to, at intervals, for the rest of his life...