A Rome No Longer My Own

Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just objects ― inert, merely utilitarian. This is unfortunate, as one cannot grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead.

For primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history, context combine to create, magically, the quality of soul. But we moderns are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. With what we are filling the world, I see a dulling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery.

―K.J. Bishop, The Etched City