THE TRANSFORMATIVE VISION

Prof. Arguelles' consciousness went the route with the rest of his generation, and this is where he's arrived from painting and art history and the conclusion that ""the problem of art was inextricably involved with the problem of history, and the problem of history with the un. fathomed depths of man's nature."" He attempts a fathoming here with the Tai-chi (yin yang) symbol as a sort of diving bell--yang equals the fight cerebral hemisphere equals psyche, the intuiting female spirit; yin equals the left cerebral hemisphere equals techne, or man-the-maker, with stellar and geological analogues besides, to involve the universe in this Chinese boxload of inverse symmetries. It is a very poetic model, but the emphasis is polemical, for this is a comprehensive if erratic art history written in the interest of right-hemisphere psyche, which got suppressed in the course of that yin-yang imbalance we call the rise of the West. All the elements were there, it only remained to knit up the ravelled edges of Mumford and Krishnamurti; but in this ambitious work Yeats and Jung, for example, are used to argue that the present epoch is Tibetan hell, and Dane Rudhyar gets about as much space and more favorable notices than the Renaissance. Not for everybody, but serious, and the perspective ought to be tried.