PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE
51
The abstraction of his created form as sacrament singularly en–
visions the corporateness of man
in
a religious act . . . Each man wor–
ships alone on his island. The sacrament which he creates invokes for
his comfort and his 'salvation' a world of the ideal where what he re–
members of lost symbols is mixed with what his heretical allegiance to
non-Christian (Oriental) custom supplies. Whether this custom, dis–
played to him through the aperture of his Oriental journey as exper–
ience, was mastered or merely 'sampled' cannot very much matter. His
symbol suggests the possibility of a new sacramental corporateness. As
a maker of sacramentalism he belongs to an unconscious artistic com–
munity of his age because, as artist, he is like other workers who find
art a better means of affirmation than existential courage. He has cast
off convention and traditional theology, and
in
his act of creating, he
descends to the true primitivity of religiousness; he returns to the au–
thority of primitive feeling and the emotive life.
There is not a phrase here which refers to anything real; neither
art
nor religion, neither the so-called primitive feeling nor the emo–
tive life, means anything in this context. But Mr. Baird is not bogus:
he is not pretending that he believes in God; he is pretending that
out of something which is not religion, religion may come again, so
that human beings who have lost the traditional objects of their
belief, but not the habit of belief, may have something to believe in
again. Just as the Reichians want to believe in Socialism again,
be–
cause they don't, so the Jungians write as if religion could
be
had
back for the asking.
It
is all so easy, so fatally easy-this socialism
that carefully avoids society; this religion that dares not say that God
exists.
It
is easy because everything is based on what the seU wants,
what the self needs or thinks it needs, and nothing on what the world
is really like. The world- the surrounding and not always friendly
reality of nature, history, society-has disappeared for these writers,
and has taken with it everything which has given measure and defini–
tion to man's struggles in the world, everything which has given man
a sense of his po·ssibilities and his limits, of his guilt as well as his de–
sire, of his tragedy as well as his happiness. These writers are not
concerned with winning over nature, with forcing it to yield up its
secrets; they are searching for a world they can believe in again,
and get angry at again. They are tormented not by the pains of
heroism, but by the inability to feel heroic-and often by the ina-
