Close Up (Jul-Dec 1929)

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CLOSE UP the ram will demur that if he is a little troubled it can be onh on account of growing pains. And the thought-reader will continue. If the ram is not careful he will think himself into a mood of pessimism. Forsaking momentarily diagnosis, the thought-reader will philosophise. A doubt is a fecund breeder. If you are troubled with one, ten minutes' thought will multiply it to the point w^here you yourself are a point of negative consciousness, receiving vibrations of defeat, loss and suffering. The ram replies that his own heavenly sign know^s no defeat. There is difference, he says, between doubts. Abstract doubt — the doubt of something you believe because of will to believe — is different from doubt that is philosophic, and, in effect, constructive preparation for what trends the future may assume. The talking film, says the ram (for it begins from there) is a parricide. A tinny warrior from the costumier, who, making martial gestures with his papier-mache sword, steps clumsily back ten years or more, and is even now marking time on the trampled body of his parent. He is a Roman bully, dressed by a wiggery, and his ultimate culture may well attain a counterfeit of Rome's rank sw^aggering. * * * He is, indeed, to his parent what all Rome's clap-trap was to intellectual Greece. Cymbals, swank, the militant imperialism of the screen; for his cultural summit the engaging pathology of a Caligula. Reflect that with his new^ tin trumpets, every stroll will be a festival procession, noises lopping down the quiet like earliest branches. Already his 6