Escape from Phalaris: An Odyssey Through the Creative Process in Brief Meditations

By Frank Hazard

The title as well as the thematic impetus of ESCAPE FROM PHALARIS are derived from the legend of Perilaus and Phalaris as related by the ancient Greek satirist Lucian. Perilaus, a gifted sculptor, created for Phalaris, tyrant of Agrigentum, an ornate bronze bull reputed to be a magnificent work of art, into which was carved a secret chamber in which the tyrant imprisoned hapless victims. And victims, when flames were ignited underneath the statue, inside were roasted to death as their shrieks of agony were transformed into dulcet music through ancillary pipes attached to the beautiful statue. The first victim whom the tyrant, Phalaris, tortured was Perilaus, the artist. ESCAPE FROM PHALARIS comprises a deft and original concept of art and creative impulse, examining (among other eminent themes) the necessity of the solitary artist to transcend minatory environmental inhibitions—to escape, as it were, from Phalaris—that impede or negate his own profound freedom and purpose affirmed in the distant chance of artistic achievement.

The book is divided into three parts.

Part One comprises twenty sections of varied length including meditations, a dialogue, and analysis, and establishes essential questions and themes addressed and elaborated and fulfilled in the ensuing narrative. (For instance: the dialogue in Section 12 is a complete autonomous statement in itself, but it is also continued and developed in Part Three—Section 7, which is also a complete and autonomous statement in itself.) Themes addressed in Part One include the fundamental—and questionable—validity of critical analysis of art, and evaluations of time, history, authenticity and inauthenticity, science, aesthetic choice and compulsion, elaborated both analytically and among vivid poetic impressions that establish mood and raise questions and ideas and themes which, again, the overall narrative fulfills.

Part Two consists of fourteen sections and it comprises a bridge (mostly but not exclusively analytic) that unites Part One and Part Three, although Part Two also is of course an autonomous independent statement of its own unified by themes including evaluations of aesthetic consciousness, intrepid analyses of journalistic and pedagogical criticism of art, a description of the Perilaus-Phalaris story from which the title of the book is derived, and the ardent spiritual and psychological processes out of which a solitary creator devises his art.

Part Three comprises seventeen sections of varied length including meditations, a dialogue and analysis, addressing themes and questions and ideas previously approached and now conclusively and altogether fulfilled in the comprehensive pattern of the narrative. The dialogue in Section 7 is a continuation of the dialogue in Section 12 of Part One. Analysis, poetic impressions and dialogue unite to achieve a vigorous and comprehensive portrait and expostulatory vindication of aesthetic passion, struggle, individuality, compulsion and (solitary) aesthetic consciousness.

Each section of every part is autonomous and can be read separately from the others but each section of every part is also absorbed by and unified within the comprehensive thematic pattern of the narrative whole. The reader section by section is drawn irresistibly into the narrative web and participates in the solitary agony and exultation of creative endeavor and the pain and peril and the affirmation of aesthetic deliberation and achievement. ESCAPE FROM PHALARIS comprises a provocative argument and ideas, vivid meditations and artistic impressions, two dialogues, and analyses, but it is also a suspenseful experience more thrilling and edifying than any similar tractual or fictive exposition could ever attain to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 12, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462804856

Frank Hazard

Frank Hazard Biography Frank Hazard is the author of The Fatal Heist, a philosophical crime thriller; three fabulist satires, Sow Belly and the Stranger, Sow Belly and the Thief, and Sow Belly and the Theater; and Escape from Phalaris, an innovative exposition of art and creative endeavor. For many years, the he was a drama critic in New York City. He was born on Sea Island, Georgia, and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, where his father was a member of the athletic staff at Yale University. An autodidact, he began to read widely at an early age. Mr. Hazard has been a feature writer, a film critic, and a general assignment reporter. Presently, he lives in New York City with his wife, Nancy, an artist and former ballet dancer.

Book preview

Copyright © 2008, 2014 by Frank Hazard.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2007908968

ISBN:       Softcover           978-1-4363-0288-3

                 Ebook                978-1-4628-0485-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 11/07/2019

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

45482

CONTENTS

ONE

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

TWO

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

THREE

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

PENELOPE

15.

16.

17.

IN MEMORY

OF

MY BELOVED FATHER

Who provideth for the raven his food?

Book of Job, XXXVIII: 41

Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?

Milton

ONE

1.

You never know when a demon will approach you and tell you that you are fraudulent, or worse, when he will begin to persuade you with his luciferous intimations that he is telling you the truth. This is a sardonic moment, a startling occasion that always troubles you, and you rarely can recover your former confidence afterward. But a possible simultaneous liberation—the apposite necessary opposite—occurs at the same moment, because (if we remember that the spirit of denial ultimately is supposed to act in the service of affirmation) you are released from the claustral restrictions of a certitude that may, after all, have been misleading, misunderstood or misappropriated—it may have been false; and, eyes agog, you perceive plethoric possibilities where you previously observed a limitation, dis-enchained if also disenchanted. Of course, modern consciousness discredits the influence of demons on world affairs, suffusing even the most feral recesses of primal darkness with artificial light, a cold glare penetrating shadows without delineating their subtleties, and so Mephistopheles for the moment is out of a job, bankrupted by the brief somatic evaluations that current psychology devises to adumbrate the elusive nature of skepticism or doubt, especially if either challenges its prevailing assumptions. (Perhaps demons should establish their own labor union in sincere protest—the infer no malice union—but demons, as a rule, are a restless and divisive group, so they would probably end up quarreling among themselves. They do their best work alone and in subterranean regions; and anyway, modern consciousness has failed to raise any Faust to rally their spirits: the heraldic clenched fist of contemporary protest is always political, not spiritual.) But doubt masquerading in any disguise is still a persistent temptation, augmenting the arrogant myopia of plausibility into adventurous wagers of choice and chance—while imposing, however, a penalty—a price—there is always a penalty you pay for responding to the temptations of doubt, the disadvantageous advantage: the lambent wings of certitude that formerly carried you forward, if only in one direction, shrivel and disappear as clay feet weigh down your movements and you perceive the sword with two edges, the obverse side of the coin, the arcane worm (never the urbane serpent) concealed in Newton’s and Adam’s apple, and the diffusion of possibility undermines your choice of a single possibility. The anxiety overwhelming your consciousness arises when a demon convinces you that you are fraudulent because of your inability to effect a decisive choice.

I am numbed and nailed and nulled into pliable acquiescence, a negation of possibility, when I fail to recognize my capacity to effect a choice, but doubt also encourages scrutiny and the suspicion occurs to me that many of my choices may be futile, determined by derisive circumstances that despoil my wishful thinking. A question of purpose confronts me, a perplexity: of what I can or cannot do, should or should not do, or if any decision of mine ultimately will be efficacious: and the question is moot, an agony. So art beckons, encourages, seduces my devotion, eliciting a dilemma rare enough to be exotic, or foolishly romantic, or quixotic, which I deliberate obsessively, always solitary because few people care to ponder my deliberations and nobody can assuage my obsession, and solitude nourishes my faith. Few people believe in the intense reality of art, a salient reality that underlies my relentless dilemma. People usually perceive art as a remote enigma, not a reality, and reverence hardly suffuses their ambivalence. The idea simply does not occur to most people, however they admire or respect creative activity, that art exists as palpably and as consciously as they do. They believe in its gilded price-tags, or the cheap sexual and social melodrama in tumescent novels about the middle-class, or pay an expected and obligatory—if largely bogus—homage to museum pieces, or exude fashionable enthusiasm for synthetic gimcrackery in painting and sculpture and music, but they have little if any faith in the reality of art as an authentic expression, or investigation, of existence and art remains a negligible abstraction which they dissociate from the mundane obligations and vicissitudes of quotidian routine. Art for most people is only an anodyne. I differ because art inspirits my consciousness. It invigorates, delineates my perception and experience. Neither a dalliance nor a diversion, or merely a mirror of myself or my environment—if this is all that art represents Plato is right and art is worthless—majestically art delivers me from my circumstantial predicament in time and space. It is my salvific extension of myself, my past inhabiting my present and my present infusing my past on a turbulent giddy ocean wave into the future, and so I must know what is authentic and what is artificial, if I expect to know where I am and where I am going (what I am, what I am, what I am, not what I think or presume I should be) or to determine if the trip is worth continuing. And this is an exorbitant question, a quest and a request.

By definition, however, art resists definition, so my quest sometimes appears to be questionable. You can describe art, imprecisely, but you cannot define it, not accurately. Art veils, reveals. It eludes definition because it is always fluent and forcible: and you vitiate its passion if you stagnate its intrinsic motion while attempting to scrutinize its methods, which are frequently animated moreso by interior motivation than by mechanics or any perceptible design. A theoretical battle fought on a map off the field away from any danger is only an exaggerated chess game. Similarly, dogged attempts to define art invariably are futile and doomed to be pedantic since you eviscerate art when you attempt, by analysis, to isolate and arrest that fluency out of which the impactive vitality of art develops, so finally you approximate and you equivocate and you obfuscate mere synthesized attitudes and oblique ideas about art, without ever coming any closer to a substantial or persuasive definition. Art can only be expressed or defined as art, by itself and in itself and of itself, and it defines or expresses itself in activity only, a shadow and a substance, ardor and essence, a fact and an idea wholly absorbing and suffusing consciousness like a massive torch illuminating the distant landscape on a crepuscular horizon, an imperious elucidation. You experience art in spontaneous recognition, all at once or not at all. It beckons, you respond, you approach, it reveals. Earnest interpretive discourses or presumptive speculation ultimately impede or