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Rene Cera was a French artist who moved from France to Canada after the First World War and was an accomplished architect as well as abstract painter. He kept a thought-journal related to discussions with his close friend, Marshall McLuhan. C.A.L. Review will be publishing excerpts from this journal from time to time, along with memoirs of the early and mid-twentieth century artists and others.
You may post comments on this article in our blog to be used in our print magazine as "Letters to The Editor".  Going Over It Allby Rene Cera *editted by D.S. Matteau (c)2006 D.S. Matteau *This is the unabridged version. Bracketed words are my insertions next to apparent typographical errors. I am working off old print-outs and photocopies of the original manuscripts. Not all the pages have been dated. Most were dictated by Rene Cera to his secretary when he lived in Toronto, Canada, where he was a designer at Eaton's and a close friend and colleague of Marshall McLuhan. I would place most of them in the late forties and the fifties. Rene and Liz left Canada for retirement in New England, where they lived out their years until the mid-nineties. These pages were supposed to be part of a biography of Rene Cera written by me in 1988 according to his and his wife's request, but circumstances prevented my fulfilling that task and so I was left with these pages and other memorabilia of our friendship. I am now publishing them in their entirety along with my recollections of Liz and Rene Cera so that their work will not be lost to posterity. Saturated as we are with materials settling in our inner being, we never invent anything actually new. We do a certain amount of cud-chewing which eventually will be transformed in conscious thought ready to be eliminated. We also possess a sense of automatic divination which is Wisdom based on unexpressed experience. Our individual make-up helps us to discover at the opportune moment the precise material we need, out of the immense amount of stored stuff stuck in our sponginess. Our mind chooses what is indispensable at a given moment from a chaotic treasure gathered unconsciously. The mind is often absolutely literal. It refuses to accept the conventional implication supposed to be part of representative production. Written or read words, music, graphisms, plastic equivalent of reality. Extremity of pragmatism. The mind or the deep being refuses to be an accomplice in any sort of make-believe. Human beings, like magnets, might also get run-down, worn out. Is it natural of being attracted or to attract? Suddenly the same emphasis comes again, overflowing with intense signification. Humans get temporarily lost to themselves, becoming disconnected, as when the Hydro is on strike. A human psychic organism could be compared to an extremely complex PIANOLA which must be in perfect functioning state to do its work of rendering, properly. It must click before any rendition could ever be obtained. Any human expressive work registered on external medium [media] is nothing [other] than a perforated roll, a certain rarefied bill of fare out of which nothing else is to be had. The first prerequisite is to be wanting. As soon as the registered roll is put on, the machine is ready to go. But the potential emotivity is inside, not contained in the roll. The roll only tells of a specific choice and of a particular sequence in which this choice of emotions must be brought at the surface. We are all equipped with a data-gathering appparatus, not particularly of facts, but of effects of facts on the perceptive system. Practically it is impossible to absorb more than assimilable, but one could keep growing and make room for more. Is it possible to initiate the layman to Art? He measures everything, and everything must have a practical application. Artists should make their living with some side talent, so as to keep their deep expression free. Official artistry is [the] slave of application, continuity of purpose, seriousness, ambition, perseverance instead of simple POETRY. Left alone the true Man-artist will pursue himself from recesses to deeper recesses inside of himself. It takes more than talent to exploit one's own Gold Mine. The droning of an airplane engine is justified by the fulfilled action of the plane flying above. The sound goes through human substance but remains foreign to man's intimate reality. On the contrary, pure music has no other end than establishing communication between two or more sub-beings. It germinates inside the human humus. In this long-winded survey I am beginning to derive dividends. By the very simple fact of going through the drawers of my unknown self, I discover stored material which has been waiting untouched for years. I am neither inventing nor discovering things for the first time, - I am surprised to discover so little material actually new. All that comes to the surface to be written down belongs to my day-to-day wanderings. As I go along with the business of my personal living, questions keep popping up which are themselves even older than what they seem. One doesn't formulate all his thoughts aloud. I suppose that considerations of all on matters toward which the type of individual you happen to be attracted creep on like personal problems and worries. It must be a sort of cud-chewing business in a ruminant-like fashion taking place in the uncharted background of the unconscious. In a kind of semi-confused way, a large amount of controversial matter comes in and disturbs in a vague way, until sometimes the irritation provides a reactive way of considering it. I for my part I know perfectly well that my personal points of view are not dictated by the deliberate thoughts of my mind. I am able to taqckle a definite problem with settled basis and let my deducing faculties work toward the only one and inevitable solution. But in the case of worries I rely on a sense of divination which is in fact a wisdom based and developed on unexpressed experience. Once again I have to explain what might happen in suggesting anew the uncontrolled working of my dumb vitality. I still have this idea dear to me that there is a noticing apparatus perpetually at work gathering handy information in an absent-minded way, because humans are made that way, all of them. What makes me find this material ready for utilization rather than any other, can be attributed to the particular make-up of mine, result of my initial quality and the surrounding conditions and circumstances which obliged me to grow with certain specific tendencies, rather than any other. I am sure that if my interest could be directed toward another goal, entirely divorced from y present one, I would find stored in my rear storage room all a large piling up of information ready to sustain my new efforts of expressive thought. Well, all this is beside the point, (or is it?). However, it is not without interest to me, in any case, to think that by such process of stirring my undetermined possessions I could be decidedly pleased to know the range of my possessions. My mind itself possesses the faculty of choosing among my chaotic treasures and chooses naturally whatever it can discover that answers my needs fitting my permanent orientation and also the point of this orientation where I happen to be at the moment of the choice. The very type of this orientation obliges me to an inescapable partiality. I cannot direct my choice anywhere else than toward the goal that my very nature has fixed for me. This brings me to put down another old idea that I had almost lost out of my mental sight. I am, according to the general trend of my thoughts and of my occupation, an Artist. As such, I should be permanently attuned to any Art realization that circumstances place in my way, - Strangely enough, there are days, whern I have to accuse myself of stupidity, when a painting that I am able to see with consumed pleasure ordinarily ceases to be a special Universe in which I am able to enter as it penetrates me. Do whatever you like, my mind seems to have become suddenly absolutely literal. And this piece of rough canvas in a wooden frame with blobs of paint, of colored putty, appears to be nothing more than what it is: a piece of rough canvas in a wooden frame with blobs of colored putty all over. Even the most obvious representation of some simpole subject I know well loses the property of suggesting the model. I can't make it out, I can't see it. Something deeper in me than my eyesight refuses to be fooled. A cow is a cow and a dirty piece of canvas is a dirty piece of canvas. As a customer I refuse to play my part. Magic has no effect on me. I am obtusely literal. If I try to hear music, I hear the sounds, one by one. I might go as far as to like them, but that is all. There is nothing else in it, no Magic, nothing. And as a matter of fact there is nothing, that is the only reality that counts. There is no possible make-believe if the subject for which it is put together refuses his complicity. As I happen to be my own most patient Guinea-pig, I wonder why all pretenses all of a sudden seem to be dropped and show the drab reality in its crudest aspect. Magnets happen to be run down I know that. (sic) A run-down magnet is just a plain bit of iron, it has lost its arms, therefore its power of embrace. The battery is dead, the car won't go unless you crank it. Human beings get run down, I presume. Or is it that the natural state of any man, me, if you like is not to be wound up. After all, there might be the truth, - it is unnatural to be attracting and attracted like a magnet! All delusion, that's what it is, all delusion. Again we might say that it is an old delusion, an irreality patiently built up by accumulation, like mineral crystal formation in caves, drops of hard water fallen one on top of the former during millions of years. That is where delusion is pretty near of being a reality. So human magnetism cannot be disregarded so lightly after all. And anyway I myself am subject to such lightening [enlightening?] turn about. As I was just telling myself that the painting I was unable to see was just a stretched piece of rag, there is the dawn, and I find myself clicking again. All this emptiness takes over again its fantasmagoric importance, - it has become a Magic reality holding me with the strongest posdsible ties, a circulation of power has re-established itself. The painting is a sort of perforated roll that enters, goes through the Pianola that I happen to be at the moment, and a song of joy resounds in me, and I hear every single nuance of it, and there is the answer to exactly tyhe sort of need I had just then. I imagine that Human beings not only happen to get run down, but also to be lost. I mean to be lost to themselves, become unconnected as when the hydro fails and stops the Pianola munching its perforated roll. Music is made of that little. A roll of paper with holes in it. A painting is made of little more, - a stretched canvas, and a certain combination of strokes. Nothing actually, I, Pianola=like with the power on, am ready to grind it through my performing machinery. I spoke of fooling myself, of refusing or accepting to be an accomplice. It is hardly so. After all, as I come to think of it, the music is not contained in the perforated roll, and all the potentialities of sound are contained in the Pianola and they are ready to come out as long as the power is on. The paper contains only a certain narrow bill of fare out of which nothing else is to be had. It just shows the order of precedence, - it tells how the guests must be seated, who next to whom, so as to have everybody happy and smiling. Otherwise nobody would know. Sounds are sounds, they are all nice or not nice, as you prefer. Well, some are nicer than others, I'll grant you that, but how should I know which is which. And a painting is also a kind of restricted bill of fare, telli9ng you the feast you can have in the circumstance and in which order the service is going to be made. Otherwise I wouldn't know. Of course one prerequisite is to be hungry. Another is to be free of alimentary fads. Food is food. In writing down the thoughts brought to my mind about my own specialized case, I had in mind the multitude of gentle people I am aquainted with, who have no idea, not the faintest, of how to approach a dining table and help themselves, figuratively speaking. I have friends who stare at paintings, and stare and stare, full of honest eagerness, because they believe hard there is something to be had, and are unab le to get it. Some are very straightforward about it. They can't see it, it's too bad, but they can't see it, and that's That. The great majority, do not dare to confide even to themselves that it is hard going. So they supply reason and justification deducted from irrelevancies which have at least the merit to give them a kind of hold on the mystery. My contention is that they overdo it. Somehow they imagine a hidden reality that simply doesn't exist. I would almost go so far as to suspect them to invent a shadow work of art, yes, a kind of informulated creation of their own, romantic and sentimental that fits the bill and allows them in a strange way to participate in the experience at hand. Don Quixote charging the windmills or the sheep. And this is perhaps all for the best of bests. Unless we want to admit that by dropping all erroneous points of view they could in reality participate in something their imagination untrained as it happens to be is unable to give an equivalent of. I spent my romantic adolescence dreaming of enchanted blond Princesses. I never met any in the flesh. But I have met nice women, very simply feminine; Princesses couldn't be any better. Impossible. Still, I find myself longing for them now and again. Now back to this Pianola example, just lend yourself to a small amount of false pretense. You are a Pianola-like contraption. All right. You present yourself with the Moonlight Sonata which has been perforated while Padewreski was playing it. All the light holes on the roll are Padewreski's. And yourself, if you want to share the Sonata with the Poloish Hero, you must be a Pianola in perfect shape, with all the notes ready for good sounding. Unless you are in such a state with every single note re3ady to perform its duty without failure, Padewreski will recieve a poor type of rerendering. Would he be responsible for such shortcomings? I imagine not. You yourself would be the first to ask, What is the matter with me, as a Pianola I think I am a very poor one. Moreover, to be allowed to heaqr a single sound, you would have had to be in such a receptive position that would have permitted you to connect your working system with the perforated roll. In front of any painting the relation of canvas to receptive performer remains the same. A canvas is after all nothing more than a special kind of registered roll which you must connect in some manner with your own perceptive self. It is not quite sufficient to stare at a painting and even go as far as being sentimentally excited about it, - your absorbing cogs and wheels must get hold of the painting and as they start grinding, must suck it in, so to speak. Nothing can really begin to happen unless the perforated roll starts it s journey inside and brushes into action the sensitive centers which are expected to be there, ready to perform the utmost of their perceiving duty. The Painting does not bring anything new inside, nothing that wasn't there previous to the confronting operation. The purpose of a painting or for that matter of any work of Art is to give you the total and well-ordered awareness of the treasure you possess. As you do your job of considering the special arrangement made by somebody else who has devoted the greatest part of his life to make such adequate arrangements, you discover in your storage room the elements the arrangement is composed of. Besides, it shows you how they have to be presented in relation to each other in order to be taken in the most profitable manner. So we find ourselves tempted to conclude that there is a certain amount of personal bringing-up to do if any Art experience on its true ground has to be expected. All of us, I believe, are equipped with a data-gathering apparatus, not only of facts, but more precisely, of effect of facts on the sensitive system. It would seem essential if any Art participation is to be expected, that a surveying consciousness should be directed toward the inner knowledge of the stock at hand. In other words, the individual is expected to keep a sort of tabulation of whatever comes in in the form of brute sensation, - they have to be given a valuation as regard to oneself. If, when you look at a tree, you must say to yourself, Tree, it is barely enough to make emotional reserve in yourself. The important operation to accomplish then is to figure out as subtly as it can be done, what change the presence of this new tree operates in your latent reality. My example here is plainly one among millions. But at the right moment when on isw confronted with an ensemble of signs which do evoke registered true sensation, a resounding wind comes and wakes them up, not one by one, but in a sequence and correspondence from each to each, and each to certain groups, and each to all until all possible combinations are covered. A work of Art can be compared to a cocktail very complicate3d which recalls all the separate ingredients used to prepare it, thatg you know each very well in your taste memory, without being able to situate the exact nature all the components now blended together. Basically, it is impossible to receive more than you are prepared to possess, but there is not any impossibility in enlarging the possessing scope. It is primarily a question of desire. Things you do not recognize as existing, when you can manage it, exist less than if you can hunt for them. The necessary development must be based on a sharp desire to know the size and nature of your own estates. It is much less difficult than it appears on the surface. I wonder sometimes, when I figure ways and means to open actually the realm of Art to the layman if it is normal for him to have dealings of any sort with that sort of thing? His general training has only been directed toward usefulness. He expects all activities, he and his fellow-men, to correspond to a definite purpose with results to be estimated in acceptable measurable quantities. His preparation for life forbids him the appreciation of anything that doesn't answer a definite need in the ordinary sense of the word, that is, doesn't appear to have a practical application, a clear-cut relation with a well-fullfilled as he is able to conceive it. From early youth he has developed a customer's mind who is ready to pay for any commodities he gets and who expects to be awarded in some sort of cash for anything he may produce and supply his neighbor with. Material reward is the basis of all transactions, whether the reward be taking form of barter or success. To understand that in certain cases the result actually doesn't count, being only incidental and subordinated to the essential fact that the marshalling of energy is a reward in itself since it helps man to be conscious of his unity and possibility of concentrated power, demands a great effort of acceptation and of abnegation. And in fact, since there is a market for Art governed like anything else by the law of offer and demand, it is more so, it is impossible to imagine an artist going to the trouble of putting together a complicated monument of his talents for the only self-satisfaction of having succeeded in his difficult attempt. An Artist must eat, anybody will agree on that. In my younger days I had my heavy share of unsuccessful efforts to eat through producing personal works of art. It never was particularly easy. Finally I got tired of hoping for regular meals which would depend on my finding a successful (therefore acceptable) formula which would have a market value and still satisfy my desire of not having to settle immediately in a rut. Some artists rather like it to settle themselves early in a routine in which progress is only possible in a technical ground. Some others prefer to remain unattached, free from any decided manner, [to] keep going for new ways of approach and self-revelation. As soon as I ceased to depend on my salesmanship to become a successful Artist I aquired the right to be an Artist on my own account, for my own pleasure pursuing changing goals as circumstances and my own evolution as a man warranted it, experimenting at my leisure in my most private way. Instead of remaining a professional painter I became a man with a specialized job where I did my best to satisfy everybody including myself, and as to my private activities they were exclusively controlled by the turn of my fancy. This might seem a derisive opinion, coming from a man who discovered a rare way to remain free, but I firmly believe that Artists shouldn't have to earn their living in producing works of art. Work done with the market as an eventual end tends to discourage the developing of talent and brilliancy. By simply persevering in a straight direction he will succeed to form around him a group of admirers who have the artistic ambition of producing works which they see well realized by the artist of their choice. It is a pity. It rewards application, continuity of purpose, seriousness, perseverance, all qualities which have little to do with true Poetry. A real man, left alone, will keep pursuing himself from recesses to recesses in his own uncharted wilderness. He must of course remain aloof. Recognition is not an essential necessity. It is agreeable to be the center of an appreciative crowd, it boost self-esteem. But when all is well-considered, the only thing that really counts is the discovery of one's own mystery, of one's own treasure. And it takes more than talent to exploit one's own Gold Mine. The droning of an aeroplane engine has no other effect on me than of signaling the reality of the plane's passge overhead in sound. I am able to tell myself: there goes the 9:30 plane. I feel the machine going through my reality like if there inside a taut cello string is vibrating in the whole of myself like if tackled and tickled bu the rubbing of a giant bow. I have a kind of interested indifference for the plane and the vibrating waves it forces through me. The purpose of the rumbling sound I explain by saying it is justified by the fulfilled action of the plane flying in the air above and all through my substance. Still sound and plane are both foreign to my intimate reality, because the purpose of a plane passing somewhere above is not to take into account my existence but to accomplish the miracle (miracle to me) of flying. Pure music on the contrary has an end in itself. Produced by man to discharge his heavy load it either subsides there without further activity or goes on all over a circle of human communication to reach man again, completing the human circuit. Music splits the complacity of silance in measured bits all fitting into each other and fitting also the assimilating faculties of the listening man. It has no other practical end than being indispensible to the profound inner activity of Man. |