ART is a word which summarizes THE QUALITY OF COMMUNICATION.
It therefore follows the laws of communication.
Too much originality throws the audience into unfamiliarity and therefore disagreement, as communication contains duplication and “originality” is the foe of duplication.
TECHNIQUE should not rise above the level of workability for the purpose of communication.
PERFECTION cannot be obtained at the expense of communication.
Seeking perfection is a wrong target in art. One should primarily seek communication with it and then perfect it as far as reasonable. One attempts communication within the framework of applicable skill. If perfection greater than that which can be attained for communication is sought, one will not communicate.
Example: A camera that shoots perfectly but is not mobile enough to get pictures. One must settle for the highest level of technical perfection obtainable below the ability to obtain the picture.
The order of importance in art is:
1. The resultant communication
2. The technical rendition.
Two is always subordinate to 1. Two may be as high as possible but never so high as to injure 1.
The communication is the primary target. The technical quality of it is the secondary consideration. A person pushes 2 as high as possible within the reality of 1.
A being can take a lot of trouble with 2 to achieve 1 but there is a point where attempting 2 prevents 1.
If the ardures of 2 prevent 1, then modify 2, don’t modify 1.
Perfection is defined as the quality obtainable which still permits the delivery of the communication.
Too much time on 2 of course prevents 1.
It is usually necessary to lower a standard from absolute perfection to achieve communication. The test of the artist is how little it is lowered not how high it is pushed.
A professional in the arts is one who obtains communication with the art form at the minimum sacrifice of technical quality. There is always some sacrifice of quality to communicate at all.
The reduction of mass or time or impedimenta or facilities toward the ability to render a result is the exact measurement of how much technical perfection can be attempted. The rule is if one is being too perfectionistic to actually achieve a communication, reduce the mass, time, impedimenta or facilities sufficiently low to accomplish the communication but maintain the technique and perfection as high as is reconcilable with the result to be achieved and within one’s power to act.
No communication is no art. To not do the communication for lack of technical perfection is the primary error. It is also an error not to push up the technical aspects of the result as high as possible.
One measures the degree of perfection to be achieved by the degree of communication that will be accomplished.
This is seen even in a workman and tools. The workman who cannot accomplish anything but must have tools is an artistic failure.
“Art for art’s sake” is a complete paradox as a remark. “Art for the sake of communication” and “Attempted perfection without communicating” are the plus and minus of it all.
One can of course communicate to oneself, if one wishes to be both cause and effect.
One studies art only if one wishes to communicate and the search for artistic perfection is the result of past failures to communicate.
Self-improvement is based entirely on earlier lack of communicating.
Living itself can be an art.
The search for freedom is either the retreat from past failures to communicate or the effort to attain new communication. To that degree then the search for freedom is a sick or well impulse.
Searching for and discovering one’s past failures to communicate an art form or idea about it will therefore inevitably rehabilitate the artist.
How much art is enough art? The amount necessary to produce an approximation of the desired effect on its receiver or beholder, within the reality of the possibility of doing so.
A concept of the beholder and some understanding of his or her acceptance level is necessary to the formulation of a successful art form or presentation. This includes an approximation of what is familiar to him and is associated with the desired effect.
All art depends for its success upon the former experience and associations of the beholder. There is no pure general form since it must assume a sweeping generality of former experiences in the beholder.
In any art form or activity one must conceive of the beholder (if only himself). To fail to do so is to invite disappointment and eventual dissatisfaction with one’s own creations.
An artist who disagrees thoroughly with the “taste” of his potential audience cannot of course communicate with that audience easily. His disagreement is actually not based on the audience but on former inabilities to communicate with such audiences or rejections by a vaguely similar audience.
The lack of desire to communicate with an art form may stem from an entirely different inability than the one supposed to exist.
Professionals often get into such disputes on how to present the art form that the entirety becomes a technology, not an art, and, lacking progress and newness of acceptance, dies. This is probably the genus of all decline or vanishment of art forms. The idea of contemporary communication is lost. All old forms become beset by technical musts and must-nots and so cease to communicate. The art is the form that communicates not the technology of how, the last contributing to the ease of creating the effect and preservation of the steps used in doing it. A form’s reach, blunted, becomes involved with the perfection alone, and ceases to be an art form in its proper definition.
A communication can be blunted by suppressing its art form. Examples: bad tape reproduction, scratched film, releasing bits not authorized. This then is the primary suppression.
On the other hand, failing continuously to permit a nondestructive communication on the grounds of its lack of art is also suppressive.
Between these two extremes there is communication and the task is to attain the highest art form possible that can be maintained in the act of communicating. To do otherwise is inartistic and objectionable.
These, therefore, are the fundamentals of ART.
When Shadows Fall
written by
L. Ron Hubbard
illustrated by
GREG OPALINSKI
ABOUT THE STORY
Originally published in July 1948, this timeless story communicates as well, if not more so, today as it did upon its first publication.
“When Shadows Fall” is set far in a future when Earth faces the prospect of slow environmental death, or more immediate destruction by the fleets of the colonial civilizations spawned by Earth among the galaxies.
Played out against a barren and destitute landscape, the story reveals the supreme power of words and art to not only create new civilizations, but bring them to heights not yet envisioned.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Greg Opalinski began his artistic journey the way many others did. As a child growing up in Poland, he loved drawing, which contributed to many notebooks being filled with doodles and cartoons.
In grade school his skills were quickly utilized by his classmates who requested drawings of their favorite characters from the television show Dragon Ball Z and others. Greg quickly realized that getting paid for drawing would be a great life.
However, it wasn’t until he came to the United States and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City that he realized that there are people who actually do that. There he discovered old master painters, as well as contemporary illustrators who inspired him to take art seriously and commit to a life of creativity.
Greg was a winner of the Illustrators of the Future Contest in 2012 published in Writers of the Future Volume 28. He is currently working full-time as a
freelance illustrator for various companies and exploring personal projects during free time.
When Shadows Fall
And then there came a day when Earth lay dying, for planets also die. About her crept a ghost of atmosphere, the body eaten full away by iron rust and belching smoke until the plains, stretching wide, were sickly red, and no green showed from range to range and pole to pole.
Red as Mars.
Dead, or nearly so, with the broken tumble of her cities peopled with the lizard and the wind. And the spaceports, which had given birth to the empires of space, were charred and indistinct upon the breast of Mother Earth.
So thought Lars the Ranger sitting in the window of the Greater Council Hall, so he saw from this eminence above the world and the red plains.
He too was getting old. Strong and young he had voyaged far on dangerous ways to bring the treasure back, but now he voyaged no more. Science had prolonged the beating of his heart a thousand years beyond his time, but now he was old and stiff and the Council chamber was cold.
The voices were thin behind him. They echoed oddly in this reverberant tomb. Seats were here for all the Council members of full six hundred systems. But the seats were empty now and their metal threw back the reedy whine of the clerks who called them all to order, reading names which had been gone these seven hundred years, all formal, all precise, and noting that they were not here.
Mankin, Grand President of the Confederated Systems, sat hunched and aged upon his dais, looking out upon his servants, listening to the threadbare rite.
“Capella!”
Silence.
“Rigel Centaurus!”
Silence.
“Deneb and Kizar and Betelgeuse!”
Silence.
And onward for six hundred names.
Silence.
For they were mighty there in the stars and Mother Earth was old. They were thriving across a mighty span of ten thousand light-years. And Mother Earth had no longer any fuel. They had taken the oil from her deepest springs and the coal from her lowest mines. They had breathed her air and forged her steel and taken their argosies away. And behind them they had scant memory.
Earth had no power of money now, no goods, no trades, no fleet. And the finest of her strong young men had gone this long, long while. The lame, the halt, these and the dimmest of sight had stayed. And now there was nothing.
“Markab!”
“Achernar!”
“Polaris!”
No one there. No one there. No one there. No one.
Lars the Ranger stood and stiffly shook out his cloak. He couched the ceremonial space helmet in his crooked arm and advanced formally to the dais. He bowed.
He might have reported there in the ritual that the fleets were ready and the armies strong, that as General of Space he could assure them all of the peace in space.
But he was suddenly conscious of who they were and how things stood and he said nothing.
There was Greto, once a wizard of skilled finance, sitting chin on breast in an advisor’s chair. There was Smit, the valiant warrior of five hundred years ago. There was Mankin, tiny in his robe, crushed down by years and grief.
About Lars swirled, for an instant, the laughing staff of centuries back—young men with the giddy wine of high risk in their hearts. About Lars thundered the governing mandates of Earth to Space, to System Empires everywhere.
And then he saw the four of them and the clerks, alone here on a world which was nearly dead.
He broke ritual softly.
“There are no fleets and the armies have melted away. There is no fuel to burn in the homes, much less in the cannon. There is no food, there are no guns. I can no longer consider myself or this Council master of space and all that it contains.”
They had all come there with a vague hope that it would break. And it had broken. And Greto came to his feet, his wasted body mighty and imposing still.
There was silence for a while and then Greto turned to the dais. “I can report the same. For fifteen long years I could have said nearly as much. But I admit this now. Earth is no more.”
Smit lumbered upright. He scowled and clenched a black fist as he looked at Lars. “We have our fleets and our guns. Who has been here these last decades to know that they are without fodder? Bah! This thing can be solved!”
Mankin hunched lower, opened a drawer and brought out a tablet which he took. As he set down his water glass, he belched politely and looked from one to the next, bewildered, a little afraid. He had been able to handle many things in his day.
He fumbled with his reports and they were all the same. People were old and children were few. The food was gone and winter would be cold.
He cleared his throat. Hopefully he looked at Smit. “I was about to suggest that some measure be taken to remove the few thousands remaining here to some planet where food and fuel are not so dear. But I only hope that I can be advised—”
“You could remove nothing,” said Greto, thrusting his hands into his pockets. “You could take nothing away. For there’s not fuel to lift more than twenty ships from the surface of Earth. The cause may be lost, but I am not lost. Earth is no longer tenable as she is. I propose that, with credits long past due, I force the purchase of atmosphere manufacturing equipment and other needful things.”
“Credits!” said Smit. “What do I know of credits? If this thing is at last in the light and the need is desperate, I can give them the promise of guns in their guts. Need they know?”
Mankin looked from one to the other. He was heartened a little, for he had begun to see these fabulous men as little more than companions of his desultory chess games. But he did not heed them too much.
He turned to Lars.
“What says the General of Armies and Admiral of Fleets?”
Lars the Ranger laid his helmet on the clerk’s table. All semblance of formality fell from him as he took a pipe from his pocket, loaded it and lighted it with his finger ring. He looked from Mankin to Greto.
“My fleet,” he said, “has not fired a jet in so many years that I have quite forgotten how many emergency charges were left aboard. I do know that mechanics and even officers have long since used all reserve atomic fuel for the benefit of lighting plants in the cities and our few remaining factories. At the most, on all our five continents I seriously doubt whether or not we retain enough fuel for more than two or three hundred light-years. That is, of course, for one of our minor destroyers. Hardly enough for an extended cruise of space.
“At the old Navy yard at the Chicago spaceport I daresay there may be four destroyers in more or less workable condition. Certainly there are enough spare parts in the battleships to complete them and make them usable. In our service lists we have a handful of technicians who, though they may be old, still retain some of their touch.
“We could probably beg enough food in the way of voluntary contributions to provision the trip. Perhaps we are just dreaming. We may be at best only old men sitting in the sun and thinking thoughts much better carried out by young sinews. But I for one would like to try.
“Today I walked through the streets of this city and an illusion gripped me. Once more I was a young man returning from a colonization in the Capella system. The sidewalks were lined with people, the unbroken pavement glittered before me thick with roses. Young boys and girls darted in and out amongst the crowd adding their shrill cries. I knew how great, how strong, Earth was. And then, the illusion faded and the pavement was broken and the roses were thorny weeds, and an old woman whined for bread at the street corner. I saw but one child in half a hundred blocks of walking, and he was ill.
“An old man is old and has nothing but memory. It is youth which plans, endeavors and succeeds. Frankly, gentlemen, I have but little hope. But I cannot stay, while even a few years remain, and know that Mother Earth which I served for all my
thousand years is dying here, forgotten and unmourned.”
He sat looking at them a little while, puffing his pipe, swinging an ancient but well-polished boot, not seeing them but remembering.
Smit blustered to his feet. “We are speaking of dreams. I know very little of dreams but I demand to be told why our friend desires to beg for food? Are we still not the government? Must we dig in garbage cans to provision our government’s expeditions and crawl in dung heaps for a few crumbs of combustium? The first right of any government is to enforce its will upon the people.
“I highly approve of the expedition. I demand that I be allowed to take one section of it. And I desire, if this matter be agreed upon, that all necessary writs and manifestos be placed in my hands to create it a reality.”
Mankin looked nervous, took another tablet and washed it down. It had been three hundred years since an expedition of any major import had been planned in this chamber. All the major expeditions formed on Centauri now where food, fuel, and crews were plentiful. The bombastic tone of Smit had battered Mankin. He looked at Greto.
Greto was aware of the eyes upon him. He shifted his feet nervously. Hesitantly he said, “I approve of this expedition even though I have little hope of its success, for it will be very difficult to attend to the financing here. Our funds are in an impossible condition. Our currency is worthless. I take it that at least two units, perhaps four, will be sent. I myself would like the command of a unit. But how we are to finance the voyageurs is a problem I cannot readily solve. One Earth dollar can be valued no higher than one-thousandth of a cent on Capella. This means I must assemble millions.” He rubbed his thumb against his forefinger. “They like money out there in those systems.”
“Print it,” said Smit. “Who’ll know the difference? And if you are to command one of the units, then my advice is to print a lot of it.”
Mankin coughed, he looked at the three of them and knew that it was he who must make the decision. A small flame of hope was leaping up in him now. He thrilled to the thought that Earth might once more prosper and send forth and receive commerce and trade. The strangely renewed vitality in Smit’s voice gave him assurance.