Embryonic Abstractions ...

“Perhaps that ideal enigma that the modern would desire to solve is, ‘what would we know about anything, if we didn’t know anything about it?’ . . . to track intellection back to the embryo.

For the spiritual record of the race is this nostalgia for the crystallization of the irreducible surplus of the abstract. The bankruptcy of mysticism declared itself in an inability to locate this divine irritation, and the burden of its debt to the evolution of consciousness has devolved upon the abstract art.”

(Mina Loy, “Gertrude Stein”)