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Salient: Victoria University of Wellington Students' Newspaper. Vol. 32, No. 1. 1969.

Rags And Bones

page 9

Rags And Bones

The start of a new year. My problem, that of any literary editor, is to find suitable copy. I may either set my standards high and wait in some literary Never-Never Land for the brilliant student pool or I can humble myself and take the best of what comes along. However, I will not feel bound to publish material that I consider rubbish. If students don't warn to write then Salient will gel material from other sources,

I think of the literary role of Salient as being a missionary endeavour. Tongue-in-cheek it's a bit like John the Baptist trying to rouse a flock of sleepy peasants. In Fact it is to demand that people truly come to love art rather than perpetuate the conventional, base posturing affected by the so-called "arty" set who. it is believed, are so acceptable to common taste.

Art is not to be played with. By this I do not reject the posture of casualness or the so-called dilettante approach. Those who affect this posture are quite often among the finest artists but they have, as it were, the right to appear casual because their lives and their art testify more than adequately to their integrity within their art. Such appearance of ease is occasioned only by the rigorous intimacy.

On the other hand I definitely object to those people who assume a false 'reverence' or artificial intensity toward art. They compare most unfavourably with someone like Wilde who treated his work with a quite Puritanical integrity and devotion while still retaining a sense of some of the social graces

From this I hope some, at least, of my predilections will be made clear. Salient is going to follow Paul's advice to Timothy quite closely and I will hope be "instant in season and out of season. Refute falsehood, corect error, call to obedience —but do all with the intention of teaching". Finally, this "art" of which I have so gaily talked is never something to be used lightly, it is always a pale image of something else, viewed "through a glass darkly" a premonition of the Beautific vision, infinite in complexity but entirely beautiful in its truth.