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Correspondence from Frieda Harris to Aleister Crowley
EXTRACT
[23 August 1944]
The Book of Thoth is beautiful and I treasure the inscription. If the ideas you presented to me had not been stimulating, if you had not been so patient and expressed to me in many poetical images what you wished to convey and if you had not been, as I frequently tell you, a person, and one of the very rare, with a 3 dimensional mind (I don't add the time dimension you haven't got that) I could never have attempted anything.
In every subject I find a law peculiar to it and it is a geometrical progression . . . The type, the law of this, is simple like all great things but one can't see it for all the occasional trimmings.
In a painting, there seems to be a law which governs certain forms. If you make a curve one way, you must also make one which is its perfect counterpart. Shaddow [sic] and light must balance but in relation to that subject and the idea and form which lies in it. Colour is the same.
. . . added to this old conception of Art is this persistent sensation of movement. It is part of the glorious universe, it must be part of a picture. The lines must lead you on—so that the feeling of time is given.
. . . it is light and air and movement which is so lovely. I can't be crammed into a Rembrandt all varnish and dark luminous shade. So either I must try with hard work to find the living moving line or imagine nearly a pattern which, mind you, will take a genius to discover. This pattern moving in 3 dimensions could be woven in light instead of pigment, with our command of electricity and the cinema and shown on a disk and would give you some conception of the beauty of the Law with its knowledge and wisdom and make you feel all crinkly and goosey like fine music and some grand poems. It will be the light on which the domestic view-point in front of the eye horizon has never shone.
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