Literalness

"Literalness" – Buchstaeblichkeit.

The apparently ever-flexible Alfred Stieglitz wrote after he had changed his mind on publishing his work: “Contradictory? Of course. There are contradictions in everyone truly alive. Yet, contradictions in those truly alive are not, in reality, contradictions at all, if seen in proper relationship to life itself. It is literalness that is contrary to life. Literalness can only be relative, and then it may be alive, so true. Any conclusion is to me a dead thing – unaesthetic, a tombstone. Where there are no contradictions there is no life.”