Читать книгу Seven Little Known Birds of the Inner Eye - Mulk Raj Anand - Страница 11

Introduction

TO THE title Seven Little-Known Birds of the Inner Eye, I could have added the subtitle How to Taste a Picture to emphasize my wish to approach the theme of appreciation of works of art in a relaxed manner rather than from a formalist point of view. Like other people, I have been aware for some years that it is difficult to use words to explain paintings, sculpture or architecture. But, despite those who maintain that the "silent areas" of art should be left alone, there is a common urge to analyse, dissect, understand, enjoy and criticise aesthetic experience. Thus no apology is necessary to explain the need for appreciation. Actually, however, research in efforts at total experience of works of art has only recently begun and the hypotheses put forward in this essay are tentative, suggested for discussion in order to achieve some basic formulations.

I contend that if you look at a picture, even for a second, many more things happen to you than you may have cared to find out.

But if you are not an impatient or a superficial person, and stand to look at a work of art for longer than a second, you begin to experience certain striking phenomena, such as colours, lines, structures, tones and stirrings. These are only revealed, at first sight, in a general perception or sensation or intuition. The structural parts of the composition are allied with the various parts of your body-soul, so that you become aware of the whole picture or a portion of it. For instance, the horizontal Sines may ally themselves with the hereditary restful lines of sleep in your eyes; the vertical lines with the aspiration towards the great God above the skies inherited from the infancy of mankind; the triangles with sharpness and vitality; the curving line with the sense of harmony or coherence. And all this may happen without your knowing it.

Again, if you sit down rather than remain standing when you contemplate a picture or sculpture or even a building, the work of art, beyond the first look, may begin to evoke from you several highly complex and varied responses which you may not have believed possible. If, however, you happen to be a rasika, or critic, who has seen thousands of works of art, you know that experiencing a particular work involves many considerations of a continuing intricacy and richness. The experience involves associations of nerves, vibrations, feelings, emotions, ideas and other subtle states of the psychophysical life, one leading to the other, and back again, until you are in active contemplation and come back to the work not only to look but to see it more intensively and to try, as far as possible, to have a total experience of it. In this process you recall other works or natural objects, and you ask questions and allow yourself to feel the work's inner rhythm. You fee! pleasure-displeasure in it, dimly apprehend its various social, historical and ideological aspects, absorb it or are absorbed by it and taste it. Or, on mature consideration, you reject it and walk away. At any rate, as you are looking you are much more in the condition of seeing than of merely looking.

Actually, most of the museums, art galleries and big houses of the world display works of art in such a jumble that many people go through them like peasants walking through a treasure house or through a colourful bazaar on a market day.

The schoolteacher, with a class of eager children, lectures on the history of a work of art, weaves legends about the artist, and tells pupils all kinds of anecdotes. And the naive but curious youngsters get only a verbal idea of the picture and the story it illustrates, and some gossip about the artist and the world of art.

In the vast majority of homes, pictures are ornaments or status symbols or sentimental mementos. These may be oils or water-colours, cheap religious oleographs or photos of relatives, immortalised and placed far above eye level, or a jumble of colourful calendars adorned with depictions of political leaders or film stars.

Even the critics seldom emphasise the nature of the complex of references which emerge in those who wish really to see a work of art. And the reason for this may be that the condition of seeing or vision, or total experience (darshana in Sanskrit), with all its subtle implications in the body-soul, can never be totally defined or fixed. Very few attempts have so far been made to distinguish between looking and seeing, looking and noticing and, again, if I may put it in an ancient Indian form, "seeing and seeing." Nor have the neuromuscular phenomena of man's highly sensitive biological organism, the miraculous product of millions of years of vertebrate evolution, been deeply analysed, as yet, in relation to the feelings and recognitions, analogies and resonances which can occur between ourselves and works of art.

Always, however, we bring our human responses to a work of art instinctively. Sometimes these work well and the onlooker may carry away the "feel" of a painting or sculpture. More often than not there remain only casual, superficial experiences without much value. People sum up their reactions with ejaculations like "lovely," "beautiful," "marvellous," "splendid," "glorious," "wonderful," "great," "bad," "atrocious," "What does it mean?" and "Is it art or double-talk?"

If the purpose of a work of art is to intensify the emotions or to heighten the awareness of rhythm, colour, line, form or expression, then, even though a work of art may remain a "personal experience" for each individual, we must try to analyse the elements of art experience, to increase our enjoyment and to make it, as far as possible, darshana, total imaginative experience. We must try to achieve oneness with the internal rhythm, joy, catharsis or release, or whatever the aesthetic experience may be called.

In the following pages, we shall suggest some hypotheses for seeing beyond looking.

It is important to note that when we speak of pictures here, we do not refer to photographs. At its best, the camera does, indeed, select a visual situation, mood or symbol, and this involves the photographer's choice of qualities that suggest the whole vision. The photographer of talent is today an artist who is freed only by his machine.

But because the making of a painting or a sculpture involves an almost indefinable, prolonged and continuous creative process, the creative artist is more totally involved and does not necessarily depend on a particular tool. At any given moment, the heightened imagination of the artist is the real determining factor in so far as it gathers up all the strains of biological and psychophysical energies. (This has sometimes been done in photography, as by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, but is more integral to the artist who uses his total personality.)

Our vision or visionary image is revealed, after analysis, to be composed of many form-giving interpretations. We make certain voluntary and involuntary choices of colours, and we distinguish structures, emphasising certain elements and leaving out others. I will use a metaphorical method in describing what happens, since the response is more poetical in its nature than scientific, and since art experience is delight, deep sensitive awareness, a flight into the inner realm of a work, rather than the casual appeasement of an appetite for vulgar sensationalism or for precise intellectual understanding. I have, therefore, referred to the responses of the body-soul as "seven little-known birds of the inner eye,"

These birds may fly singly, or in unison, or in a haphazard manner. It seems to me that the total vision, or darshana, as I call it, is not an orderly process, because of the over-abundance of perceptions, apperceptions and vibrations which are the inner energies of the body-soul. Affiliated with these inner energies are emotions, moods and feelings and stirrings in the subconscious life. So many traces of experience become active along the tracks of the racial unconscious in the moment of seeing that it is difficult to distinguish them or to say which portion of the metabolism became energised first. Therefore, I am inclined to question the view that a work of art evokes a "pure aesthetic emotion." Though the response may ultimately be joy, the peripheral reactions do suggest practical significances. Thus the wall-painting The Dying Princess, in Ajanta, may conduce to karuna, or pity; Leonardo's Madonna and Child, in the Hermitage Museum, to love; Picasso's Guernica to horror of war. And these moods, or bhavas, are almost biological. So aesthetic response cannot be a class apart, but part of a totality of responses.

I am not sure in what order these responses emerge. But for the sake of convenience I have described the flight of the seven little-known birds or energies in a certain sequence, as indicative of what might happen to a good rasika in the first second or two of his mature contemplation of a work of art. But the actual response may or may not happen in this sequence.

Given the flight of the seven birds along the energised tracks of experience, we might, I believe, be able to see. That is, we might become more intensely aware of the suggestions made by the composition of colours, forms, lines, tones and textures, through the "poetry by analogy" of visual art, than we are when we are merely looking. Works of art are popularly understood as illustrations of poetry or stories, or as themes yielding logical meaning. But this idea may give place to the real response that lies, perhaps, in the awakening of the active body-soul.

When played upon by art experience, this active body-soul begins to release energies or vasanas and either allies itself with the experience or rejects it, completely or in part. In this process, works which are merely slick or clever, or unfelt imitations of appearances, are proved to be false, sentimental, tawdry and insincere, lacking the core of the vital creative process in the organisation of form. Such works are devoid of genuine struggle on the part of the artist to construct from a challenge, to ally himself with the creative vision of the intensely eager onlooker. These indifferent works can then be cast aside through the value judgements that are implicit in true seeing.

I wish to make it clear that many Western aesthetic systems, based on pure sensation, are inadequate. I feel that Lord Russell, following David Hume and Professor G. E. Moore, overplayed sensation and congeries of sensations. We become aware of sensations only after the impact has passed through our physiology. By that time sensations are not simple percepts, but have acquired affiliations which charge them with suggestions, vitalities and meanings. This is to say we have no pure abstract sensation but perceptions-apperceptions.

The process of contemplation, or total darshana, is something like this. The first bird flies off impetuously, propelled by curiosity, and communicates to the memory its discrimination of the lines, colours and forms beyond the light in the retina. The second, the memory bird, recognises the likeness of image or lines to what has been experienced before. The third bird flies off from the thalamus (the survival of the anthropoid ape in ail of us) underneath the cerebral cortex. Vibrating with questions ("What?" and "How?" and "Why?") this third bird transmits violent currents above and below, since the thalamus is connected with the brain as well as the spinal cord. The currents are transmitted downwards to the lumbar ganglion and to the mysterious kundalini, or the dormant serpent power, which may be the ultimate repository of all the rhythmic wavelengths. The fourth, the rhythm bird, follows the seminal possibilities, such as those from the various past and present rhythms. This fourth bird allies itself to or dissociates the body-soul from the organised pattern.

The fifth, the heart bird, is already filling the personality with the excitement of the gestalt. If its energies have been aroused by the art experience, the blood flow quickens. The sixth, the brain bird, always hovering over the personality from the field-station of the head, makes the image an autonomous reality, and at this point what began as a message from outside, "reading from," may turn into a "reading into." The seventh, the king bird, takes in the whole. Seeing everything by intuition, as it were, it makes the suggestions produced by the composition of colours, forms and other visual elements into integral projections of the inner world of the faculties. It transforms the outer experience, With sympathy, empathy or insight, into a total vision of the possibilities of expression and into the delectation which may ensue from a work of art.

Actually it is rarely that the "third eye" of the imagination opens up and enables the body-soul to see, absorb, "savor" or taste the work of art. Only in the gifted rasika can the body-soul achieve that release of incipient energies, vibrations and urges which is the condition of seeing all. This opening up of the third eye and release of energies unites the inner life of a work of art—its vibrations and stirrings—with the human centre, making possible the connection between looking and seeing.

I have, called the last bird the king bird, or the Phoenix Bird of Paradise, because it is the bird of imagination, which ever renews ant) "connects." I define imagination in the poet Baudelaire's sense, as the faculty which rouses all the others, or in the sense of Shakespeare's words in A Midsummer Night's Dream: "imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown."

This analysis of the complex of references involved in the condition of seeing may, in the erratic flights of the seven birds, reveal some striking results.

First, we may find that there is a general connection between human breathing—the inhale-exhale process—and the feeling a work of art evokes. Paintings and sculptures ultimately fuse sounds, vibrations and stirrings in the inward life of the artist. They are never mere copies of outside objects. Certain forms, especially in architecture, tend to be relaxing. Others are constricting. And through long habit and association various colours, lines and forms have become the index of our own stirrings, moods and emotions, affecting our feelings and tending to create a new equilibrium. For this reason it has been said that all arts tend towards the condition of music.

Secondly, it may become clear that, apart from the eyes, the whole sensibility, including not only the five senses, but also the nerves, muscles, tendons and other parts of the body, as well as the soul, comes into operation, even in the few seconds most people take to look at a work of art, during the time they are unconsciously involved in the condition which may go beyond looking to seeing.

Thirdly, quite a few conventional attitudes may be upset. For instance, you may prefer to sit down to see a picture, and allow your rhythmic life to move or to dwell within (rather than look at it always standing up or walking about) so that the condition of seeing beyond looking may be stimulated. Also, art galleries and museums may change their methods of hanging pictures and put up one or two works where they generally crowd fourteen or fifteen on a single wall, thus cancelling out one image with the other.

So works of art may cease to be merely pleasant backgrounds, furniture or decor, because it may be found that even the "ugly" distortions of a so-called devil mask can, with the stirrings they excite, come within the purview of "beauty," in spite of the terrors, repulsions, even horrors they display. Their beauty comes from the essential vibrations which started off the artist's sheer delight in image-making. We may find that more often than not we listen to the music of the singing line or to the drip-drop of colours, and that the eye is not merely the looking eye but the "listening eye," aware of vibrations.

Again, the sense of touch may be found to have a good deal to do with the enjoyment of relief painting or sculpture. It has been found that eating with the fingers is not nearly so uncivilised as many Westerners have thought it to be in the past.

In fact, after tracing the erratic flights of the seven birds, some art-lovers may forget their snobbery and their easygoing habits and ask themselves what really happens to them during the few seconds in which they confront a work of art.

I shall, then, describe the activities of the seven little-known birds which stimulate the alliance of the onlooker's vision with art works and with some of those elusive, subtle rhythms that are part of the human metabolism from birth. Many of these rhythms have remained hidden or undiscovered, because of the conceptual and anti-imagist bias produced in literate people by faulty educational systems in which ideas and meanings are valued more than feelings. We must learn to avoid the easy quest for literary meaning in art and for dominantly philosophical and socio-historical facts. The distinction between poetry in words and the poetry by analogy of visual art must be emphasised.

The pictorial and plastic situation and its ancillary vibrations, in terms of expression of form and of philosophy, must become our chief concern. In this way we can explain by implication how the body-soul's whole range of feelings—from languor, delirium and abandon to studied cynicism—is often neglected in reactions to works of art. In this way, too, the creative process as the release of vision by the artist may be apprehended in the onlooker's complex of references and experiences. Thus some part of the total experience or darshana may be received, and the rasa, or flavour, consequent upon absorbing or savouring works of art may be tasted.