Читать книгу Seven Little Known Birds of the Inner Eye - Mulk Raj Anand - Страница 12

1: The Dickeybird

2. Bird of optical vision.

THE FIRST bird which flies off as soon as you look at a picture is the bird of optical vision, which emerges from the focus of the two eyes (Fig. 2). It is an eager, impatient, impetuous bird, which goes out flapping, flopping, excited and quick, from the converging point of the eyes and fixes its stare upon the work of art. It is almost like the bird the photographer releases when he clicks the shutter of his camera lens open, telling his youngest models to "watch the birdie" (Fig. 3).

In fact, it is an accepted idea that the first view of anything is very much like that of the camera, focussed in a particular orbit, except that the camera is a machine and the eye is a live instrument, intimately connected with the other organs of the human body. This has led many people to regard the optical vision as the "camera eye," And so the eyes are supposed to see, more or less, the likeness of an object in nature as a copy of the outside object, an imitation of reality.

This commonsense notion is fairly correct. But, beyond the camera eye, the retina helps to discriminate among the various parts of the area within the focus. As a result, our visual experience becomes, soon after the first impact, a complex of highly involved references. With the alacrity of an electrical signal, the eye bird, focussed upon a picture, sends messages to the other birds of our senses (Fig. 4). Like the ear, it gets a response and thus becomes the "listening eye," connected with the nervous system and the brain. Also, these senses, and the various energies of the vital organism— the other birds, as I prefer to call them—supply the material which enables the bird of reason to synthesise the messages. The bird of imagination may then ultimately fly out and comprehend the work of art as a whole.

3. Dickeybird about to fly.

4. "Medal of Alberti" by Matteo de' Pasti (Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

Thus even the simple optical vision is a phenomenon of such intricacy that it cannot be measured in all its subtle interconnections by any instrument so far invented. As a gateway to the outside world, it is one of the miraculous results of mankind's long evolutionary process. We can merely summarise its functions briefly and suggest the complex of references.

What happens when the dickeybird, or the bird of the eye, flies off? This affects not only the eyes; a person's body-soul, inspired by its goal-seeking desires and by conative will and curiosity, projects itself through the eyes towards an object. Light of a single colour is the simplest type of radiation, appearing as a single line in the spectrum. The sensation excited by monochromatic light is, therefore, the simplest type of visual sensation. But to sense even monochromatic light and recognise it involves a compulsion from within the spectator. Only through tension in the protoplasmic metabolism of the human being is it led to awareness of things in the universe outside.

Scientific observation of the human cornea lens and retina confirm the eye's similarity to a camera. But, because there is always a cameraman directing the lenses to the focus and opening the shutter, even as with any mechanical camera, the eye becomes an organic instrument or machine for perceiving things.

Until the moment of looking, there is the sensation of perception and only a little apperception, or understanding. But certain facts about the human eye complicate the pure sensation. The evidence for the existence of these facts, which are not known to common sense, comes from optical illusions. For instance, the child, in the earliest stages of its growth, sees objects upside down. The field of vision of a nine-month-old child looking into the distance is restricted. It is only through the perfecting, formative and self-regulatory processes of the body-soul that this approach is later corrected. The familiar trick often practiced by photographers who show the figure head down and legs up resembles the child's first approach. This is a common delusion. The eye slowly adjusts itself.

If you compare the iris diaphragms of the camera and of the human eye you will understand that, in both cases, when the diaphragm is contracted the image is sharpened, whereas when it is relaxed the image becomes vague. The flattening or wrong adjustment of the eye (or the camera) leaves the image blurred. The adjustment of both the human eye and the lens is carried out by the use of a sieve or screen. The use of a screen is nowadays a familiar process in printing pictures clearly, sharply and accurately. In vision, too, the image itself is broken up into dots by the rods and the cones of the retina. Each of the many cells sees one dot as big as itself. The strongest and most energetic cells receive "light" in a radiation which is reported by the eyes to the brain and other parts of the body-soul. The weak cells communicate "dark,"

If you enlarge the image of hundreds of dots, almost as in the famous neo-Impressionist painting by Georges Seurat, Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbour (Fig. 5), you can get a feeling of dissolved colour energies in a new light. The Pointillism of Seurat was based on such a formula.

5. "Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbour" (1888) by Georges Seurat. Oil on canvas, 21 5/8" x 25 5/8" (Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lillie V. Bliss Collection).

I shall refer in detail to the findings about optical vision of Professor C. V. Raman, who has analysed the relationship to, or the impact of, our sensory impressions on the eye.¹ Meanwhile, I mention here his important discovery that "light appears as a sharp type of radiation." It is appropriate, therefore, that we recognise the sensations excited by monochromatic lights of various colours as the primary or fundamental visual sensations. Likewise, when a continuous spectrum of radiation is dispersed by a prism into a band of colours, the eye can distinguish or discriminate each strip from the others in the spectrum, under the most favourable conditions of observation. And as many as 250 hues in the spectrum can be distinguished under laboratory conditions, to confirm that this also happens in the ordinary way when we look at a picture or landscape.

Walter Gropius has explained important biological facts about our ways of seeing.² The human eye from within looks like a television camera. It transforms optical images into electrical currents through its broadcasting system; it has a supporting framework; it has photosensitive cells; it has transmitting cells; it has connecting cells; it has a nerve cable; it has a protecting base.

A more exact metaphor is the idea that "the human eye is a combination camera for day and night photography." The retinal cones are the daylight apparatus. They require much light, producing sharply defined panchromatic pictures. The rods are the twilight apparatus. They are strongly photosensitive but produce indistinct achromatic pictures.³

The discrimination of colours and of lines which takes place immediately upon the first glance is brought about by the transformer in the retina and the whole complex structure allied to perception through the evolutionary processes and the energies behind them. These energies respond to light, and, according to Albert Einstein, consist of streams of "photons."

It must be emphasised that, though the obvious analogy between the human eye and the camera eye is fairly accurate in relation to the first impact of a work of art on the retina, the experience of seeing involves much more than this initial impact. The vasanas (energies or vitalities) of the body-soul urge us to active collaboration. The urge behind seeing a painting or sculpture has subjective associations of all kinds. These may in rare cases be refined, and we may set a subjective-objective condition for seeing, but, beyond this, there is achieved an undefined union, catharsis or release.

Consequently, as soon as the dickeybird flies off towards the "photon" energies of a picture, with its own impetuous vitalities, it transforms the report immediately, with some additions or subtractions, and relates it to the centres of apperception. The energies of the body-soul, behind the television-like apparatus inside the retina, take over. And discrimination between the various parts of the image, which began immediately when the energies of the picture hit the retina, now begins to be heightened. The image is thus already being seen into. It is now allied with the surviving primitive anthropoid brain in us all, the thalamus, situated underneath the cerebral cortex. The image now travels towards the cerebral cortex. Recharged by memory, it goes towards the lumbar ganglion and the complex of nerves, tendons, muscles and subconscious underlayers. Thus it spreads its subtle rhythmic and other messages down below the far-flung universe of the unknown life of man, within the five-or six-foot structure that has evolved into the miracle called the human being. In so far as the eye selects the visual features, according to the choice compelled from within by the sensibility of the person looking, as well as by his potentialities for intense feeling and thinking, the eye becomes the seeing window of the body-soul, which is replete with all the biological and racial experiences that have gone into the making of the metabolism.

As the onlooker contemplates a painting, his nervous organism, in a flash of lightning, registers many sensations, even in the first one or two seconds. Beyond the dickeybird, the other birds of his inner faculties carry messages from one to the other, so that, ultimately, he has an aesthetic experience.

The available evidence about the responses of animals, birds and insects shows that, in some respects, they are more sensitive than human beings. For instance, birds have vision that is about one hundred times more acute than ours, and they can also sense magnetic fields. With their compound eyes, bees can detect the direction of the sun's rays and thus buzz about by "celestial navigation"; bats can hear supersonic sounds; and snakes are sensitive to the slightest temperature changes.⁴ Man, however, is superior in so far as he has evolved a brain, the seat of reason, called in Hindu philosophy "the lotus of a thousand petals" because of its intricate connections with the nervous system (see Fig. 49, p. 105). The brain coordinates most of the responses of the senses, like a pilot station directing us from its cavity towards the vision afforded by the imagination or the release of the body-soul.

Man has fewer instincts than animals, but his instincts are vital. In man the earlier instincts and emotional patterns have come to be directed by a purposiveness deeply rooted, through years of evolution, in the very protoplasmic stuff of which he is made.

Some men are neither highly evolved nor highly self-evolving. Some are more sensitive than others, as their whole organism has been perfected by heredity, or by physical and mental exercise, to take in more than ordinary mortals. The philosophy of yoga suggests ways in which the dormant energies of the serpent power, stimulated by exercises, can be welded together and released through active contemplation.

And yet it is fascinating to see that even in ordinary ways the average human being far surpasses the animals, whose behaviour is often as precisely patterned as that of Pavlov's dogs. Man is invariably directed from inside, by powerful urges, desires, pulls, aspirations and longings, when he confronts the simplest outside experience or stimulus. He is no tabula rasa, on whom the environment is merely registered. The curiosity of the cells in him to look, to see, to absorb and to know is the drive to attain a singular goal of unity within the total organism.

Above all, man is inventive, working with his intuition and imagination on the dim tracings of what has happened before, through which he synthesises the new experience with the old, often without knowing how or why.

Walter Gropius, the architect and founder of the Bauhaus art school, has drawn attention to some of the subconscious reactions which influence man's outlook. He has also pointed out some ways in which objects, in their different relations to space, create optical illusions on the retina.⁵

The distortion of images is occasioned by the curvature of the retina, thus complicating the associations of our space-perceiving senses and creating optical illusions. The awareness of these optical illusions is always helpful to the artist. For instance, in modern abstract art the illusion of movement is often attained by the interplay of convex and concave forms.

6. Optical illusion: figure in horizontal-striped bathing suit looks slimmer.

7. Irradiation phenomenon: black figure looks smaller.

Gropius notes that stripes and the contrast between light and dark can produce very odd optical effects. "The girl in the bathing suit looks more slender in horizontal than vertical stripes" (Fig. 6). Another optical phenomenon is that called "irradiation": a bright figure on dark background looks bigger than a black figure on a bright background (Fig. 7).

Gropius suggests further that our eyes close automatically if a car coming from the opposite direction stirs up mud or slush, even when the windows of our car are up. If we look down from the balcony of a twenty-storey building, we feel giddy even if there is a railing to protect us from falling. But if the same railing is covered with cardboard or paper, and gives support to the eye, giddiness often disappears through the illusion of safety.

People often feel lost or Lonely in wide-open spaces. This feeling is identified as agoraphobia, the dread of open spaces, sometimes felt by sensitive people crossing a large open square.⁶ And the loss of the human sense of balance when one looks down from great heights is a familiar phenomenon, as attested, for example, by the visitors to India's Kutub Minar in Mehrauli, who want to descend immediately, once they look out from the top of this minaret. The dizzy height of the Kutub Minar makes one lose contact with the earth. The head often swirls and one may even feel bilious, as if in an airplane (Fig. 8). Gropius confirms this when he says that "people get lost in a space the size of which is not in keeping with the human scale."

If, however, in a vast area some vertical planes were created on that open space, like wings on a stage, such as shrubs or fences or walls, the illusion of safety would be reinstated, and the dread would disappear, for the eyes of the person groping in space could find a frame of reference to act as a psychological support. When the eyes hit a solid in the field of vision they register its outline just as radar does.⁷ This is confirmed by the experiments in the paintings of Irene Rice Pereira, who has also analysed the historical breakthrough of man from one-, two-and three-dimensional space areas to the expanding universe.⁸ And so our eyes, which are the instruments of our organism and our subconscious, deceive us in many ways. This happens at any time when the human being is not directing the personality with a deliberate will to concentrate in active contemplation, or to allow deeper awareness by relating to the inner life of a work of art.

The deceptive phenomena can be illustrated by a number of distortions easily created from the curvature of the retina, by delicate dissociations of the space-perceiving senses, if we twist and turn the basic stimuli received by the eye. In this way, abstraction, simplification and distortion can be understood as quite simple artistic means by which it becomes possible to express soul-body experiences beyond the habitual three-dimensional space areas of common sense.

8. Kutub Minar, Mehrauli, India.

Artists have frequently resorted to the clever interplay of various elements of structure to create the illusion of mobility. The Kailasa Temple in Ellora, south-central India, cut from the giant rock on three sides, has been given the appearance of a moving cloud (Fig. 9). The Cubists generated movement by superimposing multiple planes in their pictures.

The important considerations in all optical illusions are space-time relations, judged in terms of human scale. In all ancient civilisations, the human frame has served as a yardstick. Le Corbusier has rightly emphasised the Modulor as the basis of all architecture, since the human being symbolised in the Modulor is the measure of all structures, of where man lives and moves and has his being. The silhouettes of giant temples like Khajuraho, Puri, Konarak, Bhuvaneshvar (Fig. 10) and Mahabalipuram were obviously intended to communicate the majesty of the invisible power dominating the vast space, so that people seeing the huge hulk of such a temple would feel awe and reverence for the gods. The approach to the garbha griba, or the inner sanctum of the temple, is made intimate by the narrow doorway in the small room. The abundant carvings on the outer wall surfaces, as well as inside, direct the optical vision to seek the course of memory, sensation, hope, fear, purpose, which may have already risen to the surface through alliance with the grace of the curves, the excitement of the angles, the gestures of the chisel and the harmony of the composition.

9. Kailasa Temple, Ellora, India.

10. Bhuvaneshvar Temple, India.

An object painted in brown wax seems heavier than if it were coloured grey or white or yellow. A life-size sculpture on a high pedestal, standing against the bright sky, looks smaller than the same sculpture in the artist's studio because, against the open space of the sky, light nibbles away at its sides. (This phenomenon is scientifically called "irradiation,") Therefore, carvers often make figures more than life size, to compensate for this illusion.