Seven Little-Known Birds of the Inner Eye

by Anand Mulk Raj 1905-2004

  55. Flight of seven birds from a picture.

  I am afraid that it is not easy for opinionated, half-educated and untrained people to invoke this bird of imagination which flies out from the third eye—though naive people are sometimes capable of bringing their inherited potential of awareness to works of art fairly easily if they are encouraged and trained by a good guide or teacher and exposed to many images.

  If these are the qualities we see in creative men, then these qualities must be imbued in works which can be considered successful, But not even the works of the great masters often approximate the elusive reality of imaginative "quick" that we have tried to isolate as the genuine aesthetic experience. The work known as a masterpiece is placed in a museum because a number of people agree, from their different points of view, that it gives the feeling of having almost gotten there—near enough to their experience of that heightened moment which has accrued to them after the sadhana of seeing thousands of pictures, as well as after a vigorous examination of their own condition of "seeing" and the consequent capacity for a pure, immediate and intuitive perception. But most critics must learn to walk on the razor's edge in order to discriminate, without partiality, bias or eccentricity, from the attached-detached point of view, the silent areas of really important works of art.

  I have arbitrarily put the seat of the bird of imagination in the mythical third eye. This third eye may be located anywhere in the body-soul, As all parts of the human organism are involved in the act of "seeing," and the creative process in the artist as well as the onlooker synthesises all the faculties and experiences, the seat of the bird of imagination may be in the stomach, the centre of the whole personality, though the bird superficially appears to be looking concentratedly from between the eyes where the eyebrows meet.

  The bird of imagination flying out of the third eye is the kingbird, supreme over all the others, which the third eye gently allies with itself and with which it flies into a picture and back into the body-soul, gathering together all the nuances, in the effort to gain the life core of the work, the freedom of it, with which it sweeps the onlooker along with itself to the heights of the empyrean, the depths of the psyche, the sources of vision itself.

  If you recall the way in which some important work has appealed to you, you may have felt as if you had suddenly made contact with a new, fascinating personality. The face is like that of many other people you know, and yet there is a peculiar aura arising from the lights and shades, reminiscent of the chiaroscuro of other faces, and yet different, investing the image with the unique qualities of an important work of imaginative art.

  One cannot analyse, except at some length, the quality of imagination which, having fused together in the artist's genius various elements, creates in the onlooker the total impact of an important work.

  I can only illustrate the impact of certain imaginative works by reproducing at random, from my album, a few pictures which, I recall, created in me the stirrings which urged me to look deeper into them.

  Some of the prehistoric drawings from the ancient cave shelters of India gave me pure delight in movement, in visual terms, when I first looked at them in their original location (Fig. 56). Here was the contact with instantaneous action, where feeling and movement were one.

  The child's delight in movement which I received from the cave drawings became an intellectual pleasure when I later saw Paul Klee's drawings. In Klee the creative talent of a vital, introverted artist goes far beyond the primitivist handiwork. The organic development of lines in his works creates a movement of comparison and contrast, retreat and advance. Ashe himself put it: "The contrast between man's ideological capacity to move at random, through material and metaphysical spaces, and his physical limitations, is the origin of all human tragedy. . . ."5 The relation of line, object and form became for me, in Klee's Actor's Mask, a portrayal of this contrast (Fig. 57).

  56. Drawings from ancient care shelter, Bhimbetka, near Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India.

  Again in Paul Klee's picture Hot Pursuit, I saw the transformation of what might have been a primitive man's hunt drawing into a complex situation. Whatever the original intention, when the artist began to draw his first line, the inchoate scribbles began to emerge at various places as symbolic dogs or bisons or jackals. And then the lines, describing the hunter with the arrow, confronted another structure, and seemed to become Cupid shooting the arrow. All the lines had beginnings and no endings. And yet they were definitive. No figure could be identified as an object. The echoes of forms, feelings and ideas seem to emerge from the vibrating lines (Fig. 58). After the intense pictorial situation of the central confrontation, the echoing lines faded away into the edges, suggesting various inexplicable differentiations. The action picture could not be forgotten.

  57. "Actor's Mask" (1924) by Paul Klee. Oil on canvas mounted on board, 14 3/8" x 14 3/8" (The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

  58. "Hot Pursuit" by Paul Klee. Oil on canvas, 19" x 25 1/2" (Courtesy, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Jaretzki, Jr.).

  Paul Klee's notes on the creative experience, both in his lectures, On Art, and in the Pedagogical Sketch Book, are perhaps nearest to the deeper sources of the imagination in its working when he says, "Thought is the father of the arrow; how can I increase my range over this river, this lake, that mountain?"6 He is speaking the language of the line. The line may begin with a single flourish but, as it enters space, and becomes differentiated through the formation of compulsive images, it also enters another world, beyond the concrete. The more elaborate linear forms in this hunt area flow into each other through kinetic energy or the dictates of the third eye of imagination, reflecting the outer eye which has seen nature (Fig. 59). I he logic of form from which the lines move is linear logic. It doubles and redoubles itself, gathering strength. It indicates substance. It defines boundaries. It suggests contours. It multiplies an imaginary construction. And it releases vibrations. Even the artist looks on like a curious bystander at the miracle he has wrought.

  59. Hunt area with linear structure in primitive drawing, Bhimbetka, near Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India.

  The impact of the drama called The Dying Princess in Cave XVI at Ajanta (Fig. 60) was more immediate than that of the hundreds of other scenes I saw in the historic Buddhist cave temples during a visit in 1932. Fortunately, the guide had disappeared and I was alone in the cave. There was sufficient light in the area. The flow of the dark-brown ochre form of the woman with the bent head, the attendants looking on, took my imagination to the depths below the depths of the colour flow. The inevitable confluence of other blurs of colour seemed to move towards the central figure. In fact, the door which cut off the colour energy from below the right-hand-side corner served to direct my eyes back to the melancholy flourish of the woman's body. I knew that the projection of the idea of pain on my mind came from the Buddha's definition of life as pain; but here, beyond the sadness of the naked princess, the colour flow was vibrant. The resonance of the shadow of death seemed to enter into my nerves, suggesting the unity of the image as an expression of colour, in a tragic situation. Confrontation of the concept of death was on the inner plane, but it was directed by the drama in colour before me in the "Being-in-situation."

  60. "The Dying Princess," Ajanta cave painting.

  61. "Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci. Tempera (Courtesy, Fratelli Alinari, Instituto di Edizioni Artistiche, Florence).

  The challenge of another picture was immediate. I went to Milan to see Leonardo's fresco, Last Supper, (Fig. 61) after I had been to Ajanta and seen The Dying Princess. The contrast between them was startling: whereas the colour on the Ajanta wall painting was fluid, and the drama seeped in after the first visual impact, in Last Supper the drama was fixed as on a stage. Leonardo had finished the work completely within the chosen dimensions and reproduced an imaginative picture of the scene as it might have happened in reality. The great artist had s
een to it that the door and the windows behind Jesus revealed an empty landscape, as a positive agent, which accentuated the depth and gave importance to the human figures. Each figure was shown in relation to the others. The figure of Christ was emphatically related, plastically and visually, to the figures of his companions. The painting was almost like a large relief sculpture. The appeal was to reason. And the symbolism was assertive as well as suggestive. This was my first real experience of a major picture in three dimensions. The energy was self-contained in the composition, as a vibrating tension of people turning to and away from the central figure of Christ, in a living and measurable context. The dominant focal point was relevant to the concept of Last Supper as the root of a rational design. It was almost a preconceived structure, solid, substantial, the figures deliberately contained in a certain format.

  I discussed the impact of the Ajanta wall paintings and of Leonardo's Last Supper with my Chinese friend, the painter and writer Chiang Yee, in London. He told me that the Chinese had an altogether different attitude from that of the Indians or the Europeans. They let the brush move freely on the picture surface and produced a design, compelled by inner dynamic rather than by an imposed formal arrangement. A whole landscape would be transformed by the imagination and made symbolic. Chiang Yee recited two lines by the poet Li Po:

  The waters of the Yellow River come down from heaven. . .

  I see only the mighty Yangtze flowing into the sky.

  I was startled by the wild flight of Li Po's imagination. Chiang Yee said that Li Po must have been drunk, but that all Chinese poets and painters were intoxicated in the same way. They let their imaginations run wild, Li Po was probably looking up from the side of the Yellow River toward the upper river rushing over high rocks. Thus the water of the upper river may well have seemed to him tike a waterfall from heaven. And, in the distance, the Yangtze might have appeared to Li Po to flow into the sky.

  Chiang Yee then showed me a copy of a picture by a painter of the Sung Dynasty (960-1279). The Chinese, he said, seldom painted interiors, or scenes close to the onlooker's eye, but preferred to paint vast expanses. The reason, he said, may have been that all of us are impressed by omnipotent power, and great stretches of water and mountains and sky make us feel the strength of nature. The painter feels like a god, being creator of this world. He likes to feel that he has recreated the universe with his own hands.

  62. Landscape (13th century), attributed to Ma Yuan, Southern Sung Dynasty. Ink on silk (Courtesy, Hakone Museum of Art).

  In the painting Chiang Yee showed me I could certainly see a childlike delight in expressing the experience of a fine misty morning, with the dark contours of the hills just emerging above the trees and rocks. My eye wandered from daub to daub on the scroll-like painting without coming to rest on any particular portion. This moving locus seemed to merge the landscape before me into the space beyond the picture (Fig. 62), Chiang Yee quoted from Ku Kai Chih's essay on another painting in this style, Cloudy Terrace Mountain, by the Emperor Hui Tsung; "The painter can put a glorious cloud in the west and compel the onlooker to believe that it has arisen from the clear atmosphere of the east."7

  Between the vast expanses of Asia and the self-contained landscapes of Western Europe, I have been aware of the contrasting attitudes of the ancient introvert Orientals and the expansive, exuberant rationalist minds of the Westerners. One notices especially the active contemplation of a given focus in the post-Renaissance painters of the West. The imagination seeks to transform a given reality in terms of itself. For instance, I was struck by the way Rembrandt had realised his own maturity in a portrait of himself as a middle-aged man (Fig. 63). The thoughtful look and the weary yet still vigorous features, the grizzled hair and determined manner betoken the outlook of experience itself. In effect, the spirit of looking outward through a deep complexity of thought and emotion evoked an awareness of the dense, individual reality of a human being, struggling, rational, wise, searching out truth by means different from the poetic inner eye used by the Sung Dynasty painter.

  With a bias in favour of the dramatisation of soul experience in all art, I naturally turned to the Western expressionists. And here I was fortunate enough to come across the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art. In this little book, I found confirmation for the Hindu view that colours are associated with certain moods. Also, I was struck by Kandinsky's peculiar concept of design. His emphasis on the idea that outward form cannot be mistaken by a painter for inner truth seemed to be Oriental. Somewhere Kandinsky has said one must look at the world from within oneself. And when I came across some reproductions of his paintings on Herbert Read's shelf during a weekend in Beaconsfield, I realised how easy it would he to paint if one could become a child and look at the world with new wonder in one's eyes.

  63. "Portrait of the Artist" (1609) by Harmensz van Rijn Rembrandt. Oil on canvas, 31 5/8" x 26 1/2" (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913).

  Like Paul Klee, who began to wander across space through line, Kandinsky also seemed to search for his forms almost as though he were making dramatic gestures in talking to a child. He seemed to visualise objects as shapes and forms, as loose images made by the hand, in the most natural juxtapositions. The very movement of his hand in gesture-making seemed to enter the drawing, I am sure that children cannot draw with the same perfection as the skilled master Kandinsky, but the play of kinetic gesture, of the hand across space, is similar.

  The images come from the depths of the unconscious, but are painted like recordings of the inner flow of music, or of the inside voice or the echoes of talk. Kandinsky's array of lines and forms expresses a state of the artist's soul, brought about by the compulsion of each form finding its contradiction in another form in an interior dialectical relationship (Fig. 64). Somehow the phenomena are being created by the controlling hand of the artist as God, merely as he touches the contents of his universe of discourse.

  I had heard that Piet Mondrian, the Dutch painter, was a theosophist, I had myself been taught by a young Irish professor to believe in the highest wisdom of the ancient Hindu Vedic culture, though I had begun to have grave doubts about many of the assertive positions of the Vedantists. All the same, I went to Amsterdam to see what the paintings of a theosophist would be like. I was amazed to find that the predilection of the mind which regards the universe as maya, or illusion, with degrees of reality, had naturally reduced experience of space to a formal array of rectangles, squares and parallel lines, heightened by colour. The neat geometry of the Dutch canals may have been an unconscious reference. But in the abstract paintings of Mondrian, empty space could only be indicated by the rationally controlled phenomena of straight lines and colours, on a two-dimensional surface (Fig. 65). It would not have been surprising if Mondrian, who later found the phenomenon of colour to be ephemeral, had decided to omit this element from his paintings and even to eliminate line itself. Thus the canvas could be left pure, with perhaps only a spot on it, as the vehicle for active contemplation, for attaining union with the absolute. The picture would then have been, like the Hindu image, a vehicle for proceeding beyond the image to mystical union with God, No wonder the logic of the Vedic period did not result in any imagery, but only in abstract squares on a mandala, or platform.

  64. "Panel" (3; 1914) by Wassily Kandinsky. Oil on canvas, 64" x 36 1/4" (Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim fund).

  65. "Composition in White, Black and Red" (1936) by Pier Mondrian. Oil on canvas, 40 1/4" x 41" (Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of the Advisory Committee).

  Often during the early thirties I happened to visit Paris. I was introduced to Pablo Picasso, whom I met three or four times later at conferences after World War II, I had been drawn by the legend of his avant-garde political stand and by his innovations as a painter. Perhaps there has been no artist who has destroyed accepted forms with greater genius and invented new forms wi
th equal fertility. In his studio he always gave the impression of being a prodigy at work. He could invoke his imagination and transform anything and everything from a kind of third new eye with which he was possessed, that combined the within and the without. His transformation of image in every material was direct. The complex interplay of forms in the aesthetic selections he made of course came out of him, through long hours of concentrated work. But there seemed to be an inner logic in every picture or sculpture or ceramic, almost as though he had been possessed by his daemon.

  Among the thousands of his pictures, one of the most lasting impressions was left on my mind by Guernica (Fig. 66). This was, perhaps, because I was in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War and heard of the bombing of Guernica one gloomy evening when there were no lights in the house in which I slept. I had nightmares of my own about the bombing, which I did not acknowledge, even to myself, until I later saw the confirmation of the experience of my generation in Picasso's great painting.

  66. "Guernica" (1937 May-early June) by Pablo Picasso. Oil on canvas, 11' 51/2" x 25' 5 3/4" (On extended loan to The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from the artist's estate).

  The controversy about whether works stimulated by the news are art or only propaganda masquerading as art was not relevant to those of us who had seen Goya's Disasters of War. In a sense ail art is propaganda, but it depends on how subtle this propaganda is, on how far it reaches into the senses and, deeper, into the rhythmic experience to become myth and fantasy through the collaboration of ail those elements of the supernatural wherein lie the sources of creative imagination. Clearly, Picasso had accepted the challenge of destruction implicit in war, as he seems to have been one of the most sensitive "outsiders" of our time. And he had brought all the knowledge and skill at his command, after years of painting, to create a canvas in which technique seems to have been fused with vision. The imagination transforms primitive sensations of broken forms, patches of colour and edgy lines, through chromatic aberrations and the use of colour, of white and black and angry red; in fact, through visual acuity and the contradictions thereofs, with symbols like the bull, the open-mouthed men, women and children, and with instinctive measurement of triangular effects, Picasso illumines the drama of the bombing of Guernica as the cruelty of man to man in historical time, taking it beyond historicity. One of the most vital works of art of all ages, Guernica evokes the sense of compassion as one of the highest points of achievement of contemporary humanism. Such a challenge has seldom been accepted by an artist in our tragic period and has nowhere been answered with the mastery which Picasso brought to it.