Seven Little Known Birds of the Inner Eye

by Mulk Raj Anand

  Seven Little-Known Birds

  of the Inner Eye

  1 (Frontispiece). Todi Ragini.

  MULK RAJ ANAND

  Seven Little-Known Birds

  of the Inner Eye

  CHARLES E. TUTTLE COMPANY

  Rutland. Vermont: Tokyo · Japan

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  BOXERBOOKS, INC., Zurich

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  PRENTICE-HALL INTERNATIONAL, INC., London

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  Figures 6 and 7 from Scope of Total Architecture by Walter Gropius.

  Copyright 1943, 1949, 1952, 1954, 1955 by Walter G. Gropius.

  Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

  Published by the Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc.

  of Rutland, Vermont Tokyo, Japan

  with editorial offices at

  Osaki Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141-0032

  © 1978 by Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 77-072601

  ISBN: 978-1-4629-1145-5 (ebook)

  First printing, 1978

  Printed in Japan

  To John Berger

  with whom I share many ideas

  May this little book help to bring the phoenix bird of imagination

  back into the contemplation of art works

  Table of Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Introduction

  1: The Dickey bird

  2: The Memory Bird

  3: The Thalamus Bird

  4: The Rhythm Bird

  5: The Bird of the Heart

  6: The Bird of Reason

  7: The Phoenix Bird

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  3. (Frontispiece, plate in colour). Todi Ragini

  2. Bird of optical vision

  3. Dickeybird about to fly

  4. Medal of Alberti by Matteo de' Pasti

  5. Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbour by Georges Seurat

  6. 7. Optical illusions

  8. Kutub Minar, India

  9. Kailasa Temple, India

  10. Bhuvaneshvar Temple, India

  11. Shiva Nataraj dancing

  12. Kali by Amina Kar

  13. Vishnu

  14. City Square by Alberto Giacometti

  15. Dickeybird, memory bird and cinema reel of memory

  16. Quarrelling birds

  17. Prehistoric cave drawing, India

  18. Thoughts Hying off

  19. The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) by Joan Miro

  20. Ugly Masks—-Man and Woman by Rabindranath Tagore

  21. Movement of Bullocks by Feliks Topolski

  22. Number 1 by Jackson Pollock

  23. The Tantras, India

  24. Minotauromachy by Pablo Picasso

  25. Primitivist idea

  26. Brahmin with tuftknot

  27. Primitive thalamus

  28. Thalamus bird

  29. Thalamus bird in brain

  30. Sending messages

  31. Birds dimly roused

  32. Rhythm bird

  33. Yoga pose

  34. Rhythm bird flies off

  35. Engraving by Krishna Reddy

  36. Dialectic situation

  37. Chakras

  38. Six plexuses

  39. Buddhist architectural forms

  40. Krishna's nervous reactions

  41. Union of hearts

  42. The heart bird

  43. Heartbeat of cat

  44. Cosmic Egg

  45, Symbol of Shiva, India

  46. Incarnation of Vishnu

  47. Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cezanne

  48. Two-headed bird of reason

  49. Brain as lotus

  50. Helpless without instincts

  51. Reticular formations

  52. Brain coordinates responses

  53. Bird of reason

  54. Phoenix bird

  55. Flight of seven birds

  56. Indian cave drawings

  57. Actor's Mask by Paul Klee

  58. Hot Pursuit by Paul Klee

  59. Hunt area in primitive drawing

  60. The Dying Princess, Ajanta cave painting

  61. Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci

  62. Landscape attributed to Ma Yuan

  63. Portrait of the Artist by Harmensz van Rijn Rembrandt

  64. Panel (3) by Wassily Kandinsky

  65. Composition in White, Black and Red by Piet Mondrian

  66. Guernica by Pablo Picasso

  67. Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird by Joan Miro

  68. Threading Light by Mark Tobey

  69. Birds by Gaitonde

  70. Feeding the chicks

  Preface

  AS A YOUNG student of philosophy in London in 1925, I was much preoccupied with the problem of perception. All the old ideas were in question. And I found that the psychology of perception was adopting revolutionary hypotheses, outdating most of the 19th-century concepts under the influence of scientific investigation. Lord Russell's reductio ad obsurdum of every percept to "sensation," based on sense data, held sway in philosophical discussion; and Clive Bell's "aesthetic emotion," to be derived from "significant form," were the slogans of the English art world. Of course, in ordinary life, in the museums and art galleries, the impact of the new analysis had not been registered. But I felt that most people, including myself, looked at paintings and sculptures but did not see them.

  So in 1926 I began to do research, under the guidance of Professor Spearman in the psychological laboratory at University College, London, on the reactions of all kinds of people to works of art. I "exposed" 200 men and women intellectuals—doctors, nurses, technicians and students from the Slade School of Art—to reproductions of Leonardo's Last Supper, a Rembrandt Self-Portrait, The Dying Princess from Ajanta and other important pictures. The results seemed to confirm my idea that people saw pictures either as illustrations or as decorations, but very seldom as perceptions-apperceptions.

  I heard my own professor's lectures on Hegel and Croce, and later I wrote an exposition of the Hindu view of art; and I found that in the past many people had built up aesthetic theories merely as coherent philosophies of beauty, without much relevance to art forms. Through my talks with two artists, Eric Gili and William Rothenstein (the former standing for art as part of religion and the latter for free form), I tried to develop my own hunches about total experience of works of art. Herbert Read, whose opinions I sought then, shared the feeling that I was working in the right direction if I wanted the autonomy of the art object to be established in India, where art had been the "handmaid of religion."

  Since then I have subjected my hunches to examination before a vast number of works of art, of all ages and all countries, in many badly arranged museums and galleries and studios. And I have written fewer words about paintings and sculptures, but have tended to collect more reproductions and picture postcards for my private contemplation. I have increasingly felt that the "poetry by analogy" that is painting, which suggests rhythms, gestures and energies, is different from "poetry in words," which suggests feelings, ideas and meanings. And I have adopted only tentative positions about particular works of art and refuse to write generalised art history.

  In 1963, I was appointed Tagore Professor of Fine Art and Design at the Uni
versity of Punjab. My commission was to encourage art appreciation. I found that my students were mostly raw young people from the north who had never seen any art object quo art object.

  Consequently, I found myself digging up my notes of the research done under Professor Spearman. And I began to expose my pupils to certain pictures. From their responses, it seemed clear that, while the potential search of vision and love of colour, line and form was in them, they had always regarded paintings as portraits, "photos" as they called them, which were put in houses for sentimental reasons. I then evolved the metaphorical hypothesis of the seven birds flying off from the onlooker to the picture and back, if the experience of art works was to be valuable.

  I could hold the students' attention in this way, keep everything on the poetic level which the Indian young prefer, as well as give th em scientific data of all kinds. The architecture of the newly planned city of Chandigarh and the paintings of Le Corbusier and of the new artists of the model city, as well as children's drawings, supplied the materials for discussing the relative deficiencies of looking as against the benefits of seeing.

  I have lectured in many schools of art on this thesis, from notes compiled during my occupation of the Tagore chair. I gave a summary of my notes as a contribution to a session of the International Association of Art Critics. I find that naive, fresh, new sensibilities, without vested interests in ideas, respond to my hypotheses and ask questions. These challenges have helped me to write my notes into this book, which is being offered for further discussion.

  As with my very first books on art, in this compilation I had the advice of Herbert Read. He was cordial and considered that this essay had gone much deeper than the usual "gallery-going as art" discussion in the West, to supply the sources of aesthetic appreciation. And he offered to write a long letter by way of introduction to the book. The passing away of this doyen of art criticism has robbed the reader of his mature reflections on this theme. But, in putting the book into print, I cannot help recalling the many friendly hours when he helped me, even during the last phase of his illness, sort out my ideas and make the writing less assertive, especially where the claims of the Tantric philosophy had been advanced a little too enthusiastically.

  I have received advice and criticism from Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Pierre Jeanneret, B. P. Mathur, Nihar Ranjan Ray, Andre Masson, Joan Miro and C. V. Raman, as well as from the various other authorities I have quoted in the text. The painter K. K. Hebbar devoted much time to the drawings of the metaphorical birds, and many museums and galleries, as well as educational agencies throughout the world, have generously supplied the photographs of art works reproduced in this volume. And my colleague, Dolly Sahiar, was instrumental in planning the layout, as well as in getting the book ready for the press. Without her devotion much of my writing could not have appeared in print. One of the finest art publishers in the world, Charles Tuttle, is bringing out this little volume, which he read at one go and accepted for his program during a cherry-blossom weekend in Tokyo. My debt to all these helpers is merely acknowledged here because it cannot be paid back.

  For various reasons, certain pictures which I had hoped to include could not be reproduced here. I am nevertheless indebted to the artists of these works for teaching me a great deal. I wish particularly to acknowledge my debt to Paul Klee. His work and his inspiring comments lent support to my theories about the impact of lines and forms on the spectator.

  M. R. A.

  Khandalla

  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 h
uman 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,"