The I simple out look of the child is also coloured by the memories, feelings and moods arising from within the protoplasm, with its roots in the subconscious, and from the life values imbedded in them. The inherent human power to recall the conscious and unconscious past, to ask questions, to relate one emotion, idea or object to another, as well as the inspiration to rebuild everything through the total desire-image and myth, enables man to absorb and to control experience in the interests of his body-soul.
For instance, many of the images of the gods made in India were made not merely to fulfil iconographical requirements, but also to embody a dominant mood. Rhythmic power is shown in the symbol of Shiva, Lord of Dancers, dancing in the circle of fire after he has crushed underfoot the dwarf representing evil (Fig. 11).
11. Shiva Nataraj dancing (10th century: Chola dynasty).
Bronze (Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
The addition of many arms suggests the destruction of hostile forces by Kali (Fig. 12). Benign grace is symbolised in Vishnu (Fig. 13). Desolation in space has been shown by Giacometti in his lonely human figures (Fig. 14).
The outer eye, used to the normal human scale of common sense, changes its perspective in art. Thus the horizontal line of the square, the cube or the rectangle has definite associations with static moods. And we are confronted with man's aspiration for the lofty, the high and the noble, by the architect's deliberate exaggeration of the vertical line atop a temple into a sikhara which reaches up to the sky, or in the high pointed steeple of a church.
The interaction of forms with the human metabolism operates, of course, when energised experiences, with their allied emotional affiliations, have already carved their grooves. By association to responses, through instinct and intuition, we can then ally ourselves with the vasanas, or the energised tracks of experience. This alliance invokes feelings, emotions and passions and extends the range of response, through the stimulus of the mind, to value judgement.
The principles of the technique of imaginative creation which might regulate the relations of pictures were laid down in ancient India and reinterpreted by Vatsyayana in the Kama Sutra as the six limbs of painting, sadanga.18 The comprehensive mental geometry of spatial imagination in architecture has been defined in the encyclopaedic Manasara and the other shilpashastras.19
12. "Kali" by Amino Kar.
13. Vishnu.
Paul Klee's tentative suggestion that a child's inner voice is "like something which strives to become visible"20 comes through observation of the infant's scribbles, circles, angles and instinctive relations. Klee's significant analysis, in his Pedagogical Sketch Book, of his own "handwriting" and lines compared with children's drawings endorses the theories of the Hindus.
The classical formulae of Hindu metaphysics, with its divine sanctions, are rooted in human instincts, as I shall show in Chapter 5, These formulae are not relevant for our contemporary period, except as background knowledge, because philosophy and science have made many observations concerning our interior life which are no longer mere guesses but ascertained facts.
14. "City Square" (1948) by Alberto Giacometti. Bronze, 8 1/2" x 25 3/8" x 17 1/4" (Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
Even in Europe, the three-dimensional perspective of the Renaissance, with its reliance on substance and consequent adumbration of depth in space, light and shadow, has been variegated by the resort to other perspectives and dissolved substances by the Impressionists, the Cubists and the Abstract Expressionists, The static conception of mass has melted into the energies of molecules and atoms, which are coagulated in the seeming mountains. The space-time continuum is in constant flux. Correspondingly, the inner Life of man and his environment are also to be seen in movement, from the time when the physical basis of life was in the amoeba, through the whole prolonged evolutionary process in which the spark jelly developed slowly and through prolonged attrition into the body-soul. The dynamic energies in man, therefore, require corresponding expressionist movements in his creations to stimulate him to his purposive goal-seeking.
We have indicated how the so-called normal vision of the dickeybird of optical vision works even when various degrees of illusions, anomalies, ambivalences and associative metaphors in a photograph, painting or sculpture or in architecture are photographed.
And yet it must be emphasised that even the most gifted person has a limited view of a work of art in the first glance of the dickeybird. Usually a person selects from the habitual bias of his past experience an aspect of a picture that seems to indicate the whole or seems preferable because of a particular favoured colour or line, and he sums up the work of art before him in such terms as "soothing," or "linear," or "affecting," or in intellectual terms. He is thus seeking "vitality" in a triangle or in an upward thrust, "coherence" in a curved line, or "rest" in a cube or rectangle.21 But when all his faculties are working at the highest pressure, he comprehends an organised pattern, construction or composition in a subjective-objective relationship.
The bird of optical vision is, as I have said, an impetuous bird. True, it has certain capacities for discrimination. But it remains a comparatively superficial bird, hopping from place to place inside the picture. It takes the habitual shortcuts of visual experience. It has all the arrogance of common sense. It feels that whatever it looks at is real. And often it is so ambitious that it rejects the mother source of energy and purposiveness in the organism, the reservoir from which it derives all its energy, and ignores the other birds. And so it remains unaware of the more complex responses. Hence, when the creation, criticism or appreciation of visual art is based mainly on visual perception or "pure sensation," it remains limited and must give place to more and more total experience or darshana.
Because of this bird's facility in flying, the general public tends merely to rely on perception through optical vision. People indulge in a certain amount of unconscious habitual discrimination without going deep into the intricacies of the composition—the challenging inner energies of the variegated colours and forms which enclose the life force of a work of art.
As the dickeybird hovers over the image, confused, excited or merely bored, after it has expended its energy in headlong flight, its companions have already begun to fly, in the very first second, to its help. These accompanying powers absorb the nuances of light and shade, the subtleties of brushwork, and relate the diffused creative vision of the artist to the onlooker's vasanas, across the energised tracks towards the inner life. For evidence now exists to suggest the fullest and the richest interconnection of all the vitalities within the body-soul.
2: The Memory Bird
15. Dickeybird, memory bird, cinema reel of memory.
IF WE PURSUE the flight of the bird of memory, which takes off from the dickeybird (Fig. 15) almost as soon as the eye is confronted with a picture, we find that it is an even more uncanny "miracle."
The bird of memory is less impatient than the first. But this bird also flies at great speed, across the many miles of images which stretch like an endless movie film at the back of the head.1 The memory bird picks out the resemblances of forms and colours, lines and textures in the painting, with those it has seen in nature or in other works of art, "Man," "woman," "horse," "sphere," "cylinder," "curved line," "vertical line," "horizontal line," "zigzag"—the report comes from recollections of images stored up, often from prehuman motivations, which still linger in us as hangovers of our biological growth and development, retained in the memory in the form of psychotypes. (The spherical dome, the sugar loaf and the tower are psychotypes par excellence and, as such, they are demanded by ordinary people in all architecture.).
The bird of memory relies almost entirely on the dickeybird because, unless the message comes from the optical vision, the stored-up pictures of outside objects do not emerge from the film at the back of the head.
The cinema reel of memory, the base across which the bird of memory flies off (Fig. 15), is even more sensitiv
e than the dynamic machine behind the retina. The nerves which converge at the back of the head help us to notice the minute configurations of line. One can compare the memory bird recognizing the various strains in a work of art only to a god who is all-encompassing in his awareness of every passing shade of creation.
The bird of memory can differentiate the various constituents of the picture, the most delicate nuances and the hidden symbols, by recalling the marvellous array it has once registered from the outside world and kept in its millions of miles of film. It can call up images from the storehouse of the unconscious, in dream and reverie. Thus it seems far superior in its powers to the dickeybird.
Without the vital role of the memory, without recalling images from the past, without moving along the energised tracks of experience and recalling some of the feelings associated with these grooves, the human being would have to rely, like a dog, on the power of smell to find his way home. Certainly, the associated impressions, images and ancillary chords of the sensibility, without the long film at the back of the head, would never penetrate the metabolism below, or the cerebral cortex above, the seat of reason which sends messages whizzing through the network of the nervous system, connecting one stream of exciting images to another.2 And thus the capacity of the body-soul to relate particular pictures and to make general laws of rhythmic experience, in order to transform rich disorder into aesthetic experience, would not be possible without the memory bird flying to and from the optical bird in various directions as the two quarrel with each other (Fig.16).
16. Quarrelling birds.
Fortunately, man, in his evolution from the earliest and most primitive protoplasm to the present stage of development regulatory of the body, has built up an extraordinary capacity for storing images. This quality is much more complex and amazing in Homo sapiens than it is in the animals' highly efficient and intricate instinctive patterns of remembrance. Before man could name his feelings, he scratched and dotted, on the walls of his cave-dwellings, images based on his activity in the hunt. Perhaps the large dots placed both inside and outside the outlines of horses in prehistoric cave drawings (Fig. 17) symbolised wounds and also the splendour of the animals, as in the early twentieth-century Pointillist style. But, like the vision of birds (and their memory is fairly acute), the memory of man is influenced by an orchestra of sounds, suggestions and meanings derived from the other senses. The memory leads the onlooker from recalled images towards the suggestion of other similar forms and feelings. Coolness is recalled through soft colors, strength through triangular shapes, subtle rhythms and sounds by alliance with linear brushwork.
17. Prehistoric cave drawing, Bhimbhetka, near Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India.
If you detach yourself from yourself (and you can do this partly with the help of memory), you will marvel at the way the slow but purposive nature of the protoplasm has inspired your memory to coordinate to near perfection, and at its capacity to retain millions of images from infancy to maturity, so that the swarming chorus can produce an orchestra or discord of remembered sights3 and coherent or quarrelling images. In brooding we are conscious of thoughts flying off like birds from the face (Fig. 18).
The stream of consciousness released by memory after recognition of a sight is illustrated by this passage, translated from Dante's Paradiso.4
. . . I looked;
And in the likeness of a river, saw
Light flowing, from whose amber-seeming waves
Flashed up effulgence, as they glided on
'Twixt banks, on either side, painted with spring,
Incredible how fair: and, from the tide,
There ever and anon, outstarting flew
Sparkles instinct with life; and in the flowers
Did set them, like to rubies chased in gold:
Then as if drunk with odours, plunged again
Into the wondrous flood; from which as one
Re-entered, still another rose. "The thirst
Of knowledge high, whereby thou art inflamed,
To search the meaning of what here thou seest,
The more it warms thee, pleases me the more,
But first behoves thee of this water drink,
Or e'er that longing be allayed." So spake
The day-star of mine eyes: then thus subjoined:
"This stream; and these, forth issuing from its gulf,
And diving back, a living topaz each;
18. Thoughts flying off.
With all this laughter on its bloomy shores;
Are but a preface, shadowy of the truth
Thy emblem; not that, in themselves, the things
Are crude; but on thy part is the defect,
For that thy views not yet aspire so high."
Never did babe, that had outslept its wont,
Rush, with such eager straining, to the milk,
As I towards the water; bending me,
To make the better mirrors of mine eyes
In the refining wave: and as the eaves
Of mine eyelids did drink of it, forthwith
Seemed it unto me turned from length to round.
Then as a troop of maskers, when they put
Their vizors off, look other than before;
To counterfeited semblance thrown aside:
So into greater jubilee were changed
Those flowers and sparkles; and distinct I saw,
Before me, either court of heaven displayed.
One can see that metaphor in poetry is based primarily on images which remind us of other images. The extension of awareness thus takes place through comparison-contrast of shapes and forms stored in the memory, transformed by the imagination.
The perfective process of making a total human being is never finished. Nor is the complete expression of all states of consciousness quite possible. At best, artistic interpretation approximates the series of visions or a fundamental mood or emotion. For, although the gains of heredity in the refinement of the various organs of the body-soul are passed on as potentialities, the cultivation of the hidden vasanas, or energies, the harnessing of energies into the service of each new organism, takes place in unequal circumstances and under different natural, social and historical conditions. Therefore, the emergent evolution of each new individual seldom achieves goal-seeking at the highest degree of accomplishment. Uncontrolled memory can lead to madness, because the assortment of images wanders on in reckless abandon, and control of impressions disappears, That is why the ancients recommended prayer to help concentration, and important words and sounds were often remembered by rote.
Thus if we consider any form of creative work to be part of the perfecting process in the evolution of man, even if it be through the most infinitesimal kinetic stimulus (and therefore naturally not seeming evolutionary in a mechanical sense), we need to cherish the instrument of the collective memory in words and images -which the human race has already acquired through the prolonged struggles in its development. Curvature in the hands of a potter, the joining of a carpenter, the smoothening by a smith are integral to the kinetic processes.
Memory, then, is the custodian of tradition. Says Gropius: "A language of vision derived from old and new discoveries in science controls the [artist's] creative art. It provides simultaneously the common key for understanding of the artist's message and transforms its paradoxical content into visible terms of expression."5 It is a valuable asset in the extension of knowledge, in the realisation of awareness. Being is really being oneself. Thus the second gateway after sight is important. Through it the cohesive exuberance of creative energy, the inner urgencies of rhythm, the tensions between image and image, image and idea, the struggling pattern of thought, and the formative energies of the human imagination have to filter, in order to help in the process of renewal of the body-soul for the invention of new forms.
If we look at thousands of works of art, or images, we will find that we can intensify our own creative talents by such contemplation, and keep them stored in o
ur memories for recall in moments when we seek sustenance for our sagging spirits, fatigued bodies and jaded nerves.
Of course the artist, and even the viewer of a picture, takes the bird of memory for granted. To him, in his casual, somnambulistic state, colour suggests colour, line becomes the counterpoint of line and then the chromatic presences vanish beyond recall, into areas of luminous sound. Or, after travelling deep into the forest of feelings, teasing one and exciting the other, or stirring the roots of the sensibility, the artist covers the canvas with brush strokes, images recalled, recreated and absorbed. He lives so much in the creative process that often he cannot say what is happening. But even the least inventive man has a dim awareness that the bird of memory has been active in him, stimulating the other senses by images recalled from conscious or unconscious life, connecting something remembered to something else.
There has been much philosophical controversy about the constituents of memory. The Scottish thinker David Hume suggested that perception takes place through the association of certain congeries of sense impressions, which merely coagulate in the memory. Many of the mechanical scientists of Europe inclined to the view that the body obeys the laws of chemistry and needs no mental element to direct it. Bertrand Russell, in his early thinking, was sceptical, like Hume, about anything but congeries of impressions and ideas.
But the Samkhya Darshana, one of the important schools of ancient philosophical thought in India, postulates purusha-prakriti, or psychophysical interactionism. This hunch about the interplay of body and mind is confirmed by recent advances in the study of dialectical processes and by the new biological sciences. And we would venture the hypothesis that, as self-perfection is immanent in the very protoplasmic stuff of man, the protoplasm has evolved organic faculties, like memory, in the pursuit of wholeness, which help other faculties in the furtherance of awareness and which seek to bind the mental life and give man a coherent character in his slow evolution.
Seven Little Known Birds of the Inner Eye Page 4
