Seven Little Known Birds of the Inner Eye

by Mulk Raj Anand

  Since the time I began doing research on the reactions to works of art, I have instinctively been drawn to the studios of artist friends, rather than the galleries where they exhibit their pictures. This was a habit shared among quite a few writers of my generation—Herbert Read, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Pablo Neruda, Malraux and others. In Bloomsbury I had frequented the studios of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and old Walter Sickert. And for a time I lived in Chelsea, to be near enough to the places where painting and sculpture were done. Even in the country, I preferred to spend weekends with Eric Gill rather than with writer friends nearby. And my interest in the sources of creative imagination has been sustained.

  When Tristan Tzara introduced me to Joan Miro, I naturally expressed the wish to visit the latter's studio. I had seen some prints of Miro's surrealist period and was fascinated by the charming broken world which he showed, almost parallel with the world of physical sciences in the hands of Einstein, Jeans, Eddington, Schroe-dinger, Joliot-Curie and Bernal. I was almost patriotically interested in the way that theories of the reduction of the universe to atoms, molecules, mesons and cosmic rays confirmed the supposition of the ancient Hindus and Buddhists about the atomic universe.

  67, "Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird" (1926) by Joan Miro. Oil on canvas, 29" x 36 1/4" (Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

  Therefore, the impact of several of Miro's intense childlike fantasies of the broken world were received with instant delight. One of these, showing the flotsam and jetsam of earth and sea and sun and fish and stars, appealed to me so much that I bought a print of it in the rue Bonaparte and have since kept it hanging in my bathroom near the mirror where I shave every morning. (Somehow the inspirational moments for writing come to me during the time I shave.) But I fancy that the stirrings of movement in Miro's flotsam and jetsam adjust me to my mobile world and touch off the selection of theme in the quite different art of writing, which I desultorily practice as a process rather than a finished thing. The influence of Miro's painting is not mechanical. Perhaps the concrete images invoke the playful child who wants to become god and create his own world of make-believe (Fig. 67), I experience the same magic which might have held Miro in its spell when he opened the doors of his mind and allowed the imagination to twist and turn the signs and symbols into the children of his creation, I tend to think that perennial wonder about the world is excited in us by this and other pictures of Miro when we look at them with the naive honesty of children. That is the essential quality of the important works of this artist.

  I had become addicted to flying off the seven little-known birds of the inner eye, and was temperamentally prejudiced in favour of allowing the birds to roam all over the space area of a picture, without a focal centre, but verging on towards a total darshana. I found confirmation for my method of looking in the linear work of Mark Tobey.

  I was not surprised when I met Tobey in Vienna and found that he had left the earlier influence of John Singer Sargent's quick brush-work and gone to the Far East in search of the Chinese line. He said he had studied calligraphic painting in Shanghai. After I met Tobey, I went to Paris and looked at some of the prints of his post-Shanghai paintings. In them was still the influence of Sargent, in the sensuous plasticity of the medium and in the colour. But there had emerged a linear movement, through intuition, and the imagination had run all over the surface without any focal interest, as in the Chinese style. Also, Tobey had self-consciously accepted, apart from the Chinese calligraphic, meandering line, the expressive purpose of the picture. The dynamic interflow of lines in such a picture as Threading Light is a complex of linear contrasts, involving patterns within patterns, filling the space, and yet not fixing anything anywhere, so that each flourish of the brush becomes a "springing rhythm" (Fig. 68). It is almost as though Tobey had unlearned the use of space in the Western manner, to get into space and wander at will, here, there and everywhere, in complete freedom of expressive intent.

  68. "Threading Light" by Mark Tobey. Tempera on cardboard, 29 3/8" x 19 1/2" (Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

  It is currently fashionable among the rather unsure contemporary Indian artists to denigrate the role of critics, interpreters and expositors. The artist prefers to be his own critic, and sometimes says a word about his new god, Form. This may be due to a sense of inferiority in the face of current Western achievement. But sincere efforts at painting lift some of the work by the new Indian artists above the Bengali revivalism of the early twentieth century and mere internationalist imitationist pastiche to individual expression.

  As I have seen the efforts of many contemporary experimentalists during the last thirty years or so, I have isolated a few genuine expressions where the seven birds have been let loose.

  In this context, I was charmed by one of the early paintings of the young Goan artist Gaitonde, entitled Birds. I derived the childish pleasure of finding two of my seven birds here, primitivist like the birds on a Saurashtra fabric, but variegated into scribbles and related to the fluent motion of a little sun and the simple triangular shape of a kite, replacing formal continuity with a sudden discontinuity (Fig. 69). I could see that Gaitonde has been influenced by Paul Klee, But also in his work is the original Indian fantasy which seems to have come alive in a kind of amazement at its own modest beginnings, I found a little autobiographical passage by Paul Klee which seems to describe Gaitonde's mood at the start of his career. (This is from Paul Klee's diary written at the age of twenty-three, in 1902.)

  To have to begin by what is smallest is as precarious as it is necessary. I will be like a newborn child, knowing nothing about Europe, nothing at all (to be ignorant of poets, wholly without nerve, almost primordial). Then I will do something very modest, think of something very, very small, totally formal. My pencil will be able to put it down, without any technique. All that is needed is an auspicious moment; the concise is easily represented. And soon it is done. It was a tiny, but real act, and from the repetition of acts that are small, but my own, eventually a work will come, on which I can build.8

  Therefore it is obvious that the imagination is prepared to receive such an experience, not only from the native sensibility which each one of us brings with us from birth, but more sincerely when the sensibility has been trained by variegated insights-outsights and experiences.

  69. "Birds" by Gaitonde.

  The common idea that everyone is born to appreciate art is, therefore, superficial and erroneous. If it takes at least eighteen years' hard study and experimental practice in a laboratory to learn the laws of a particular science, I do not see how the complexities of a work of art can be properly apprehended by an unschooled person. Of course, the Rajasthani peasant woman looks at works of art in a museum, hut she may not see them. And many people, with varying degrees of education and experience, may sec these works, hut they see them with unequal insights, and differently from a rasika, who has the necessary imaginative intensity and has learnt to fly all the seven birds, or in whom the birds fly naturally. And the trained rasika may rediscover something new every time he or she sees a great work. Though many paintings seem simple at first sight, "masterpieces" are invariably the product of subtle and complex gifts which infuse many incomprehensible qualities into these creations. And all these qualities are not always revealed in any way near their completeness in the important single moment. That is why we come back to our chosen works again and again, to discover in their complexity the confirmation of our first aesthetic experience, and we often receive revelations of new, hitherto undisclosed, inimitable characteristics.

  The areas opened up by the bird of imagination are vast. And there is endless room for the experimentalist onlooker, in seeing, as there is for the experimentalist artist in ever-fresh creative activity. As ingrained habits, conventions, inhibitions, prohibitions, restraints and prejudices break down, one may be transplanted, after the tracking of active contemplation, from the life of routine to a world of equilibrium or di
sequilibrium, to the "condition of seeing" in which the third eye may release or merge one into the state described as "the peace which passeth understanding.

  I am afraid that in explaining the role of the bird of imagination in the appreciation of works of art, I have had to resort to words like "ecstasy," "release," "harmony" and "vision." I realise that these words are vague. But I had not intended to mix up aesthetic emotion with the mysterious and controversial state of being in which illuminations occur in a Hash. "It is not this, it is not that!" asserts the mystic; or "I have seen." I think some people stumble upon this awareness through works of art, and what the mystics call the "flash'' often happens to artists and other gifted people almost every day.

  I prefer to think that the sources of art lie in the human body-soul. I believe that there are all kinds of possible alliances between the values of space, time, colour, line and coherence and the energies flowing in our metabolism. I think that there is also a strange chaos, discontinuity and formlessness in the expanding universe of our sensibility which is part of all other things in nature. And I feel that our attempts to create a pattern, a style or a coherent picture may have to reckon with mutually contradictory states of experience. The mind must face a new direction if we are to select a combination of qualities and organize them into some kind of unity, which may become communicable or suggestive and may touch the sources of intense experience.

  In fact, I would like to ask whether the generalisations of the men of religion have not made the "interior" life, suspect by appointing God as the supreme end of art, when actually the human body-soul is both the means and the. end of the aesthetic experience, and seeks perfection through insights, in the West, the Puritan-Christian tradition, which considers sex as "sin," has also, by implication, degraded the senses. But in art there is no such thing as "pure" spirit. An artist may be a drunkard, a seducer and a scoundrel, but he might be able to paint, like Modigliani, a nude in orange, or ally himself with an animated landscape in miniature, as does Bihzad, or show Krishna playing blind man's bluff with cowboys. Colours, sounds, images, perfumes and almost everything that stimulates the psychophysical life are supposed to be distractions from the path of Nirvana in early Buddhism. But more people may become good Buddhists through seeing the picture gallery of Ajanta than by reading the Dhammapada, because karuna, or pity, is more often communicated in pictures than in big words. One has to begin at the beginning— to look, and then to see.

  The withdrawal from the external world alone can, in the opinion of many exalted men of the Hindu faith, ensure the communion of the "alone with the alone." In the Dark Ages, everything connected with the senses was considered the instrument of the devil himself.

  I am not sure to what extent the interior life can be separated from the sensibility. The saints are often compelled to use the images of physical union as metaphors for the spiritual, disembodied union. And the fall from grace, in the process of meditation, is frequently camouflaged under the garb of fighting the lusts instigated by the hosts of Mara (the senses). Thus is asserted the superiority of the Gnana Yogi, who is said to establish, from the very start, perfect control over himself by intellectual processes, regardless of his physical body and the ravages of disease. I am not sanguine about the claims of Jivan Muktas, as their end is heaven and not Ananda delight, which latter is nearer the wisdom of the heart. The kingdom of heaven is, perhaps, in the pictures of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, in Leonardo's Last Supper or Madonna of the Rocks, in Pierro delia Francesca, EI Greco, Ma Yüan, Bihzad, Ajanta, Bagh, Kandinsky, Klee, Picasso and Masson.

  Against the "noble interior life," as conceived by most dead faiths, I would like to put the noble life of the body-soul, concerned with silent areas of creative art. I would prefer not to inherit a dummy called God and then look for something invented by man in the childhood of the race. I would like to put the human being, in all his failings and achievements, in the centre of our universe of discourse. I do not see why plumbing the depths of the "spirit" through a prescribed ritual should be regarded as a more exalted effort than examining the earth and penetrating the processes of things. I believe that the depths at which the serpent power is coiled up can be plumbed in the personality of many men and women trained into the condition of resilience, from which degrees of awareness of forms are possible, leading to total awareness, in full confrontation—darshana—to "the peace that passeth understanding," the "lamp that flickers not." I feel that the kind of emphasis which divides the "spiritual" from the "physical" is an inheritance from the priestly orders. This division has befogged almost every issue of the philosophy of life by a snobbish placing of the "spiritual" on a pedestal—by the a priori assertion of God first and man afterwards—before which the concept of man becoming God has been made into a vulgarity. The cliches and claptrap of these philosophical controversies have poisoned the atmosphere so that everyone wishes politely to accept the hackneyed words, although these words may have little or no relevance to reality as seen by man in his deepest and most intense awareness, after he has gained the first and last freedom of the psyche from tradition.

  Actually, the orthodox view of ascribing everything to God has to give place to the modern experimental attitude towards forms. This must occur in the interests of a comprehensive world humanism, which accepts the miracle of man himself, in the midst of an equally uncanny outside world of nature, with its marvellous array of phenomena, of which man is the product and with which he seeks alliance through ever-fresh revelations of refulgence, of beauty, harmony, coherence and even disharmony. And in this context, the next development of man may only be possible through our awareness of the purposive organism of the highly complex human system of the body-soul. This may be possible if the attitude we bring to experience begins anew every day. The artist does not copy the great masters in a museum. Nor does every philosopher repeat Kant or Hegel or the Vedanta. Time, space, succession, Being, death— all become understandable if one contemplates with ever-new eyes a flower, the evening star, a river, a mountain, a lizard, a group of men, a woman, a child or the sun. But one must look (and see) everything as though for the very first time, with a freshness which turns sight into vision.

  All the impulses which come to view in the play function of the creative life are instruments for the interrelationship and renewal of our continuous consciousness. They are the gods whom we had exteriorised and worshipped in the early moods of dependence on myth and legend. We have to enter a new plane of perception-apperception with them.

  The area covered by the bird of imagination is thus properly the area of fresh, variegated awarenesses, where instincts, feelings, emotions, thoughts and intuitions are constantly in touch with the shadows of fantasy and dream of the collective unconscious, so that they may appear in our conscious-unconscious efforts to integrate our being into Being Itself, Poems, musical compositions and pictures are the vehicles of life on earth. They take us on the quest of true humanness. Through them we seek depth, breadth, height. And through them we intensify our jaded emotions and stretch out to the utmost reaches of consciousness, to be truly ourselves.

  The seven birds in flight are pictured by Hebbar in an exquisite drawing (see sketch on p. 5). Then we see the bird of the imagination returning to the nest to feed the chicks (Fig. 70). Similarly, through the areas covered by the flight of the bird of imagination, do we return, in our sensibilities, to the areas of creation in works of art.

  70. Feeding the chicks.

  Notes

  Chapter 1

  1. C. V. Raman, "The Perception of Light and Colour in the Physiology of Vision" and "The Role of the Retina in Vision" (Bangalore: Memoirs of the Raman Research Institute, no. 125, I960, and no. 133, 1962).

  2. Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956) and Fritz Kahn, Der Mensch (Zurich: Alb. Muller Verlag, 1939).

  3. Robert Campbell, "The Circuit of the Senses," Life, vol. 35, no, 4 (1959).

  4. Ibid.


  5. Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Irene Rice Pereira, The Nature of Space (New York: privately published, 1956).

  9. Bharata, Natya Shastra, C. A. D. 500, ed. M. Ramakrishna, 4 vols., Haroda Orientsl Series (Baroda: University of Baroda, 1926-64).

  10. Raman, "The Perception of Light and Colour in the Physiology of Vision" and "The Role of the Retina in Vision,"

  11. "Howard Ketchum—Color Engineer," The New Yorker, March 8, 19S2. Quoted from Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture.

  12. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular (New York: Wittenborn, reprint 1970).

  13. Paul Klee, On Modern Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1948).

  14. Colour Research (The Brain Institute of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, Moscow).

  15. Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture.

  16. Raman, "The Gateway of Human Knowledge," lectures delivered at Azad Bhavan, 1965.