“Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.”129 That is James Joyce. The statement is quoted in Ulysses by Buck Mulligan. The situation is that Leopold Bloom, thinking of his home problem, is looking intently at a red triangle on the label of a bottle of Bass ale. When someone starts to disturb Bloom, Mulligan stops him, saying, “…preserve a druid silence. His soul is far away. It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access…,” and so on.
Take, for example, a pencil, ashtray, anything, and holding it before you in both hands, regard it for a while. Forgetting its use and name, yet continuing to regard it, ask yourself seriously, “What is it?”…Cut off from use, relieved of nomenclature, its dimension of wonder opens; for the mystery of the being of that thing is identical with the mystery of the being of the universe—and of yourself. 130
Art is the transforming experience.
The revelation of art is not ethics, nor a judgment, nor even of humanity as one generally thinks of it. Rather, the revelation is a marveling recognition of the radiant Form of forms that shines through all things.
In the simplest terms, I think we might say that when a situation or phenomenon evokes in us a sense of existence (instead of some reference to the possibility of an assurance of meaning) we have had an experience of this kind. The sense of existence evoked may be shallow or profound, more or less intense, according to our capacity or readiness; but even a brief shock (say, for example, when discovering the moon over city roofs or hearing a sharp bird cry at night) can yield an experience of the order of no-mind: that is to say, the poetical order, the order of art. When this occurs, our own reality-beyond-meaning is awakened (or perhaps better: we are awakened to our own reality-beyond-meaning), and we experience an affect that is neither thought nor feeling but an interior impact. The phenomenon, disengaged from cosmic references, has disengaged ourselves, by that principle, well known to magic, by which like conjures like. In fact, both the magic of art and the art of magic derive from and are addressed to experiences of this order. Hence the power of the meaningless syllables, the mumbo jumbo of magic, and the meaningless verbalizations of metaphysics, lyric poetry, and art interpretation. They function evocatively, not referentially; like the beat of a shaman’s drum, not like a formula of Einstein. One moment later, and we have classified the experience and may be having utterable thoughts and describable feelings about it—thoughts and feelings that are in the public domain, and they will be either sentimental or profound, according to our educa-tion. But according to our life, we have had, for an instant, a sense of existence: a moment of unevaluated, unimpeded, lyric life—antecedent to both thought and feeling; such as can never be communicated by means of empirically verifiable propositions, but only suggested by art.131
The goal of life is rapture.
Art is the way we experience it.
I will give you what seems to me to be the most clear and certain exposition of basic esthetic theory I know, namely, that of James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .
Joyce makes a distinction between what he calls “proper art” and “improper art.” By “proper art” he means that which really belongs to art. “Improper art,” by contrast, is art that’s in the service of something that is not art: for instance, art in the service of advertising. Further, referring to the attitude of the observer, Joyce says that proper art is static, and thereby induces esthetic arrest, whereas improper art is kinetic, filled with movement: meaning, it moves you to desire or to fear and loathing.
Art that excites desire for the object as a tangible object he calls pornographic. Art that excites loathing or fear for the object he terms didactic. All sociological art is didactic. Most novels since Zola’s time have been the work of didactic pornographers, who are preaching a social doctrine of some kind and fancying it up with pornographic icing.
Say you are leafing through a magazine and see an advertisement for a beautiful refrigerator. There’s a girl with lovely refrigerating teeth smiling beside it, and you say, “I’d love to have a refrigerator like that.” That ad is pornography. By definition, all advertising art is pornographic art. Or suppose you see a photograph of a dear old lady, and you think, “I’d love to have tea with that dear old soul.” That photograph is pornography. Or you go into a ski buff’s house, where there’s a paint-ing of a mountain slope, and you think, “Oh, to go down that mountain slope…” That painting is pornography: your relationship to it is not purely esthetic: just perceiving the thing. Most of the art that one sees is either didactic or pornographic.
For help with proper art, Joyce goes to Aquinas.
He says, and he uses the Latin words, that the esthetic object renders three moments: integritas, “wholeness”; consonantia, “harmony”; and claritas, “radiance.”
Say that you have several objects on a table. Put a frame around any portion of this situation, and what is within that frame is now to be regarded not as an as-sortment of separate objects but as something else: a single entity, a wholeness: integritas.
The late Buckminster Fuller has left with us a definition of this way of seeing and appreciating…:
“In order to be able to understand the great complexity of life and to understand what the universe is doing, the first word to learn is synergy. Synergy is the behavior of whole systems, unpredicted by the behavior of their parts. The most extraordinary example of it is what we call mass attraction. One great massive sphere and another massive sphere hung by tension members are attracted to one another. We find there is nothing in one sphere in its own right, that predicts that it’s going to be attracted to another. You have to have the two. It is, then, synergy which holds our earth together with the moon; and it is synergy which holds our whole universe together.…Synergy is to energy as integration is to differentiation.”132
The Buddhist doctrine of “dependent origination, or mutual arising” (pratitya samutpada) corresponds to this of Fuller’s “synergy.” When, on the occasion of the Buddha’s silent flower sermon (which is regarded traditionally as the founding sermon of Zen), he simply held out to his congregation a single flower, the only one who understood was his foremost disciple, Mahakashyapa, who quietly smiled at him in recognition.133 In the symbol, which is almost universal in the Orient, of the universe as a lotus and the lotus as manifest sign on the surface of the waters of an invisible life below waves, the Buddhist doctrine is already implicit of pratītya-samutpāda, “dependent origination, or mutual arising”; for the petals are not to be interpreted as in any way independent of each other, casual or consequential of each other. The whole system has simply arisen, “thus come” (tathāgata), like the Buddha himself.134
Now, when you have integritas, wholeness inside such a frame, the only thing that counts is the harmonious placement of everything, the consonantia , what Joyce calls the “rhythm of beauty,”135 which includes the relationship of colors to each other, of masses to each other, and of the spaces in between. All elements are part of this harmonious rhythm. When the rhythm is fortunately achieved, one experiences the claritas, or radiance: one sees that the aesthetic object is itself and no other thing, and one is held in esthetic arrest.
”The mind,” [Joyce] writes, “is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”136 The original, biological function of the eye, to seek out and identify things to eat and to alert the mind to danger, is for a moment, or (in the case of a true artist) for a lifetime suspended, and the world (beheld without judgment of its relevance to the well-being of the observer) is recognized as a revelation sufficient in itself.137
In other words, the frame is a border hermetically sealing-off the object, so that all you are experiencing, all that matters, is within that border. It’s a sacred field, and you become pure subject for a pure object. You no longer have to know what these things are named or what can be done with them. This is the a-b-c of esthetics. Next comes
the d-e-f.
The mystery of art is why one rhythm fixes you in esthetic arrest and another doesn’t. Music is nothing if not rhythm. Rhythm is the instrument of art. Music is the organization, not only of rhythm, but of scale and of the notes played against each other: quarter notes, half notes, and so forth. If you are playing a C-Major chord and move to a dominant Seventh, that’s an organization of the relationship of one note to another. It is really space.
It’s wonderful to see a jazz group improvise: when five or six musicians are really tuned in to each other, it’s all the same rhythm, and they can’t go wrong, even though they never did it that way before.
The Pygmy people have little pipes that each sound one note, and a bunch of them sit around, each piping one note, and when they get going, something darling comes out: like birds, like forest noises.
Indian music never has a beginning and never has an end. The music represents a plane of consciousness and is going on all the time. When you go to a concert, it’s the strangest event. They’re fooling around with the instruments, tuning and zinging them, and this may go on for a half hour. Then presently they’re playing. It is as though the music were going on continuously, and the musicians simply dip down, pick it up, play with it for a while, and then leave it. It is altogether different from western music: there is not only no tension or release, but no beginning and no end. It’s always there.
There’s a relationship between musical organization and architectural organization. All architecture is an organization in space. It happens to have a function that is also related to space. The Century Club in New York was built by Sanford White, an important architect, around the end of the nineteenth century. The building is an historical monument. The lounge floor is very harmonizing: a room so proportioned that it puts you at peace. But why this happens is mysterious.
The only answer I can think of is Cezanne’s: “Art is a harmony parallel to nature.” There are, of course, two natures involved: Nature, the world out there, and the world of nature within. That is to say, when it is the artist’s intention is to arrange “a harmony parallel to nature”—and any other intention probably involves didactics or pornography—then that harmony resonates with something inside you, fixes you in esthetic arrest, and you have that big “a-ha!” experience. So it is the function of art to open the consumable things of the tangible, visible world, so that the radiance—the same radiance that’s within you—shines through them.
I think one feels this harmony most powerfully in Japan, where your own nature is constantly invoked, and you don’t know where Nature ends and art begins. When a garden is constructed, the man who composes it tells his son when to bend each branch: “When it grows out to here, bend it”—so that it looks like Nature. It is art: Nature that has been harmonized with the nature within. That harmony is the first stage of this rhythm. This is basic. Abstract art, any kind of art, has to be thought of in terms of this rhythm. Choosing what verse form you are going to use in poetry in relation to what it is you are going to say, the echoing of one consonant against another: it is all rhythm, to be conceived of in terms of sensuous rhythmic effects that touch you. Certain rhythms render certain responses.
And the two kinetic movements that block this harmonious rhythm are exactly the two temptations of the Buddha: desire, which draws you to possess the object, and loathing or fear, which turns you away from it. When you move to possess or to turn away from an object, you are reacting to the world of delusory appeals and terrors that māyā has projected. And esthetic arrest, the condition of the heart or spirit or whatever not being moved by desire or fear, is precisely the counter-part of the experience of the Buddha under the tree of the immovable spot. It is the immovable spot. It is a psychological stasis with respect to your relationships to the forms of the world around you.
The biological urges to enjoy and to master (with their opposites, to loathe and to fear), as well as the social urge to evaluate (as good or evil, true or false), simply drop away, and a rapture in sheer experience supervenes, in which self-loss and elevation are the same. Such an impact is “beyond words;” for it is not such as can be explained by a reference to anything else. The mind is released—for a moment, for a day, or per-haps forever—from those anxieties to enjoy, to win, or to be correct which spring from the net of nerves in which men are entangled. Ego dissolved, there is nothing in the net but life—which is everywhere and forever. The Zen masters of China and Japan have called this state the state of “no-mind.” The classical Indian terms are mokṣa, “release,” bodhi, “enlightenment,” and nirvāṇa, “transcendence of the winds of passion.” Joyce speaks of “the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure,”138 when the clear radiance of the esthetic image is apprehended by the mind, which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony. “The mind,” he says, “in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal.”139
So the esthetic vehicle, the instrument of the rhythm of beauty that induces esthetic arrest, is the revealing power of māyā.
One application of the artist’s craft is in doing something like making a turkey dinner, another is in creating art that is of no use whatsoever except esthetically. When I use the word “art,” it has to do with “divinely superfluous beauty” and esthetic arrest. There’s no esthetic arrest in eating a turkey. That’s life in action, doing what it has to do, namely eating some-thing that’s been killed, putting it into your system. It’s totally different from esthetic arrest and recognizing the radiance. Are you going to look at the object or eat it? Eating the object is related to desire and loathing.
The distinction between the two has to do with whether it is the projecting power of māyā or the revealing power that is present when you look at the object. It’s very important to make a clear distinction between the two. If you’re concerned with prospering or failing with the object, eating or not eating it, your perspective involves desire and loathing, the temptations of the Buddha, the projecting power of māyā.
This bringing together of Joyce’s esthetic theory with the māyā idea was a wonderful illumination for me. I just woke up this morning and said, ”My god, I have finally got it after eighty years.” I have known the implications of esthetic arrest, but I’d never linked it up to the māyā idea. It is your mental attitude that determines whether you experience the projecting or the revealing power. The world is there in both modes. It is not that the world changes, it’s your consciousness.
Esthetic arrest is the result of this change of focus. “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.” You see it in esthetic arrest. But to develop the inward depth experienced through this change of focus, those who seek to achieve fully the goal of life should set aside a sacred space. The sacred space, when you think of where it appears in traditional cultures, is for initiations and meditations. If you are so fulfilled already that no further initiations are necessary, then you can do without such a space. But, insofar as you’ve not struck the ultimate depth and are interested in enriching and building the interior, in addition to the external aspects of your life, then you have to have some place, some way, to practice this.
All the world will open up when you’ve achieved this inner depth, and your play in life will be informed by this radiance. The Grail Castle is in the field that is adventured in the way of experiencing esthetic arrest. The Grail is the sense of total rapture and spiritual fulfillment that comes from your experience of this hermetically sealed field. It is like probing for oil: you put a pipe down, strike oil, and then realize the oil is under everything. But you first have to go down somewhere to find it, and this is the field of this plunge.
I think if you imagine yourself taking the position of esthetic stasis, you’ll understand about withdrawing fear and desire for what happens, and about samsara being nirvāṇa, the still point in the midst of the turning world. That’s all there is to it. Then the world becomes a display of things from which you ar
e disengaged, and yet, voluntarily, you can become engaged: “joyous participation in the sorrows of the world.” It is very different from being compulsively linked.
The change of consciousness from stasis to kinesis is the Fall in the Garden. The bondages from which the Buddha disengaged—desire, fear, and social duty—are temporal matters. You can engage in them voluntarily, but compulsive engagement is linked to māyā. If you have gotten that, you have gotten all I can give you.
Now Ramakrishna, speaking of brahman and Sakti—or Devi, the Goddess—says that brahman is the still point, the milky ocean experienced as stillness; Sakti is the movement, the joy and the pain; and the two together are one. That’s the idea of the Yab-Yum. One thing after another was coming together last night in terms of this simple analysis that Joyce has given us.
Then, in Joyce’s analysis, we have the emotions of pity and terror. Now, terror is not the same as fear and loathing. It is the realization of both the transcendent operating principle and the effect of the passage of time: the sorrows of the world. It’s static, a still terror, not the terror of flight. It is the realization of compassion: identification with the human sufferer: not the poor sufferer, the black sufferer, the Communist or Fascist sufferer, but the human sufferer—which eliminates the sociological didactic. You identify with ”the suffering servant,” you might say, and the terror goes past all movement to the still point of Goethe’s “schaudern”: the shudder of realization of the mere phenomenality
of the world. That’s the whole story.
One might add that, in the way of either lust or love, the female enables the male to make the transit: the seductress lures him to the world, and the virgin—the Virgin Birth mother, Mary—introduces him to the transcendent, the Christ principle that transcends individualism. It seems to me that everything falls right in-to place with this very simple realization.
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living Page 19
