Seven Little-Known Birds of the Inner Eye
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These birds may fly singly, or in unison, or in a haphazard manner. It seems to me that the total vision, or darshana, as I call it, is not an orderly process, because of the over-abundance of perceptions, apperceptions and vibrations which are the inner energies of the body-soul. Affiliated with these inner energies are emotions, moods and feelings and stirrings in the subconscious life. So many traces of experience become active along the tracks of the racial unconscious in the moment of seeing that it is difficult to distinguish them or to say which portion of the metabolism became energised first. Therefore, I am inclined to question the view that a work of art evokes a "pure aesthetic emotion." Though the response may ultimately be joy, the peripheral reactions do suggest practical significances. Thus the wall-painting The Dying Princess, in Ajanta, may conduce to karuna, or pity; Leonardo's Madonna and Child, in the Hermitage Museum, to love; Picasso's Guernica to horror of war. And these moods, or bhavas, are almost biological. So aesthetic response cannot be a class apart, but part of a totality of responses.
I am not sure in what order these responses emerge. But for the sake of convenience I have described the flight of the seven little-known birds or energies in a certain sequence, as indicative of what might happen to a good rasika in the first second or two of his mature contemplation of a work of art. But the actual response may or may not happen in this sequence.
Given the flight of the seven birds along the energised tracks of experience, we might, I believe, be able to see. That is, we might become more intensely aware of the suggestions made by the composition of colours, forms, lines, tones and textures, through the "poetry by analogy" of visual art, than we are when we are merely looking. Works of art are popularly understood as illustrations of poetry or stories, or as themes yielding logical meaning. But this idea may give place to the real response that lies, perhaps, in the awakening of the active body-soul.
When played upon by art experience, this active body-soul begins to release energies or vasanas and either allies itself with the experience or rejects it, completely or in part. In this process, works which are merely slick or clever, or unfelt imitations of appearances, are proved to be false, sentimental, tawdry and insincere, lacking the core of the vital creative process in the organisation of form. Such works are devoid of genuine struggle on the part of the artist to construct from a challenge, to ally himself with the creative vision of the intensely eager onlooker. These indifferent works can then be cast aside through the value judgements that are implicit in true seeing.
I wish to make it clear that many Western aesthetic systems, based on pure sensation, are inadequate. I feel that Lord Russell, following David Hume and Professor G. E. Moore, overplayed sensation and congeries of sensations. We become aware of sensations only after the impact has passed through our physiology. By that time sensations are not simple percepts, but have acquired affiliations which charge them with suggestions, vitalities and meanings. This is to say we have no pure abstract sensation but perceptions-apperceptions.
The process of contemplation, or total darshana, is something like this. The first bird flies off impetuously, propelled by curiosity, and communicates to the memory its discrimination of the lines, colours and forms beyond the light in the retina. The second, the memory bird, recognises the likeness of image or lines to what has been experienced before. The third bird flies off from the thalamus (the survival of the anthropoid ape in ail of us) underneath the cerebral cortex. Vibrating with questions ("What?" and "How?" and "Why?") this third bird transmits violent currents above and below, since the thalamus is connected with the brain as well as the spinal cord. The currents are transmitted downwards to the lumbar ganglion and to the mysterious kundalini, or the dormant serpent power, which may be the ultimate repository of all the rhythmic wavelengths. The fourth, the rhythm bird, follows the seminal possibilities, such as those from the various past and present rhythms. This fourth bird allies itself to or dissociates the body-soul from the organised pattern.
The fifth, the heart bird, is already filling the personality with the excitement of the gestalt. If its energies have been aroused by the art experience, the blood flow quickens. The sixth, the brain bird, always hovering over the personality from the field-station of the head, makes the image an autonomous reality, and at this point what began as a message from outside, "reading from," may turn into a "reading into." The seventh, the king bird, takes in the whole. Seeing everything by intuition, as it were, it makes the suggestions produced by the composition of colours, forms and other visual elements into integral projections of the inner world of the faculties. It transforms the outer experience, With sympathy, empathy or insight, into a total vision of the possibilities of expression and into the delectation which may ensue from a work of art.
Actually it is rarely that the "third eye" of the imagination opens up and enables the body-soul to see, absorb, "savor" or taste the work of art. Only in the gifted rasika can the body-soul achieve that release of incipient energies, vibrations and urges which is the condition of seeing all. This opening up of the third eye and release of energies unites the inner life of a work of art—its vibrations and stirrings—with the human centre, making possible the connection between looking and seeing.
I have, called the last bird the king bird, or the Phoenix Bird of Paradise, because it is the bird of imagination, which ever renews ant) "connects." I define imagination in the poet Baudelaire's sense, as the faculty which rouses all the others, or in the sense of Shakespeare's words in A Midsummer Night's Dream: "imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown."
This analysis of the complex of references involved in the condition of seeing may, in the erratic flights of the seven birds, reveal some striking results.
First, we may find that there is a general connection between human breathing—the inhale-exhale process—and the feeling a work of art evokes. Paintings and sculptures ultimately fuse sounds, vibrations and stirrings in the inward life of the artist. They are never mere copies of outside objects. Certain forms, especially in architecture, tend to be relaxing. Others are constricting. And through long habit and association various colours, lines and forms have become the index of our own stirrings, moods and emotions, affecting our feelings and tending to create a new equilibrium. For this reason it has been said that all arts tend towards the condition of music.
Secondly, it may become clear that, apart from the eyes, the whole sensibility, including not only the five senses, but also the nerves, muscles, tendons and other parts of the body, as well as the soul, comes into operation, even in the few seconds most people take to look at a work of art, during the time they are unconsciously involved in the condition which may go beyond looking to seeing.
Thirdly, quite a few conventional attitudes may be upset. For instance, you may prefer to sit down to see a picture, and allow your rhythmic life to move or to dwell within (rather than look at it always standing up or walking about) so that the condition of seeing beyond looking may be stimulated. Also, art galleries and museums may change their methods of hanging pictures and put up one or two works where they generally crowd fourteen or fifteen on a single wall, thus cancelling out one image with the other.
So works of art may cease to be merely pleasant backgrounds, furniture or decor, because it may be found that even the "ugly" distortions of a so-called devil mask can, with the stirrings they excite, come within the purview of "beauty," in spite of the terrors, repulsions, even horrors they display. Their beauty comes from the essential vibrations which started off the artist's sheer delight in image-making. We may find that more often than not we listen to the music of the singing line or to the drip-drop of colours, and that the eye is not merely the looking eye but the "listening eye," aware of vibrations.
Again, the sense of touch may be found to have a good deal to do with the enjoyment of relief painting or sculpture. It has been found that eating with the fingers is not nearly so uncivilised as many Westerners have thought it to be in
the past.
In fact, after tracing the erratic flights of the seven birds, some art-lovers may forget their snobbery and their easygoing habits and ask themselves what really happens to them during the few seconds in which they confront a work of art.
I shall, then, describe the activities of the seven little-known birds which stimulate the alliance of the onlooker's vision with art works and with some of those elusive, subtle rhythms that are part of the human metabolism from birth. Many of these rhythms have remained hidden or undiscovered, because of the conceptual and anti-imagist bias produced in literate people by faulty educational systems in which ideas and meanings are valued more than feelings. We must learn to avoid the easy quest for literary meaning in art and for dominantly philosophical and socio-historical facts. The distinction between poetry in words and the poetry by analogy of visual art must be emphasised.
The pictorial and plastic situation and its ancillary vibrations, in terms of expression of form and of philosophy, must become our chief concern. In this way we can explain by implication how the body-soul's whole range of feelings—from languor, delirium and abandon to studied cynicism—is often neglected in reactions to works of art. In this way, too, the creative process as the release of vision by the artist may be apprehended in the onlooker's complex of references and experiences. Thus some part of the total experience or darshana may be received, and the rasa, or flavour, consequent upon absorbing or savouring works of art may be tasted.
1: The Dickeybird
2. Bird of optical vision.
THE FIRST bird which flies off as soon as you look at a picture is the bird of optical vision, which emerges from the focus of the two eyes (Fig. 2). It is an eager, impatient, impetuous bird, which goes out flapping, flopping, excited and quick, from the converging point of the eyes and fixes its stare upon the work of art. It is almost like the bird the photographer releases when he clicks the shutter of his camera lens open, telling his youngest models to "watch the birdie" (Fig. 3).
In fact, it is an accepted idea that the first view of anything is very much like that of the camera, focussed in a particular orbit, except that the camera is a machine and the eye is a live instrument, intimately connected with the other organs of the human body. This has led many people to regard the optical vision as the "camera eye," And so the eyes are supposed to see, more or less, the likeness of an object in nature as a copy of the outside object, an imitation of reality.
This commonsense notion is fairly correct. But, beyond the camera eye, the retina helps to discriminate among the various parts of the area within the focus. As a result, our visual experience becomes, soon after the first impact, a complex of highly involved references. With the alacrity of an electrical signal, the eye bird, focussed upon a picture, sends messages to the other birds of our senses (Fig. 4). Like the ear, it gets a response and thus becomes the "listening eye," connected with the nervous system and the brain. Also, these senses, and the various energies of the vital organism— the other birds, as I prefer to call them—supply the material which enables the bird of reason to synthesise the messages. The bird of imagination may then ultimately fly out and comprehend the work of art as a whole.
3. Dickeybird about to fly.
4. "Medal of Alberti" by Matteo de' Pasti (Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
Thus even the simple optical vision is a phenomenon of such intricacy that it cannot be measured in all its subtle interconnections by any instrument so far invented. As a gateway to the outside world, it is one of the miraculous results of mankind's long evolutionary process. We can merely summarise its functions briefly and suggest the complex of references.
What happens when the dickeybird, or the bird of the eye, flies off? This affects not only the eyes; a person's body-soul, inspired by its goal-seeking desires and by conative will and curiosity, projects itself through the eyes towards an object. Light of a single colour is the simplest type of radiation, appearing as a single line in the spectrum. The sensation excited by monochromatic light is, therefore, the simplest type of visual sensation. But to sense even monochromatic light and recognise it involves a compulsion from within the spectator. Only through tension in the protoplasmic metabolism of the human being is it led to awareness of things in the universe outside.
Scientific observation of the human cornea lens and retina confirm the eye's similarity to a camera. But, because there is always a cameraman directing the lenses to the focus and opening the shutter, even as with any mechanical camera, the eye becomes an organic instrument or machine for perceiving things.
Until the moment of looking, there is the sensation of perception and only a little apperception, or understanding. But certain facts about the human eye complicate the pure sensation. The evidence for the existence of these facts, which are not known to common sense, comes from optical illusions. For instance, the child, in the earliest stages of its growth, sees objects upside down. The field of vision of a nine-month-old child looking into the distance is restricted. It is only through the perfecting, formative and self-regulatory processes of the body-soul that this approach is later corrected. The familiar trick often practiced by photographers who show the figure head down and legs up resembles the child's first approach. This is a common delusion. The eye slowly adjusts itself.
If you compare the iris diaphragms of the camera and of the human eye you will understand that, in both cases, when the diaphragm is contracted the image is sharpened, whereas when it is relaxed the image becomes vague. The flattening or wrong adjustment of the eye (or the camera) leaves the image blurred. The adjustment of both the human eye and the lens is carried out by the use of a sieve or screen. The use of a screen is nowadays a familiar process in printing pictures clearly, sharply and accurately. In vision, too, the image itself is broken up into dots by the rods and the cones of the retina. Each of the many cells sees one dot as big as itself. The strongest and most energetic cells receive "light" in a radiation which is reported by the eyes to the brain and other parts of the body-soul. The weak cells communicate "dark,"
If you enlarge the image of hundreds of dots, almost as in the famous neo-Impressionist painting by Georges Seurat, Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbour (Fig. 5), you can get a feeling of dissolved colour energies in a new light. The Pointillism of Seurat was based on such a formula.
5. "Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbour" (1888) by Georges Seurat. Oil on canvas, 21 5/8" x 25 5/8" (Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lillie V. Bliss Collection).
I shall refer in detail to the findings about optical vision of Professor C. V. Raman, who has analysed the relationship to, or the impact of, our sensory impressions on the eye.1 Meanwhile, I mention here his important discovery that "light appears as a sharp type of radiation." It is appropriate, therefore, that we recognise the sensations excited by monochromatic lights of various colours as the primary or fundamental visual sensations. Likewise, when a continuous spectrum of radiation is dispersed by a prism into a band of colours, the eye can distinguish or discriminate each strip from the others in the spectrum, under the most favourable conditions of observation. And as many as 250 hues in the spectrum can be distinguished under laboratory conditions, to confirm that this also happens in the ordinary way when we look at a picture or landscape.
Walter Gropius has explained important biological facts about our ways of seeing.2 The human eye from within looks like a television camera. It transforms optical images into electrical currents through its broadcasting system; it has a supporting framework; it has photosensitive cells; it has transmitting cells; it has connecting cells; it has a nerve cable; it has a protecting base.
A more exact metaphor is the idea that "the human eye is a combination camera for day and night photography." The retinal cones are the daylight apparatus. They require much light, producing sharply defined panchromatic pictures. The rods are the twilight apparatus. They are strongly photosensitive but produce indistinct achromatic pictures.
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The discrimination of colours and of lines which takes place immediately upon the first glance is brought about by the transformer in the retina and the whole complex structure allied to perception through the evolutionary processes and the energies behind them. These energies respond to light, and, according to Albert Einstein, consist of streams of "photons."
It must be emphasised that, though the obvious analogy between the human eye and the camera eye is fairly accurate in relation to the first impact of a work of art on the retina, the experience of seeing involves much more than this initial impact. The vasanas (energies or vitalities) of the body-soul urge us to active collaboration. The urge behind seeing a painting or sculpture has subjective associations of all kinds. These may in rare cases be refined, and we may set a subjective-objective condition for seeing, but, beyond this, there is achieved an undefined union, catharsis or release.
Consequently, as soon as the dickeybird flies off towards the "photon" energies of a picture, with its own impetuous vitalities, it transforms the report immediately, with some additions or subtractions, and relates it to the centres of apperception. The energies of the body-soul, behind the television-like apparatus inside the retina, take over. And discrimination between the various parts of the image, which began immediately when the energies of the picture hit the retina, now begins to be heightened. The image is thus already being seen into. It is now allied with the surviving primitive anthropoid brain in us all, the thalamus, situated underneath the cerebral cortex. The image now travels towards the cerebral cortex. Recharged by memory, it goes towards the lumbar ganglion and the complex of nerves, tendons, muscles and subconscious underlayers. Thus it spreads its subtle rhythmic and other messages down below the far-flung universe of the unknown life of man, within the five-or six-foot structure that has evolved into the miracle called the human being. In so far as the eye selects the visual features, according to the choice compelled from within by the sensibility of the person looking, as well as by his potentialities for intense feeling and thinking, the eye becomes the seeing window of the body-soul, which is replete with all the biological and racial experiences that have gone into the making of the metabolism.