Samkhya thinking holds that while the central nervous system is fairly well developed in its responses to external stimuli, the sympathetic nervous system remains relatively dormant. By contemplation of images, either in paint or stone, or from memory, a person develops the power to concentrate the whole being and generate all those latent powers which, through the exercise of will and certain centres like the mysterious kundalini, can be converted into active energy. The mature rasika is an adept who, by seeing thousands of pictures, has stored up enough material to help him to subject new images to the subtlest comparisons and contrasts. He exerts his autonomic nervous system and his somatic functions in such a way as to hold all distracting elements in abeyance. And he sees himself in relation to the work of art as a part of the total complex and yet differentiated from it.6
Therefore, in any attempt to understand what happens when we look at a picture, we have to presume that, if it is man who sees the work of art, then no alien God is necessary to provide for us the instrument of divine inspiration, Man as God has to analyse it from the point of view of a humanist aesthetic. The elements of perception pass from the eyes, as signals of phenomena, to he remembered as like or unlike the things seen before, and in various other differentiations. They pass through the rhythmic nerves and heart, to be brooded over by the brain, and passed into the "condition of seeing." This may be a state of awareness and creativeness, of tension, or of ultimate oneness dormant in various energies. We are thus compelled to build up an analysis of the energies of looking, memory, rhythm, emotion, reason and imagination which form the pattern of seeing. The affinities and alliances of all these, the whole process of discernment, may give us an insight into man's longings for harmony, or for harmony in disharmony. They may reveal the succession of selective sensations which are often the nuances of the body-soul. But they may appropriately be described as dynamic, recreative energies, which give a certain ripeness to life by lifting us to the excitements of the world of imagination. These excitements are often vaguely described as "soul states" though they are actually body-soul states.
Like the dickeybird, the bird of memory, however, can only perform limited functions. As the first bird transferred you to the second, the second hands you over to the third. The feelings, the stirrings and the various vibrations of the nerves, tendons, muscles and inchoate powers under the influence of the brain ultimately lead up to the universe of the imagination, where we may go beyond looking and enter the real condition of seeing, taste the flavour, or rasa, and find release or inspiration for the absorption of the suggestions of the work before us.
Let us sum up the functions of the memory bird. If you go back to the original impact of the object on optical vision, and remember that it was sieved through the reservoir of the body, you will find that memory recalls the associated images and helps us to reorganise them as things, outlines or tendencies like those witnessed before.
Of course, you may be aware in the few seconds of observation of many more factors than the associated internal images, and these may already have affected the ambience, or atmosphere, of the art work which contains recognized prototypes of your remembered images. All kinds of things may, in fact, be happening to you as memory comes to inform you that the object before you is like something you saw before, or as memory tells you when and how you saw it.
This confirmation by your memory of the testimony of the recollected image may be further complicated because it is accompanied by strong feelings about the "enrichment," or deprivation or delectation emerging from the object seen. Or there may be more possibilities in the object than the dickeybird has brought to you or the bird of memory can recall ever having seen before. Both these birds only enable you to catch the breath on the mirror, the fleeting evidence of the essential vitalities of form or colour or line.
Therefore, inevitably, the useful bird of memory passes you on to the other birds, in association with the impressions of the dickeybird, and soon some other birds fly off together towards the work of art. For instance, the active brain, in touch with the rhythmic possibilities of the human body, may suggest to the painter to leave space between the mass on one side and a stroke on the other side of the canvas, to liberate the onlooker to seek release through the magic of distance. This operation suggests that the association of the other birds has already begun to take place in the split second of the first response to the work of art.
Protagoras (481—411 B.C.) appoints man's memory as a kind of Modulor; "Man is the measure of all things, of the things that exist, that they exist; and of the things that do not exist, that they do not exist.
Erich Mendelsohn (1887—1953) emphasises the tracing back through memory as a basis for the imaginative process, "the necessity for the architect [artist] to create that unison of parts and details which in the best buildings [art] of any time miraculously trace back the imaginative processes to mathematical quantities and geometrical texts."7
Walter Gropius establishes the concept of the human form by asking "What is the human scale?" The size of the human body (of which we are always conscious through memory) serves as a yardstick when we perceive our surroundings. The body is the scale unit which enables us to establish a finite framework of relationships within infinite space.8
The novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote in "Making Pictures" after he began to paint: "The picture must all come out of the artist's inside, awareness of forms and figures. We can call it memory, but it is more than memory. It is the image as it lives in the consciousness, alive like a bird, but unknown."9 Professor Wilder Penfield's researches in memory have offered scientific evidence now for these suppositions and enriched our understanding of the key operation of this aspect of human consciousness.10
Further complications arise in the creative process of the artist because many more elements are involved, perhaps simultaneously, in the coordination or organisation of form in the work of art. Says Guillaume Apollinaire: "it is difficult to see forms that were so far unknown that only a few poets suspected their existence."11 The picture, besides communicating to you something like the object you have seen and stored up in memory, may have been transformed by the artist into something quite unexpected through a process unknown to us. Human elements may have been mixed up with an assortment of loosely connected shapes (Fig. 19). Mother and father, known to be tender, may, from their display of occasional anger, be transformed into ugly masks with beaky faces (Fig. 20). Again there may have come incongruous lines, extravagant distortions, strange bulges, ghostly figures, and weird juxtaposition of forms as in Picasso's etching Minotauromachy (Fig. 24). There may be swirls of paint, as in the art of Jackson Pollock, revealing intricacy of feelings in abstract expression (Fig. 22). Or scratches of line may indicate movement, as in Feliks Topolski's drawing (Fig. 21).
As in the first instance of optical impact, memory can only confirm the more obvious images in its film of the past, recollect some of the macabre images or guess their affinities. But the memory of a person has to be freed from the habitual world of common sense and accepted conventions, and released into the world of the constructive imagination, expressing human predicaments, emotions and concepts. That is to say, it has to make departures from normal experience to the world of abnormal suggestions.
19. "The Hunter" (Catalan Landscape; 1923-24) by Joan Miro. Oil on canvas, 25 1/2" x 39 1/2" (Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
As it wanders about the world of the heightened imagination, the bird of memory thus plunges into the vast storehouse of dream images, reverie forms, fantasies and other experience of the collective memory, and finds new ones, because our memory-vision is able to invoke form-giving interpretations from the nervous organism and its somatic functions.
The fantastic adumbrations of many arms and heads, and other exaggerations away from the normal human form have become familiar through the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, where nature spirits and other auras were anthropomorphised. The great power of divine
beings was expressed through multiple limbs and other symbols. The memory of the average Indian is replete with this kind of fantasy.
20. "Ugly Masks—Man and Woman" by Rabindranath Tagore (Courtesy, Rabindranath Tagore Trust, Vishva Bharati).
21. "Movement of Bullocks'' by Feliks Topolski (Courtesy, the artist).
22. "Number I" (1948) by Jackson Pollock. Oil on canvas, 68" x 104" (Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
23. The Tantras, Madhubani folk drawing from Madhubani, Bihar, India.
Those who are familiar with the doctrine of the Tantra accept dream, fantasy and hallucinatory images as ordinary human experiences, the stuff from within which the, coiled-up serpent power can be released (Fig. 23). The teachings of Freud, Jung, Adler and others have in our time given a scientific basis to the hypothesis of the unconscious in the West, and the commonsense mind has thus begun to accept distortion, as stimulated by various inner drives and compulsions, as ordinary in art. Our memories are less inhibited than the memories of those who rely only on facts. Difficulties arise, however, when memory is face to face with the disconnected, inconsequential and bizarre array of forms in contemporary abstract art, especially when some artists assert that they paint "pure" forms or colours and discount all associated memory images.
24. Minotauromachy" (1935) by Pablo Picasso. Etching and scraper, 19 1/2" x 27 7/16" (Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
The mature critic is inclined to doubt the claims of the creative artists to purity, or to mere reliance on the intellect, and to the consequent doctrine of J. Krishnamurti that one must rid oneself of all associations. That may only take place in the mystic experience after prolonged yoga contemplation, and this state is said to be incommunicable. Actually, however, the creative process is much more comprehensive. A miscellany of factors enters, even if the artist is obsessed by a dominantly purist or sectional approach. This does not mean that there is no objective validity in a work of art, apart from individual feeling. In fact, our whole approach is dictated by our biology through the pattern of its emergent physical and psychological completeness. And it seeks to represent the impersonal cumulative bent or tendency of successive generations through individually felt experience of images. When the artist has achieved complete oneness, all external forms may lapse or be held in abeyance because he may have become one with himself through means beyond the mere aid to such yoga found in pictures or statues. Art ends there and mysticism takes over.12
Wordsworth's idea that poetry is "emotion recollected in tranquillity" indicates the relevance of memory in the creative process. I suppose what he meant was that the images aroused by the memory, with all the associated feelings and thoughts, become crystalised or knit in a poetic rendering of the heightened moment of vision.
We believe that memory can discover many hidden images of the dream life if it seeks help from the unconscious. Further, in the inner life, the fundamental processes of the protoplasm, we believe that works of art may enter into the new, hitherto uncharted areas of human life, into the finer shades of those translucent inner spaces where forms undulate, recede, recline, flow, in secret alliance with the as-yet-unknown rhythms in our intricate beings. Understanding the possibilities of optical illusions, explained in the previous section, may equip the average memory with new images of the expanding universe, of new space-time relations and of inner space tensions. The abstract artist's attempt to animate the inert planes of the canvas, or some other material, by sensational and dynamic rhythms, imageless images, dissolved colours and contending or converging lines, may enrich the memory with a new dialectic of formless forms, provided they retain human sanctions and follow the inner compulsions.
Thus the claim of the modern artist that he is concerned with "pure" form does not frighten the acutely sensitive memory because associations of one kind or another are there even in the so-called "pure" forms, and the art-for-art's-sake approach becomes partial, as it ignores the reference to the human centre, and really aims at obscurantist experience rather than artistic expression. At any rate, the enlightened rasika knows that art creates ever-new organisations of forms, that it is essentially inventive and not merely repetitive, and that it uses the sensibility in its relation to phenomenal materials. The associated images may be highly subtle flourishes of the brush, or completely unconventional spheres, cones, cubes; they may be lyrical or broken lines or triangles. But they are all expressions of the organic purposes of the inspired will to achieve synthesis. These purposes are hidden from the wielder of the brush, who indulges mostly in automatic, kinetic expression until he attains such mastery of his resources that he is able to create new forms as easily as he breathes.
Certainly the fusion of the contrasts, likenesses and balances of the most incomprehensible imagery is always an attempt at a new coherence—at fresh construction or composition. And its suggestion can come through in terms of unrecalled desire images, or a new kind of music, which is the kind of communication our collective memory demands. We wish always to rekindle our sensibilities and to create a sense of pervasive connection with others, of pooled racial experience and of the solidarity, through communication, which is the urge of human creativeness against torpor.
I do not think that literary images, or images that have direct or metaphorical meaning, are the relevant means of communication between the artist of the new vision and the lay public. Words, concepts and images are related to one another, but the silences behind the resonant forms have their flow mainly in ideogramatic images. The evidence of Einstein that he saw his concepts first ill images, and the frequent reliance of children on images rather than thoughts, confirms the hypothesis that often "image precedes idea." Thus the primitivist idea of the heart bursting has been clearly pictured in the image of the lover seated in the heart with sunflowers bursting on all sides (fig. 25).
To sum up, I believe that multifarious energies of form, colour and line are stored up in the memory. These are called forth when the lively bird of memory flies off, recognizing a tone in the flourish of the brash, the suggestion of music in a line, the echo of emotion from somewhere in the mysterious inner life of man, and a total concept in the composition. When the memory bird thus flies off, the whole personality is enriched with a subtle appreciation of nuances. But it is obliged to plunge into the source of all sources, into the jungle of the unconscious, indicated by the Tantra, where lie the deepest memories, tinged with satisfactions or dissatisfactions. There in the unconscious are rooted the inchoate urges of formless aspirations; there exist the thwarted loves and the hitherto unsatisfied cravings of the instinct for the most variegated flavours and the reservoir of harmonious and discordant images, as deeper reflections of the world of daily experience.13
25. Primitivist idea of heart bursting.
Actually, in spite of the miracles of human evolution, the bird of memory has a difficult task to perform because its immediate connection seems to be with that primitive portion of the brain, the thalamus, which is not as developed as the cerebral cortex above or the lumbar ganglion below. The bird of memory cannot, therefore, fly too far beyond the course of its ascent across millions of images before it is thrown off its course by a danger signal from the thalamus, which is curiously shaped, somewhat like an inverted question mark.
3: The Thalamus Bird
26. Brahmin with tuftknot.
THE QUESTION-mark bird of the primitive thalamus1 is always ready to ask "What?" "Why?" "How?" about the images recalled by the bird of memory. The quest ion-mark bird is fairly ill-equipped to do much more than confront the picture in this manner. Of course, the confrontation is not simple because the act of asking "What?" introduces other queries: "Is it this or that? Is it a structure or composition of some kind? And is it capable of arousing some emotion?"
Unable to absorb the work of art, the thalamus, however, serves a useful function in asking the first elementary questions. Young people, in whom the thalamus is strong, are really very inq
uisitive. They ask for explanations. But they are impatient and turn away, presuming they will never understand or know. I would like to call the questioning thalamus bird the tuftknot bird, because the Hindu Brahmin's chutia often looks like a question mark projected above the head (Fig. 26).
Apart from its impatient stance, the question-mark bird has this merit—that it makes possible the attempt to understand, even though most people only pose the question and turn away without waiting for the answer.2
I am inclined to think that the way in which the thalamus sparks off and ignites the whole being makes its reactions like a flash in the dark. In any case, its instantaneous response is based on the instinctive behaviour of our animal ancestors.3 And, in so far as it sets fire to the personality, it is often the inspirational centre of curiosity, for both the artist and the scientist, in asking the question, it makes the choice between what the object is and what it might be, and so it sometimes supplies a hunch about the answer, though most people seldom go beyond that hunch.
Although it asks fundamental questions, the thalamus bird is not to be mixed up with the bird of reason, about which we will speak later. As science has revealed, the massive cerebral cortex, which is the seat of reason, is a comparatively late evolutionary development.4 Only during the last half million or so years of its growth has the brain become the extraordinarily complex organ it is, able to manipulate concepts into patterns or abstract thought, integrate things recalled from the past, project them into the future by relating them to other things and help the imagination to build up new worlds of suggestions, symbols and ideas.
Seven Little-Known Birds of the Inner Eye Page 5