Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour!
And the author of the Jonah story himself must have been aware of its vast implications, of the impossibility of treating all men who lead an ordinary life as harshly as Jonah -- for the story ends with an unusual act of clemency by the otherwise so vengeful desert-god, which comes as a curious anticlimax full of ironical tolerance for the inadequacy of man:
Then said the Lord. . . . And should I not spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand: and also much cattle?
The Root and the Flower
Just as there is no mythology without some mention of the death and rebirth motif; so there is hardly any epoch in world literature without some variation of it. Maud Bodkin [3] has made an exhaustive study of its occurrence in works as wide apart as "The Ancient Mariner," Morgan's "The Fountain," Eliot's "The Waste Land," and D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent and The Man Who Died. Even such an urbane novelist as E. M. Forster has in each of his five novels one central episode in which the hero or heroine, who previously walked with self-assurance on the smooth surface, seems to fall into a manhole with its lid off, and re-emerge as a changed character -- like Mrs. Moore, after her visit to the primeval Marabar caves. With the great Russian novelists, crisis and conversion is a central theme; in German literature one can trace it from Faust II to The Magic Mountain. It pops up in such unexpected places as The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, or the last page of To Have or Have Not; and it was elevated to a philosophy in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and in Sartre's existentialist credo: man is what he makes out of his anguish, he becomes 'free' through the realization of his nothingness.
Needless to say, not all great novels are -- or should be -- 'problem novels' aiming at us a constant heavy barrage of the tragic and the archetypal; if they were, literature would be very monotonous indeed. But indirectly and implicitly every great work of art has some bearing on man's ultimate problems. Yeats had a loathing for 'those learned men who are a terror to children and an ignominious sight in lovers' eyes'; because 'Art bids us to touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematical form, from every abstract thing.' And yet he knew better -- when, for instance, he evoked the purely sensual delight of Cleopatra dancing alone under her 'topless towers':
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child, That nobody looks: her feet Practise a tinker's shuffle Picked up on a street. Like a long-legged fly upon the stream Her mind moves upon silence.
The refrain, recurring after each of the three stanzas of the poem, connects (as the context clearly indicates) Cleopatra's meditations during her childish dance with the monumental archetype of the spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters.
A flower, even if it is only a daisy, must have a root; and a work of art, however gay, precious, or serene, is in the last instance fed, however indirectly, invisibly, through delicate capillary tubes, from the ancient substrata of experience. If it has a humorous message, it produces a smile -- a subdued laugh or sous-rire; if it is tragic, it produces a sous-pleurer, that rapt stillness and overflowing of emotion where, to quote Donne again, "with a strong, sober thirst, my soule attends."
The Tightrope
The ordinary mortal in our urban civilization moves virtually all his life on the Trivial Plane; only on a few dramatic occasions -- during the storms of puberty, when he is in love or in the presence of death -- does he fall suddenly through the manhole, and is transferred to the Tragic Plane. Then all at once the pursuits of his daily routines appear as shallow, trifling vanities; but once safely back on the Trivial Plane, he dismisses the realities of the other as the products of overstrung nerves or adolescent effusions. Sudden catastrophes -- famines, wars, and plagues -- may shift a whole population from the Trivial to the Tragic Plane; but they soon succeed in banalizing even tragedy itself, and carry on business as usual among the shambles. During the Spanish Civil War, one of my fellow prisoners, a youth condemned to death by shooting, and suffering from appendicitis, was put on a milk diet two days before his execution.
The force of habit, the grip of convention, hold us down on the Trivial Plane; we are unaware of our bondage because the bonds are invisible, their restraints acting below the level of awareness. They are the collective standards of value, codes of behaviour, matrices with built-in axioms, which determine the rules of the game, and make most of us run, most of the time, in the grooves of habit -- reducing us to the status of skilled automata which Behaviourism proclaims to be the only condition of man. What Bergson called 'the mechanical encrusted on the living' is the result of protracted confinement to the Trivial Plane.
But, glory be, man is not a flat-earth dweller all the time -- only most of the time. Like the universe in which he lives, he is in a state of continuous creation. The exploratory drive is as fundamental to his nature as the principle of parsimony which tends toward the automatization of skilled routines; his need for self-transcendence as basic as the necessity of self-assertion; lastly, we shall see that the reculer pour mieux sauter of the creative act itself has its evolutionary precedents in the phenomena of organic regeneration and in the 'original adaptations' of which animals are capable in a crisis.
Life on the Trivial Plane is a state of unnoticed confinement -- but also a condition of social and intellectual stability. The belly of the whale cannot be made into a permanent residence. Neither emotionally, nor intellectually, can we afford to live for more than brief transition periods on the Tragic Plane, surrounded by archetypes and Ultimates. Emotionally, it would mean the journey of no return of Blake -- or of the Yogi entering into final samadhi. Intellectually, it would mean the abdication of reason. For the entities encountered on that plane, the members of its matrix -- eternity, infinity, ultimate causes, archetypal paradoxes -- are irreducible absolutes which do not lend themselves to logical manipulation. They disrupt all rational operations, as the mathematical symbols for nought and the infinite do if introduced into a finite equation. Malraux's 'une vie ne vaut rien -- mais rien ne vaut une vie' is a perfect expression of this. The physicist can deal with infinite space in an abstract symbol-language, but in ordinary experience it is just the infinite, a thing that passeth understanding, and there the matter ends.
Absolutes are too inhuman and elusive to cope with, unless they are connected with some experience in the tangible world of the finite. In fact, eternity is a pretty meaningless notion -- unless it is made to look through the window of time. 'Immensity' is a bore -- unless it is 'cloystered in thy deare wombe'. The absolute becomes emotionally effective only if it is bisociated with something concrete -- dovetailed, as it were, into the familiar. The rain of manna on the children of Israel which lasted forty years was an act of incomprehensible divine largesse which, as we learn from Exodus, did not particularly impress them; the miracle of the loaves and fishes was a true miracle.
Where the Tragic and Trivial Planes meet, the Absolute becomes humanized, drawn into the orbit of man, while the banal objects of daily experience are transfigured, surrounded by a halo as it were. The meeting may have the majesty of an incarnation where the logos becomes flesh; or the charm of Krishna's descent to dally with the shepherdesses. On a less awe-impiring scale, the tragic and the trivial may meet in golden lads and chimney-sweeps; in the petrified boot which the Pompeian boot-mender holds in his petrified hand; in the slice of pig's kidney which Bloom fingers in his pocket during the funeral service. Laplace regarded it as the ultimate aim of science to demonstrate from a single grain of sand the 'mechanics of the whole universe'.
The locus in quo of human creativity is always on the line of intersection between two planes; and in the highest forms of creativity between the Tragic or Absolu
te, and the Trivial Plane. The scientist discovers the working of eternal laws in the ephemeral grain of sand, or in the contractions of a dead frog's leg hanging on a washing-line. The artist carves out the image of the god which he saw hidden in a piece of wood. The comedian discovers that he has known the god from a plum-tree.
This interlacing of the two planes is found in all great works of art, and at the origin of all great discoveries of science. The artist and scientist are condemned -- or privileged -- to walk on the line of intersection as on a tightrope. At his best moments, man is 'that great and true amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds'.
C. VISUAL GREATION
XXI
MOTIF AND MEDIUM
Looking at Nature
Kepler, contemplating a snow-crystal melting on his always sweaty palm, saw in it the harmony of the spheres reflected miniature. Let a less romantically disposed person look for the first time at a snowflake under a microscope: he will catch his breath and wax equally lyrical: 'How strange -- how beautiful -- how clever is nature', et cetera. Yet the symmetrical pattern of hexagons thus marvellously revealed, loses all its magic when drawn on a drawing-board. It becomes aesthetically neutral for lack of a second context -- the familiar sight of the feathery snowflake. It is the superimposition of the two matrices -- the trivial object revealing the mathematical regularity of its micro-cosmic architecture -- which creates the impact, and gives rise to the aesthetic experience.
Whether Odysseus saw in the sky at dawn 'rosy-fingered Athene lift her golden ray', or whether you share the sorrow of the weeping willow, there is inevitably a second frame of reference superimposed on the picture. Man always looks at nature through coloured glasses -- through mythological, anthropomorphic, or conceptual matrices -- even when he is not conscious of it and believes that he is engaged in 'pure vision', unsullied by any meaning. The 'innocent eye' is a fiction, based on the absurd notion that what we perceive in the present can be isolated in the mind from the influence of past experience. There is no perception of 'pure form' but meaning seeps in, and settles on the image (though the meaning need not be expressed in verbal language, about which more later).
The idea that looking at nature is self-rewarding, and that landscapes devoid of action can give rise to aesthetic experiences, is of relatively recent origin; so is landscape painting.* Dr. Johnson regarded mountains as 'rather uncouth objects'; in the literature of the eighteenth century precipices were branded as 'frowning' and 'horrid'. [1] The further we go back in time the less appreciation we find of the purely visual aspects of form and colour in inanimate nature:
Considering the bulk and value of Greek literature, and the artistic brilliance of Athens, the feeling for nature . . . was but poorly developed among a people whose achievement in the dramatic and sculptural arts has been unsurpassed; it is seriously lacking in Homer, even when he refers to the sea or to the famous garden of Alcinous, and it can hardly be said to enter Greek drama save in the Oedipus at Colonnus and in some of the lyrical choruses of Euripides. Indeed, the continent of nature had to wait for a thorough and minute exploration until the romantic movement of the nineteenth century: Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Goethe, first brought the ocean, the rivers, and the mountain ranges into their own. . . . For primitive man earth and sea are simply the perennial source of those material goods on which life depends, and mountain peaks are uninteresting and unattractive because they are barren and bleak (Listowel). [2]
The same could be said about the underprivileged classes and nations in our own time. The peasants in the alpine village where I live in summer never cease to marvel at the silliness of tourists who talk about the 'beauty' of the mountains -- which to them means so much timber, pasture, and hay. Travelling in India one is amazed by the indifference, even among the educated classes, towards landscape and scenery, birds and plants.
All this does not mean that earlier civilizations derived no emotional experiences from nature. But they were derived from different sources: the supernatural powers and magic forces which animated the visible world. The Babylonians populated the starry heavens with lions, virgins, and scorpions. The Sicilian straits were to the Greeks not a landscape but the seats of Scylla and Charybdis. To Homer, a storm at sea signified the anger of Poseidon; to Mr. Babitt it signifies the majesty of nature, a vaguely personalized Power manifested in the spectacle before his eyes. There is always a second matrix active behind, or superimposed upon, the visual appearance. The beholder may be convinced that he is simply perceiving images on his retina, but he is in fact perceiving with the whole of his brain; and what he sees is modified by the perceptual codes which operate in it, resonances of his racial and personal past, floating images of touch and smell, even kinesthetic sensations or incipient muscular stresses. When an appearance gives rise to an aesthetic experience, it always represents or symbolizes or expresses something behind and beyond its retinal image -- exactly as the pigment on a canvas always refers to something beyond its frame.
A human face is also an object of nature, a landscape of live tissue. To evoke aesthetic feeling, it must point at something beyond itself in the beholder's mind. The analogue of the snow-crystal is here that scaffolding of perfect symmetry and proportions, whose geometrical laws the painters of Greece and the Renaissance tirelessly pursued. The golden section and other basic proportions were thought to be the ultimate constituents of organic form -- as the Pythagorean scale of music was thought to regulate the heavenly motions, and as simple geometrical units, the architect's elementary 'modules', combined to make Gothic cathedrals. The philosophers of classicism, from Pliny to Leonardo and Dürer, saw beauty wherever mortal flesh testified to the immortal axioms of Euclidean geometry.
However, the ideal to which the bloated Venus of Willendoff testities with her pendulous breasts and enormous hips, is not Euclid, but the goddess of Fertility. Our whole manner of perceiving the human frame depends on our ideas about its purpose or function -- on the selective code which determines our criteria of significance and patterns our vision. I am using here the word 'function' in the dictionary sense, as referring to a 'mode of action by which [a thing] fulfils its purpose'. The definition, of course, takes it for granted that we know what the purpose of the thing in question is. Now if the thing is a railway engine, the answer is clear; but the purpose of the thing called a human body is open to various interpretations. And according to the interpretation of human purpose which we accept, our ideas will change, and our manner of seeing the human body in its functional aspect will change accordingly. In the drawings of some lunatics, adolescents, lavatory artists, and tribesmen, the dominant functional aspect is shown by a huge genital part, while the remainder of the body is only indicated by a sketchy outline. On Egyptian wall-paintings and reliefs, conventionalized and schematized figures are shown functioning as fishermen, hunters, builders, servants, or parts of a state procession. The size of the figures is usually proportionate to their rank -- not to bodily but to social stature; male skin is painted dark brown, female skin pale yellow; the code which provides the criteria of relevance is not visual but conceptual. For three thousand years the sculptors and painters of Egypt produced no original discoveries in the technique of visual representation. They had no visual curiosity. In its indifference to colour, movement, human anatomy, Egyptian painting was more single-mindedly functional than any before or after; but 'function' was defined as social function, a person's rank and occupation in the social hierarchy. Apart from that, individuals are interchangeable, without personal identity, and their appearance devoid of interest.
In the golden age of Greek art, the human body was seen in a totally different aspect, that of its physical function: in throwing a disc, tying a sandal, or simply lifting an arm; vision is attuned to geometrical proportion, to the play and co-ordination of muscles and joints; and by the criterion of a perfect physique, with facial expressions limited to typ
es, the curve of the buttocks becomes as important and expressive as the curve of the brow. Again, in Byzantine painting the human body functions as an indifferent, and often awkward, shell of the spirit; and if the spirit commands the saint to bend his head back and gaze rapturously into the sky, the artist has no qualms in breaking his neck and letting the body float upward with all limbs out of joint. The Renaissance once more gave the body its due; and in the centuries that followed it became the carrier of an individual head, and hence of an expression and mood. For the courtiers of Louis XV, the principal function of human bodies was to play, suitably covered and uncovered, hide-and-seek between trees and bosquets, and to fall into each other's arms. For the impressionist painter, the function of the body is to demonstrate the impermanence of appearances in the luminous blur of colours; for the cubist, to prove God's preference for cubes; and so on.
Which aspects of reality dominate the visual matrix of a culture or group depends ultimately on its conception of the purpose and meaning of existence. Accordingly, its norms of beauty will always reflect the archetype of some kind of functional perfection: the rigid dignity of Pharaoh, through whose eyes eternity looks in stony silence at time; the play of muscles in the Greek adolescent's perfect anatomy; the spirituality in the transfigured face of the Byzantine madonna; the harmonious resolution of the body into Euclidean forms, or a patchwork of coloured blobs. Whichever aspect is dominant, its matrix acts as a kind of optical polariscope, through which the particular appearance is seen as a thing of general significance, an embodiment of some universal law or meaning.
The Act of Creation Page 43