The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  Taste and Distaste

  This brings us to a subject which I have not mentioned so far, although it used to play an important part in aesthetic theories of the hedonistic type, and was a wonderful source of confusion: I mean the polarity of agreeable and disagreeable, attractive and repellent sense-impressions.

  The first necessity, if we wish to avoid similar confusion, is to make a clear distinction between tastes and distastes directly affecting the senses (the tongue, the nose, the ear); and the pleasure-unpleasure tone of complex emotional states mediated by the autonomous nervous system. The distinction may seem pedantic, and a sharp line cannot always be drawn, because the different levels in the nervous system interact with each other; the palate can be 'educated' to delight in rotten Chinese eggs, and the smell of honeysuckle can become nauseating to the rejected lover. Whether the selective codes which govern our spontaneous reactions of taste and distaste are inborn or acquired in early childhood is irrelevant in this context; and the fact that these reactions can be altered in later life does not affect the argument. What matters is to distinguish between the aesthetic experience -- or the experience of beauty if you like -- on the one hand, and sensory gratification on the other; and to get away from such definitions as the "Concise Oxford's" of beauty: 'Combination of qualities . . . that delights the sight; combined qualities delighting the other senses', etc. Evidently, by these criteria not only Grünewald, but the vast majority of works of art would be beyond the pale of beauty and could never give rise to aesthetic experience -- defined by the "Concise Oxford Dictionary" as 'the appreciation of the beautiful'.

  I do not mean to flog the dead horse of hedonist aesthetics but to emphasize the difference between sensory gratification and aesthetic satisfaction -- a difference of levels deriving from the hierarchic organization of the nervous system (Chapter XIII and Book Two). Take an obvious example from music. Periodic sounds -- musical tones -- are more pleasing to the ear than a-periodic noises; and some screeching noises -- rubbing a blackboard with a dry sponge for instance -- are so offensive that they give gooseflesh to some people. Again, among musical chords, the octave, fifth, and major third are more agreeable to the European ear than others; and some dissonances, heard in isolation, can put one on edge. But the flattery or offensiveness of individual chords has only an indirect bearing on the emotional effect of a string quartet as a whole. There is no numerical relation between the number of consonances and our aesthetic appreciation. The pattern of alternation between sweet and bitter sounds is merely one among several relevant patterns interacting with each other in the multi-dimensional experience.

  Sensory preferences -- the discrimination between sensory stimulations which 'agree', and those which 'disagree' with our innate or acquired dispositions -- do not provide the clue to the nature of aesthetic experience, but they provide one of the clues: particularly those preferences which are part of the human heritage, and shared by all. The Chinese taste for music differs from ours considerably; but all men are subject to the pull of gravity and prefer keeping their balance to losing it. A leaning tower, or a big head on a thin neck give rise to disagreeable sensations mediated by projective empathy (p. 296). But this again is only part of the story. Inverted, topheavy, disturbing forms may combine in the picture with forms in repose, creating a total pattern with a balance of a higher order -- in which the parts with positive and negative balance play the same role as consonant and dissonant chords, or beats and missed beats in a metric stanza.

  One of the most haunting pictures in this particular respect is Pollaiulo's 'Martyrdom of St. Sebastian' (in the London National Gallery). The saint stands with his naked feet on the sawn-off stumps ot two branches of a dead tree, his hands tied behind his back, looking as if he were bound to topple over any moment. He is held up by another, hardly visible, branch of a tree which rises behind him, and to which his hands are presumably tied; but even so he is bound to fall. What prevents him, in the beholder's eye, from falling is a trick in the composition of the picture: the figure of the saint forms the apex of a solid, well-balanced triangle. The sides of the triangle are six figures in symmetrical poses, performing symmetrical gestures. The imbalance of the part is redeemed by the balance of the whole, by the triangle which lends unity to diversity. The fact that the figures are the saint's executioners, shooting their murderous arrows into him, belongs to a different level of awareness.

  Empathy projects our own dynamic experiences of gravity, balance, stress, and striving into the pigment on the canvas representing human figures or inert shapes. Thus vertical and horizontal lines acquire a special eminence; a vertical line looks longer than a tilted line of the same length, and right angles are so much singled out, that an angle of, say, ninety-five degrees is seen as an imperfect, 'bad' angle of ninety degrees. Patients with brain lesions sometimes give freer rein than normal people to the hedonistic bias of their eyes, and do not notice deviations up to ten degrees from the horizontal or vertical. They indulge in 'wishful seeing' as others in wishful thinking. And to a lesser extent that is true of all of us. Goethe knew that after-images which appear on the retina tend to reduce irregularities and asymmetries, and to transform squares into circles. The Gestalt school has shown that the raw material of the visual input is subjected to yet other kinds of processing than those I have mentioned: the 'closure principle' makes us automatically fill in the gaps in a broken outline; Prägnanz (conciseness), 'good continuation', symmetry, simplicity are further built-in criteria of excellence which prejudice our perceptions. But once again, it can hardly be maintained that the delights of looking at a perfect circle with a closed circumference, and the disgust with circles marred by a bulge, enter directly into the aesthetic experience. If that were the case, the perfect picture would be a perfect circle with a vertical and a horizontal line intersecting in its centre; all hedonistic principles and Gestalt-criteria would be satisfied by it. The innate bias in our taste-buds in favour of sweet compared with acid stimuli is a fact which every theory of culinary aesthetics must take into account; but it does not make syrup the ideal of culinary perfection. Symmetry and asymmetry, closure and gap, continuity and contrast, must combine, like consonances and dissonances, into a pattern on a higher level of the perceptual hierarchy -- as far removed from Freud's pleasure-principle as from the Oxford Dictionary's definition of beauty.

  Motion and Rest

  That pattern is in fact our old friend, unity-in-diversity; or rather unity implied in diversity, for here the 'law of infolding' asserts itself with a vengeance. If a work of art strikes one as hopelessly dated, it is not because its particular idiom dates from a remote period, but because it is spelt out in a too obvious, explicit manner. The Laocoon group is more dated than the archaic Appollo of Tenea in spite of the vastly superior representational skill of the Hellenistic period -- which the sculptor displays with such self-defeating ostentation. Pollaiulo's delight in the recently discovered laws of perspective, and the resulting over-emphasis on geometrical structure has a somewhat chilling effect; the same could be said of Ucello's 'The Rout of San Romano'. Again (as Eric Newton has pointed out), the triangular scaffolding in Raphael's treatment of the Madonna and Child theme is a shade too obvious. To discover the principle of unity hidden in variety must be left to the beholder's imagination. Leonardo has given a 'formula' how to draw trees: if you draw a circle round the crown of a tree, the sections of all the twigs must add up to the thickness of the stem; the bigger the radius of the circle, the more twigs it will cut, but because the sections get thinner, the result is the same. Though the law is not exact, it holds the secret which lends unity to the tree drawn in its full foliage, and implied symmetry to its irregularly shaped branches and twigs.

  Unity-in-variety can be debased to a formula: the portrait painter drawing his oval and dividing it into the length of four noses; it can also be a peephole to eternity. 'Motion or change,' wrote Emerson, 'and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion an
d Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the surface of a brook, admits us to the secrets of the mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the simpler shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at last at the most complex form; and yet so poor is nature with all her craft, that, from the beginning to the end of the universe, she has but one stuff -- but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up her dream-like variety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties.'

  I owe this quotation from Emerson's essay on 'Nature' to G. Kepes' The New Landscape -- one of the most remarkable books on art in recent years. It opens up a world as unattainable to the limited range of our senses -- the 'narrow biological filter of perception' -- as light and colour are unattainable to the blind. 'Of the total stimuli flooding the world with potential messages, the visible and andible ranges accessible to our bodies represent a tiny segment.' [1] But it has now become possible to decipher these signals and bring their message into visible focus by instruments which expand and compress events in time, penetrate space near to the border where granules of matter are revealed as patterns of concentrated energy, and enable the eye to see 'in terms of' ultra-violet and infra-red radiations. All of us have seen an occasional photograph of a spiral nebula or a snow-crystal, but these are like early daguerreotypes compared with the new landscapes seen through the electron-microscope. They show the ultra-structure of the world -- electric discharges in a high voltage arc which look like the most elaborate Brussels lace, smoke molecules of magnesium oxide like a composition by Mondrian, nerve-synapses inside a muscle suspended like algae, phantom-figures of swirling heated air, ink molecules travelling through water, crystals like Persian carpets, and ghostly mountains inside the micro-structure of pure Hafnium, like an illustration to Dante's Purgatorio. What strikes one is that these landscapes, drawn as it were in invisible ink, possess great intrinsic beauty of form. The aesthetic experience derived from them seems to be directly related to what Emerson called the first and second secrets of nature: 'Motion or change, and identity or rest' -- and also to the fact that' the universe is made of only one stuff with a finite set of basic geometrical patterns in an infinite number of dynamic variations.

  'There are two basic morphological archetypes,' wrote Kepes, 'expression of order, coherence, discipline, stability on the one hand; expression of chaos, movement, vitality, change on the other. Common to the morphology of outer and inner processes, these are basic polarities recurring in physical phenomena, in the organic world and in human experience.' They are 'the dynamic substance of our universe, written in every corner of nature'. . . . 'Wherever we look, we find configurations that are either to be understood as patterns of order, of closure, of a tendency towards a centre, cohesion and balance, or as patterns of mobility, freedom, change, or opening. We recognize them in every visible pattern; we respond to their expression in nature's configurations and in human utterances, gestures, and acts. Cosmos and chaos . . . the Apollonian spirit of measure and the Dionysian principle of chaotic life, organization and randomness, stasis and kinesis . . . all these are different aspects of the same polarity of configuration.' [2]

  Thus the cliché about unity-in-variety represents one of the most powerful archetypes of human experience -- cosmos arising out of chaos. We have seen it at work in the scientist's search for universal law; and when we see it reflected in a work of art, or in any corner of nature, however indirectly, we catch a faint echo of it.

  Ascending Gradients

  When I compared the landscape of the smoke micrograph to a Mondrian composition, I was not merely indulging the metaphoric consciousness; for another strange thing about these shapes not meant for the human eye is that they all look like something else. But not in the same way as the ink-blot which serves as a passive receptacle for our projections; they are so precise and well-defined that they seem to ask for an equally definite meaning. The electric discharge does look unmistakably like lace-work, the various unexpected shapes which a water-drop assumes during its fall through the air look unequivocally like a chain of semi-precious stones; and when no concrete interpretation presents itself, some painter's work comes to mind. To be told that the Brussels lace is actually the 'portrait of an alternating current reversing its direction a hundred and twenty times per second' provides an additional shock: the sudden substitution of a new matrix, a different contact-lens has the effect of a sudden illumination. The sparkling electric discharge still looks like lacework, and the Hafnium crystal still looks like a mountain in Hades, but the original interpretation has now become a metaphor, which supplies an additional dimension, and feeds more calories to the experience.

  The mind is insatiable for meaning, drawn from, or projected into, the world of appearances, for unearthing hidden analogies which connect the unknown with the familiar, and show the familiar in an unexpected light. It weaves the raw material of experience into patterns, and connects them with other patterns; the fact that something reminds me of something else can itself become a potent source of emotion. Girls fall in love with men who remind them of father; men get infatuated with a reflection of Botticelli in a vacuous profile; every face is a palimpsest. The willow's shoulders droop, limp like a mourning widow's; the ripples on the lake reflect the Pythagorean harmonies; the whirlpool on the surface of the brook 'admits us to the mechanics of the sky'. When a painting is said to represent nothing but 'significant form' -- to carry no meaning, no associative connections, no reference to anything beyond itself -- we can be confident that the speaker does not know what he is talking about. Neither the artist, nor the beholder of his work, can slice his mind into sections, separate sensation from perception, perception from meaning, sign from symbol.

  The difficulty of analysing the aesthetic experience is not due to its irreducible quality, but to the wealth, the unconscious and non-verbal character of the matrices which interlace in it, along ascending gradients in various dimensions. Whether the gradient is as steep and dramatic as in a Grünewald or El Greco, or gently ascending through green pastures, it always points towards a peak -- not of technical perfection, but of some archetypal form of experience. We thus arrive at the same conclusion as in our discussion of literature: a work of art is always transparent to some dim outline of ultimate experience -- even if it is no more than the indirect reflection of a reflection, the echo of an echo. Those among the great painters who had a taste for verbal theorizing, and the articulateness of translating their vision into words, almost invariably evoked absolutes and ultimates -- the tragedy, or glory of man's condition, the wrath or mercy of divinity, the universal laws of form and colour harmony, the norms of beauty hidden in the mysteries of the golden section or anchored in Euclid's anxioms. 'Everything has two aspects,' wrote Chirico, 'the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction. A work of art must narrate something that does not appear within its outline.'

  Regardless of the site we choose for our excavation, we shall always hit at the same ancient underground river which feeds the springs of all art and discovery.

  Summary

  The aesthetic experience aroused by a work of art is derived from a series of bisociative processes which happen virtually at once and cannot be rendered in verbal language without suffering impoverishment and distortion. At the base of the series we once more find illusion. But 'life-likeness' is a matter of interpretation, dependent on the limitations of the medium and the prejudices of vision. Perception is loaded with unconscious inferences, from the visual constancies, through spacial projection, empathy, and synesthesia, to the projection of meanirtg into the Rohrschach blot, and the assigning of purpose and function to the human shape. The artist exploits
these unconscious processes by the added twists of perspective, rhythm and balance, contrast, 'tactile values', etc. The conventions of a period or school lend coherence to its vision, but also tend to crystallize -- as in all domains of science and art -- into fixed 'rules of the game': into formulae, stereotypes, visual clichés; these may be so firmly established that the artist becomes snowblind to aspects of reality which do not fit into them. The originality of genius, here as elsewhere, consists in shifts of attention to aspects previously ignored; in seeing appearances in a new light; in discovering new relations and correspondences between motif and medium.

  Tastes and distastes on the sensory level play, like consonances and dissonances, only a subordinate role in the aesthetic experience, as one among many patterns of unity-in-variety. The pre-condition of the experience to occur is once more that the emotive potentials of the matrices participating in it should form an ascending gradient, and provide a hint, however tentative or teasing, of some hidden reality in the play of forms and colours.

  XXIII