The Act of Creation (54 page)

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
and 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.