Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest

1966

1966 1 January There are reciprocal metaphors, where the two items reflect each other symmetrically, neither of them referring solely to the actual "reality" that is being metaphorized. When T. S. Eliot identifies the dove of peace with a divebomber , neither the Bible nor the battle prevails. When Henry Moore creates women that are mountains, his sculpture does not show a mountainlike woman as does Baudelaire's La Geante. Rather, by raising his image to the level of the common denominator, Moore synthesizes the feminine in the monumental with the monumental in the feminine. What results is a rarified abstraction that could qualify as a religious vision. 2 January The notion that the soul is separable from the body comes about because we do not usually know what is going on in the brain. In daily experience the mind labors and travels, leaps and connects, while the body may be all but motionless, like a container harboring a lively, fluttering thing. 87 8 January When I showed my students the recent reconstruction of the Laocoon statue, one of them remarked that the bending of the arms as now established has a bearing on the famous problem of the priest's half-open mouth. The father and the son's right arms, no longer freely stretched as they were in the faulty addition of the sixteenth century , express by their angled elbows a control similar to the one that keeps the mouth from screaming. 10 January If Ernest Fenollosa is correct in asserting that "in Chinese the proposition is frankly a verb" (by = "to cause"; to = "to fall forward"; in = "to remain; to dwell"), we should no longer be misled by our own languages to believe, as Freud still did in his discussion of dream symbols, that relational concepts cannot be expressed by images. Fenollosa makes his point also for conjunctions. Thus, if instead of saying, "She cleans the house because we are having guests," we say, "Her housecleaning serves to honor the guests," our speech is freed of its dry fillers; it dissolves entirely in the living medium of perceivable action . 17January Nothing, I said to myself while I was falling asleep, will have suggested the art of writing to ancient man so compellingly as the sight of the crescent moon, for nothing in nature resembles a written letter as closely as the elegant white sickle on an undisturbed ground. 3 February The film version of Laurence Olivier's Othello showed the actors so closely that I could analyze the facial gesture by 88 PARABLES OF SUN LIGHT which Frank Finlay as lago expressed villainy. He kept his mouth half open—not with the lower lip dropping loosely (as one would do to express a lack of intellectual discipline) but by retracting his lip tensely as though to withhold progress of action. There was alertness, lying in wait, holding back, which together with the vigilance of the glance conveyed scheming and dishonesty. Compare for contrast the open receptivity of the lips practiced as a sexual lure by young actresses and models. 22 February The closed and concentric stage of the Greek theater excludes time from the play. Oedipus's punishment does not follow his crime; it is implied from the beginning of the presentation. The frame of our modern stage offers instead a momentary unveiling of a story emerging from behind the scene and exiting into an invisible future on the other side. It therefore suits plays stressing the course of time. On our peephole stage, the mop-up of the characters at the end of a tragedy—which is a device of ancient drama—has the almost ludicrous quality of a total liquidation, leaving the future as empty as an express train at the end of its run. Instead, when the curtain falls, the play should be felt to continue. 12 April I was surprised to notice that Jerome, in the Vulgate, translates the petition for our daily bread in Matt. 6:11 as "Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie." The Greek original, it seems, has an adjective that can refer to what is beyond the substance but can also simply mean "what is needed." Even though in antiquity the demand for bread must have been intended literally, Jerome prefers a wording that transforms it into a eucharistic figure of speech. 89 1966 Light in my window As I look up from the street "I must be...