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

1973

1973 24 January In a film about the early nineteenth century a stagecoach traveling along a country road was photographed from an airplane. The anachronism might not have been noticeable , had it not been for the characteristicswaying and sweeping of the plane's motion, which transformed the neutrally recording camera into an individual observer— an out-of-place member of the cast. The churches and the English departments are converting to a cult of the movies. Considering how little of general interest some of them were doing before, this may be just as well. Some philosophers and art historians are tempted to do the same, and for the same reason. 30 January We have barely recovered from Jung's archetypes, only to have our good sense attacked by Chomsky's linguists asserting that the structures of language are inherent in the human germ plasm. Instead of acknowledging that the world of experience around us has a structure of its own, 167 we prefer to take the easy way out by calling that observed structure a piece of inbuilt equipment. 31 January An identical mechanism seems to operate in two totally different realms of human behavior. I have shown that the literary metaphor brings about the union of two incompatible images by raising the statement to a level of abstraction that draws out their common elements. The same is true for stereoscopy in vision. The two images fuse by what they have in common, thereby rising from flatnessto three-dimensionality. 9 February Thinking back to what pictures there were in my parents' living room, I remember Rembrandt's painting of the Mennonite preacher Anslo comforting a widow (in the Berlin Museum) and a Madonna Enthroned by Andrea del Sarto. Such was the secularization of religious art and of families like ours that only now, half a century later, I notice for the first time the curious disparity between the Christian art on the walls and the Jewish background of my family. Freethinking though my father was, he might have felt uncomfortable if someone had made him aware of the discrepancy. What these paintings meant to us, I can hardly tell: the kindly, dignified face of the preacher, the ideal beauty of the Virgin, the middle-class cultural devotion to traditional art—all of this was, I am sure, almost subliminal. Like all good servants, the pictures performed their duties inconspicuously. In the work of his last five years or so, the sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck tended to omit the arms of his figures. He amputated them from their torsos or hid much of them. The arms of a sculptural figure are like the subplots of the drama. They expand and ramify the principal 168 PARABLES OF SUN LIGHT theme embodied in the compact trunk or oppose that main theme by the counterpoint of secondary action. Perhaps in those last years Lehmbruck could no longer tolerate such interaction with externals. In a bust of a brooding thinker, a bent hand, devoid of arm, presses against the chest as though the incubus had to be defined as residing within the mind, not attacking it from the outside. 12 February Our belief in immortality is supported by the uniqueness of the individual: so special and irreplaceable a person, we say, could not disappear without leaving a hole in our world; and, in fact, people continue to remain in memory in direct relation to how special they were. Actually, however, in a broader sense the opposite also is true. It is the generality of nature that counteracts the coming and going of time. There will always be summer and winter, dogs and trees, love and despair, so that in spite of the turnover everything essential remains. If the world consisted only of differences, nothing would last but change. Notice here how much we are inclined to understand existence as essence. Anything that possesses essence claims existence, and nothing devoid of essence can be said to be. 9 March Some particulars are so loaded with universality that they clamor to be used as metaphors. Jean-Louis Barrault says in a book of his that it is impossible to fry an egg properly . The yolk requires more heat than the white. How true for situations where the whole is hard to deal with because different parts call for different treatment. 12 April In the silence of early morning, a few minutes before I have to get...