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

1980

1980 12 March Nothing more ghostly could happen than if an animal suddenly showed a smile on its face. It would indicate that a human mind had been lurking in the creature, with the whole arsenal of irony, judgment, and the awareness of our frailties. We have long suspected that the cat is judging us. Its smile would be the terrifying proof. Think also of the opposite case of persons without facial expression , like the dwarf in The Tin Drum. There, terror is produced by a body deserted by its soul. 15 April The particular blend of heaviness and lightness in Mies van der Rohe's architecture shows in the I beams he likes to use as supports of his buildings and to attach to his faqades . Seen from in front, the I beams look massive and powerful, but from the side the hollow channel framed by narrow edges looks almost delicate. 4 May Even the deepest tragedy looks inadequate when watched from a sufficient distance. We can smile at Madame Bo257 vary when she is upset by the loss of Leon, her miserable little clerk. But only God can smile at Oedipus and Hamlet. 5 May The question is not, Why did Cezanne not use correct perspective? but, Why should he have? The tradition of naturalistic representation has made us forget that every pictorial device calls for justification—including the conformation to nature. 14 May When the psychologist John M. Kennedy shows that the blind have no difficulty using lines to depict objects in drawing, he confirms my conviction that lines are not discovered in the visual world and then copied in drawing . Lines are all but nonexistent in the visual world, nor do they occur in the world of touch. Rather, they translate into a two-dimensional language the surfaces of the objects in the three-dimensional world of sight and touch. The fact that the blind use contours is no more surprising than that the sighted do, nor is it less so. 3 June Is it she breathing Or are the waves of the lake Moving in the dark? WJune When I was modeling a small female figure, I found that it needed some kind of a spiral wrapping around it as a counterpoint to the symmetry of the body. I tried a garment but was distracted by its hanging. The shape I needed required the firmness of a snake—and so I found 258 PARABLES OF SUN LIGHT myself modeling an Eve! I am not suggesting that the ancient myths invented their images to accommodate their arts, but there surely exists an interplay between the themes picked by artists from the ancient stories and the morphology of body stances on which sculptors and painters depend. The Venus pudica, for example, is a study in the counterpoint between body and arm. 12June For the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, antiquity lay at a remote distance in time, no more connected by a workable bridge than was our own distance from the moon before we first set foot on it. There was no sense of the continuity of history. A similar lack of continuity existed in a different area, the depth dimension of painted space. But the gap between foreground action and background landscape was most conspicuously overcome by central perspective already in the fifteenth century. 13June When one opens the door for the cat, the animal stops precariously between in and out, surveying the prospect before submitting to it. This intelligent circumspection compares favorably with the rashness of our own exits and entries. 20 July It may take a Frenchman to impose with impunity the strict logic of the mind upon the raw material of experience . German literature is better off when it is composed with a rich looseness, a kind of uninhibited effluence. The free rhythms of Holderlin's poetry surpass his early rhymed poems, and although Goethe constructed the Wahlverwandtschaften like a magnificent piece of engineering , that novel is less German than the crowded medita259 1980 tions of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. Durer loses his exuberance when he tries to compose in the Italian manner. Most recently, Giinter Grass in his giant novel Der Butt has the seven deadly sins gush forth with an authenticity that rivals Grimmelshausen's great chronicle of the Thirty Years' War. But when Grass tries to tie all this luxuriance together by collapsing whole galleries of historical figures into...