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

1982

1982 4 January When the alexandrine verse of the French poetic tradition breaks into two equal halves of three feet each, it creates a symmetry that blocks the continuity of the sequence. It endows the two halves with the same weight and the same function. The blank verse of the German classics reduces the six iambic feet to the odd number of five, which bridges the hole in the middle with a kind of keystone . Therefore the French verse stands heavily, like a symmetrical fagade, whereas the blank verse flows. Compare Racine—"Toy qui connois mon coeur depuis que je respire"—with Schiller—"Lebt wohl, ihr Berge, ihr geliebten Triften!"* It is not prudishness or lack of courage that makes a good film director avoid the explicit performance of physical acts such as sex or violence. Art calls for expression, not for documentation. The labor of the sexual act looks ridiculous or even incomprehensible; it recalls the saw of the carpenter or a power drill breaking up the pavement. * "You who have known my heart as long as I have breathed." "Farewell, you mountains, you beloved pastures." 281 By giving love the appearance of physical mechanics, a picture meets Henri Bergson's formula for the comic. A similar objection holds for violence and indeed for any purely physical occupation. An actor concentrating too much on the exact technical motions needed to pick a lock, prepare a meal, or perform an appendectomy may fail to transform a practical chore into symbolic expression , that is, into art. The invention of nuclear weapons has made war into a kamikaze action. You can kill your neighbor only by killing yourself. WJanuary If beauty is understood as the means of displaying an artistic statement clearly and powerfully, it is in fact an ethical quality, and Plato did well not to distinguish it in principle from the moral good. 15 January Physicists speak of "conditional elementarily" to indicate the level at which, for the purpose of a given discourse, they are willing to treat a phenomenon as not further divisible . In the arts also, the level of abstraction in an artist 's style determines whether a figure is presented as an elementary unit or a complex of interacting forces. In a medieval mystery play or even in a Boccaccio story, each character stands for a single attitude. Compare this with what happens to the miser or lover or murderer in the psychological novel of the nineteenth century. Or think of the hierarchy of divisibility in a play, where subsidiary figures behave like elementary particles whereas the principal characters unfold a whole range of impulses. 18 January "Painterly" paintings used in windows look like projected lantern slides, not like stained glass. This is so because in 282 PARABLES OF SUN LIGHT true stained glass every unit of the composition must look itself like a little window, charged with the function of letting the light pass and modifying it in the process. 1 February A handshake feels limp, almost nonexistent, in a dream. So does most, and perhaps all, touch. Is it that dreams are sustained by vision and hearing only and fail to reproduce the sensations of the other senses? 6 February In the past, writers of theory did not hesitate to invent emblematic characters as carriers of concepts. Thus Lessing , at the beginning of the Laocoon, presents the amateur , the philosopher, and the art critic in a "historical" sequence. This device affects the argument with a touch of fraudulent authenticity, unless we understand that we are reading parables. Even in our own time, my teachers in psychology enjoyed inventing dialogues and episodes without indicating explicitly when they were reporting facts and when they were telling stories. By no means did this "falsify the data." It turned systems of ideas into scenarios. 12 February The cat Toby fills a gap in our domestic conversation. Embarrassing though it may be to confess it, one of us has him speak in a squeaky voice and the other answers. In these utterances he displays a distinct personality of his own, a brash and blunt expression of complaints and selfish demands. It is a mood lacking other-wise in our behavior and giving voice perhaps to what otherwise would remain unsaid. Lessing predicting Heidegger: "Aus ein paar angenommenen Worterklarungen in der schonsten Ordnung alles, 283 1982 was wir nur wollen, herzuleiten, darauf verstehen wir uns, trotz einer Nation in...