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

1984

\2 February When they passed each other under the trees of the fogged-in park, the old gentleman said to Mary, "Kind of a misdeal morning, isn't it?" 14 February On the rug in the middle of the large basement room there stands all by itself a garden chair, arousing a surrealist shiver. Ready to receive the sitter with open arms, the chair seems pathetically blind to the emptiness around it. Since it is deprived of its function, it displays the expression of its gesture all the more clearly, like an abandoned woman unaware of her loss. 25 February A fable for adjustment psychologists. There once was a professor who also played the violin but so badly out of tune that he sometimes was half a tone off. No accompanist could put up with him. Then one day he found that one of his students would modulate on the piano to the 1984 325 key to which he happened to have shifted—a welladjusted player! Susanne Langer begins her chapter on music in Philosophy in a New Key with the assertion that a Greek vase is a work of art whereas a handmade bean pot is only an artifact , albeit it may have "a good shape." And Nikolaus Pevsner starts his book on European architecture with the sentence: "A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture." This is ostensibly so because only the latter is designed for "aesthetic appeal." My own conviction has always been that unless you recognize aesthetic expression in all good form, simple or complex, natural or man-made, intended or unintended to be art, you will never touch the root of art, which grows from the soil of universal perceptual expression. To look for the distinction between art and nonart is like seeking the cutoff point between plainness and beauty. At times, themes for notebook entries stand in line waiting to be used, and then again there are weeks and months without any such demand. I notice that when periods are meager, it is not because I lack ideas. The nourishing cues seem to be always around. What matters is the difference between times when I have, as it were, my tentacles out, and the ducts are open between observation and readiness to respond, and other times when I watch and learn and think without the response urging me to write. I suspect the same is true for "inspiration" quite in general. Experience lies patiently in wait until the poet puts up the sign Open For Business. As we stood admiring the amaryllis, a young woman, recently married, confessed that she felt the large size of the flower to be obscene. I retorted rashly that size did not matter, since, for example, the vaginal shape of an orchid remains the same, whether it is tiny or huge. And yet our friend was right, because it is only when the flower enters 326 PARABLES OF SUN LIGHT the size range of human shapes that it addresses us in a disturbingly private manner, remote from the neutral contemplation we can afford when the object is too small or too large. Something like this is true also for sculpture and painting. 29 February Our playing place was surrounded by a fence. Our parents had to pay for a key if we wanted permission to spend our days in the wildly overgrown park, which differed so abruptly from the big city surrounding it. The children who "belonged" were like a secret fraternity, distinct from the rest of the neighborhood. Leaving the daylight of the clean city streets, we entered the messy shadow under the old trees and made our way through the shrubbery on narrow "Indian" trails. Hidden in the thicket and accessible only to the more select children was the Temple of the Ants. The Temple of the Ants was a gazebo, of which nothing remained but the fluted columns on a cracked concrete floor. The wood of the columns , spotted with the leftovers of a red stain, was punctured and mined by wormholes. In and around the columns traveled the ants, exuding an invigorating alcoholic odor and crawling over us as we huddled on the floor. Our favorite game was "The Stonecutter's Family," our image of proletarian living, which let us indulge in the rough speech and the bad manners forbidden in our middle-class homes. For refreshment we...