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

1985

1985 11 January When the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies was founded at Harvard in 1974, we dreamed of an integrated course of studies that would introduce undergraduates to the visual aspects of our world as a whole. Painting, graphics, and sculpture were to be taught as reflections of social and individual life, as ways of understanding the world. This meant bridging the gaps between the fine and the applied arts and viewing them in the context of architecture and landscaping. It meant exploring the visual aspects of knowledge and thought and the similarities and differences of art and science . It also meant recognizing functional objects as carriers of meaningful expression and understanding, and paintings and sculptures as objects designed for enlightenment and deepened awareness. The history of art and architecture was to be taught as the social, political, and cultural history of the world manifested in its visual creations . This educational approach was intended to be more than the usual art department and the opposite of vocational training in the arts. It called for teachers with a wide-angle conception of their task and for students understanding the need for a broad synoptic foundation 341 as the basis for their particularfuture profession. It was a dream, but one worth recording. 12 January There is art for art's sake and art for English departments. In the latter category are works with provocative subject matter, preferably Surrealist, without much pictorial imagination but with lots of lack of obvious meaning. Karl Kraus called it "Auf einer Glatze Locken drehen."* 19 March After spending the morning on cleaning the house, she bicycled to the art school to model. At five dollars an hour, frozen into the beauty of a goddess, shejoined the timelessness of the Greek marbles while watching the clock surreptitiously. 21 March To celebrate the three-hundredth anniversary of Bach's birth, a local church hosted a twenty-four-hour-long nonstop performance of his organ works, thereby desecrating the church, the composer, and the spirit of music in one sweeping demonstration of the deplorable fact that in our country quantity is still considered the safest measure of quality. 5 April The airplanetrip to the South took less than three hours, but the cultural difference was marked. When I asked the hostess of the breakfast room whether they had a nonsmoking section, she said reassuringly, "No, we don't. * "Using curlers on a bald pate." 342 PARABLES OF SUN LIGHT You can smoke anywhere you please!" And when I explained , she repeated, a shade more coolly, "No, we don't. Here you can smoke anyplace." Semantically the meaning of "you" had shifted from me to the more acceptable rest of humanity. 10 April A first acquaintance with Jane Austen and her Prideand Prejudice introduced me to a society in which people are concerned entirely with each other's character and behavior . They have no true occupation other than that of dealing with one another, no further task in life. Those private struggles of the leisure class continue in the later novels of the century but apply by then more often to men and women concerned with their missions and ambitions and coping with their chores. Think of Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, or Zola. Austen's book also reminded me again of how difficult it has become for us to see the novelists of those years as "realists." Her characters are walking concepts, highly stylized abstractions, which nevertheless come to life. She is much closer to the authors of Les Liaisons dangereuses and La Princesse de Cleves, much closer to Stendhal than to Dickens. 25 April In Indian sculpture the sensuous women's heads and limbs and the sections of their torsos tilt and bend to indicate their ardent pursuit of action and passion. Only the balls of their breasts, like all spheres, are exempt from oblique distraction. With the immobile stare of a hypnotist their nipples fixate the viewer, summoning and captivating him but also keeping him sternly at his distance. By 1877 the coming and going in the city streets of Impressionist painting is uncomfortable enough for a painter like Gustave Caillebotte to make him stabilize his Parisian 343 1985 scene with the stark axis of a green lantern in the very middle of his large painting Place de I'Europe on a Rainy Day. Also the wedge-shaped apartment block in the background faces us head...