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

1970

1970 30 January All around my heart The coronary fingers Gripping me too tight. From my bed window Cars circulating in veins My body extended. From my bed window Branchings of sycamore trees Vessels of my blood. An example of the adaptation effect. The head end of the hospital bed rises and lowers mechanically. When it is lowered after having been raised for a while, the normal position no longer feels horizontal but as though the bed were tilting downward. A Catholic laboratory technician looking at a pot of red cyclamens on the windowsill of my hospital room exclaimed , "They arejust like the outpouring of the Holy Spirit!" Yes indeed, the "cloven tongues like as of fire" (Acts 2) on the heads of the twelve apostles, roughly the 127 number of the red, flamclike flowers in my pot. Once again I was reminded of the indispensable power of collective imagery, the symbols provided by a tradition shared by all. How almost beyond human power is any single artist's attempt to create such images all on his own! 13 February I have insisted that in a sensible taxonomy one should not classify by species but by properties. The question should not be, In which class does this kind of thing belong? but, What properties is it made of? Librarians face the insoluble task of where to shelve a book, say, by a psychologist analyzing the effects of furniture arrangement on the behavior of the users. A reasonable catalog would list it under several components: the psychological, the architectural , the sociological. But only King Solomon could decide where to shelve that one book itself. Goethe on architecture: "Mag man doch immer Fehler begehen, bauen darf man keine" (Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre ).* 26 February Age is not a causative agent and, in fact, not a property of any existing entity at all but simply a yardstick for the length of time a process has been going on. Age is no more guilty of the predicamentsof the late years than is the clock on the wall. 1 March To a melancholy mind, things that belong together come apart. Georg Biichner in his play Dantons Tod has his lan- * "Mistakes are permissible, but one must not build any." 128 PARABLES OF SUN LIGHT guid hero complain about the double-dealings of symmetry . Danton resents the boredom of doing the same things again and again every day: "It is very sad that, in addition, we consist of two halves, which do both the same, so that everything happens twice" (act 2, sc. 1). 6 March Any notation for the temporal media of art can serve two different purposes. By simply preserving and reconstructing the static elements of a performance, it can indirectly define the actions in time of which the work consists. Musical notation, for example, lists the tones following one another and thereby shows the beginning and end of each up-and-down movement of pitch. Dance notation also, as far as I know, gives the fixed body positions indicating the beginning and end of each movement and thereby implies the motions to be executed. In architecture one can similarly describe the sequence of sights experienced when someone walks through buildings or a landscape or urban environment. If, however, one wishes to go beyond these static markers to describe the perceived dynamics of the time events, one needs notational signs similar to the crescendo and decrescendo indicators in musical scores. In architecture, this calls for concepts such as narrowing and widening, sudden or gradual change, continuity and discontinuity, etc. The theological question of how an imperfect world could be created by a perfect god is turned around when one asks how the imperfect mind of an artist can createa perfect work. 9 March While in the hospital, I wondered how long it would take me to lose my usual response to the telephone bell, its alarming appeal, the pleasure of being called upon. Two 129 1970 weeks of time were insufficient. Whenever the phone rang at the nurses' desk near my room, I felt the usual shock, the signal to dash to the receiver. In fact, as I came closer to being released, a returning sense of "being back in circulation" made me feel even more promptly that the bell of life was tolling for me. W March Writers are by no means tied to linear thinking. Michel Butor, who cultivates simultaneity, flash...