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

1975

1975 1 January In the portrait sketches drawn by artists at court trials the defendants and accusers look disturbingly private, like the neighbors next door. This is so because as parties to a legal case they have a claim to public appearance only as embodiments, types of evil or violence, madness or scornful justice. The only court artist I can remember succeeding in revealing the public symbol in the private triviality was David Low, in his depictions of the Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg trials. 2 January The most astonishing thing about dreams is that they contain surprises. While you are driving along the road, you are suddenly faced with a steep incline, and you decide to turn back. To make something happen and then be surprised by it—this means that there are two independent agencies at work, one that thinks up the story and another that is faced by it. 189 12 January "Car I'homme de genie ne peut donner naissance a des oeuvres qui ne mourront pas qu'en les creant a 1'image non de 1'etre mortel qu'il est, mais de 1'exemplaire d'humanite qu'il porte en lui. Ses pensees lui sont, en quelque sorte, pretees pendant sa vie, dont elles sont les compagnes . A sa mort, elles font retour a 1'humanite et 1'enseignent " (Marcel Proust, En memoire des eglises assassinees ).* 31 January Being astonished by the discovery that Marcel Proust was still alive when I graduated from school, I thought that it would be fruitful to investigate the mistakes people make in recalling the birth and death dates of historical figures. Probably any reasonably intelligent person does not simply memorize dates like telephone numbers but sees historical periods as sensible sequences of styles, ideas, or events and adjusts the chronology accordingly. Proust is for me a voice from before my time. One cannot poke one's nose through a painting one wants to see. 17 February Who makes us read numbers as being turned to the left? It is quite possible to read a 3 as a B without a back or as a pair of breasts. When turned toward the right, a 3 becomes a different shape, just as Tinbergen's figure of a goose looks like a hawk when read in the opposite direction . All objects have this double character. A brush points from its wooden back toward the bristles, the op- * "For a great mind can give birth to immortal works only if he does not create them in the image of the mortal being he is himself but in that of the model of humanity he holds within him. His thoughts are granted him as some sort of a loan during his life, of which they are the companions.When he dies, they return to humanity and enlighten it." 190 PARABLES OF SUN LIGHT posite direction being "against the grain." A bottle points toward its opening while a bowl reads both ways. Thus the change of character observed when Rubin's goblet/ faces shift direction is only a special case of the dynamic ambiguity of all shapes. Philosophers spellbound by the duck/rabbit figure fail to see that they are dealing with an individual instance of a common principle. 7 March The first thing to learn about art is to take its statements literally. When Vermeer shows the painter's model frontally and the painter himself from the back, we are not permitted to consider that this situation would change if we moved forward or the painter turned around. Rather, the model is there to be looked at as the dominant item while the painter joins us in being mere onlookers. Rembrandt or Velasquez do the opposite when they have us face the painter as the principal subject. 20 March Not much will be learned about mental imagery from experiments in which subjects are presented with a sentence isolated from any context and not involving any demand for thought. In and by itself, the sentence "Mr. Taylor is not a tailor" calls for no help from imagery and therefore will produce little but stray results of no interest. But if you ask me, "Would Mr. Taylor make a good tailor?" a whole host of perceivable traits will emerge from my memories of Mr. Taylor and from what I have known about tailoring and will go to work on a solution to the...