literary transcript
Aldous Huxley's
HEAVEN AND HELL
________
IN the history of science the
collector of specimens preceded the zoologist and followed the exponents of
natural theology and magic. He had
ceased to study animals in the spirit of the authors of the Bestiaries, for
whom the ant was incarnate industry, the panther an emblem, surprisingly
enough, of Christ, the polecat a shocking example of uninhibited
lasciviousness. But, except in a
rudimentary way, he was not yet a physiologist, ecologist, or student of animal
behaviour. His primary concern was to
make a census, to catch, kill, stuff, and describe as many kinds of beasts as
he could lay his hands on.
Like the earth of a
hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest
Like the giraffe and
the duck-billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting these remoter regions of the
mind are exceedingly improbable.
Nevertheless they exist, they are facts of observation; and as such,
they cannot be ignored by anyone who is honestly trying to understand the world
in which he lives.
It is difficult, it is
all but impossible, to speak of mental events except in similes drawn from the
more familiar universe of material things.
If I have made use of geographical and zoological metaphors, it is not
wantonly, out of a mere addiction to picturesque language. It is because such metaphors express very
forcibly the essential otherness of the mind's far continents, the complete
autonomy and self-sufficiency of their inhabitants. A man consists of what I may call an Old
World of personal consciousness and, beyond a dividing sea, a series of New
Worlds - the not too distant Virginias and Carolinas of the personal
subconscious and the vegetative soul; the Far West of the collective
unconscious, with its flora of symbols, its tribes of aboriginal archetypes;
and, across another, vaster ocean, at the antipodes of everyday consciousness,
the world of Visionary Experience.
If you go to
Some people never
consciously discover their antipodes.
Others make an occasional landing.
Yet others (but they are few) find it easy to go and come as they
please. For the naturalist of the mind,
the collector of psychological specimens, the primary need is some safe, easy,
and reliable method of transporting himself and others from the
Two such methods
exist. Neither of them is perfect; but
both are sufficiently reliable, sufficiently easy, and sufficiently safe to
justify their employment by those who know what they are doing. In the first case the soul is transported to
its far-off destination by the aid of a chemical - either mescalin
or lysergic acid [diethylamide, or LSD].
In the second case, the vehicle is psychological in nature, and the
passage to the mind's antipodes is accompanied by hypnosis. The two vehicles carry the consciousness to
the same region; but the drug has the longer range and takes its passengers
further into the terra incognita. [See Appendix I.]
How and why does hypnosis produce its observed effects? We do not know. For our present purposes, however, we do not have
to know. All that is necessary, in this
context, is to record the fact that some hypnotic subjects are transported, in
the trance state, to a region in the mind's antipodes, where they find the
equivalent of marsupials - strange psychological creatures leading an
autonomous existence according to the law of their own being.
About the physiological
effects of mescalin we know a little. Probably (for we are not yet certain) it
interferes with the enzyme system that regulates cerebral functioning. By doing so it lowers the efficiency of the
brain as an instrument for focusing mind on the problems of life on the surface
of our planet. This lowering of what may
be called the biological efficiency of the brain seems to permit the entry into
consciousness of certain classes of mental events, which are normally excluded,
because they possess no survival value.
Similar intrusions of biologically useless, but aesthetically and
sometimes spiritually valuable, material may occur as the result of illness of
fatigue; or they may be induced by fasting, or a period of confinement in a
place of darkness and complete silence. [See Appendix II.]
A person under the
influence of mescalin or lysergic acid [diethylamide]
will stop seeing visions when given a large dose of nicotinic acid. This helps to explain the effectiveness of
fasting as an inducer of visionary experience.
By reducing the amount of available sugar, fasting lowers the brain's
biological efficiency and so makes possible the entry into consciousness of material
possessing no survival value. Moreover,
by causing a vitamin deficiency, it removes from the blood that known inhibitor
of visions, nicotinic acid. Another
inhibitor of visionary experience is ordinary, everyday, perceptual
experience. Experimental psychologists
have found that, if you confine a man to a 'restricted environment', where
there is no light, no sound, nothing to smell, and, if you put him in a tepid
bath with only one almost imperceptible thing to touch, the victim will very
soon start 'seeing things', 'hearing things', and having strange bodily
sensations.
Milarepa,
in his Himalayan cavern, and the anchorites of the Thebaid
followed essentially the same procedure and got essentially the same
results. A thousand pictures of the Temptations
of St Anthony bear witness to the effectiveness of restricted diet and
restricted environment. Asceticism, it
is evident, has a double motivation. If
men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this
way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments; it is because they
long to visit the mind's antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing. Empirically and from the reports of other
ascetics, they know that fasting and a restricted environment will transport
them where they long to go. Their
self-inflicted punishment may be the door to paradise. (It may also - and this is a point which will
be discussed in a later paragraph - be a door into the infernal regions.)
From the point of view
of an inhabitant of the
What are the common features which the pattern imposes upon our
visionary experiences? First and most
important is the experience of light.
Everything seen by those who visit the mind's antipodes is brilliantly
illuminated and seems to shine from within.
All colours are intensified to a pitch far beyond anything seen in the
normal state, and at the same time the mind's capacity for recognizing fine
distinction of tone and hue is notably heightened.
In this respect there
is a marked difference between these visionary experiences and ordinary
dreams. Most dreams are without colour,
or else are only partially or feebly coloured.
On the other hand, the visions met with under the influence of mescalin or hypnosis are always intensely and, one might
say, preternaturally brilliant in colour.
Professor Calvin Hall, who has collected records of many thousands of
dreams, tells us that about two-thirds of all dreams are in black and
white. 'Only one dream in three is
coloured, or has some colour in it.' A
few people dream entirely in colour; a few never experience colour in their
dreams; the majority sometimes dream in colour, but more often do not.
'We have come to the
conclusion,' writes Dr Hall, 'that colour in dreams yields no information about
the personality of the dreamer.' I agree
with this conclusion. Colour in dreams
and visions tells us no more about the personality of the beholder than does
colour in the external world. A garden
in July is perceived as brightly coloured.
The perception tells us something about sunshine, flowers, and
butterflies, but little or nothing about our own selves. In the same way the fact that we see
brilliant colours in our visions and in some of our dreams tells us something
about the fauna of the mind's antipodes, but nothing whatever about the
personality who inhabits what I have called the Old World of the mind.
Most dreams are
concerned with the dreamer's private wishes and instinctive urges, and with the
conflicts which arise when these wishes and urges are thwarted by a
disapproving conscience or a fear of public opinion. The story of these drives and conflicts is
told in terms of dramatic symbols, and in most dreams the symbols are
uncoloured. Why should this be the
case? The answer, I presume, is that, to
be effective, symbols do not require to be coloured. The letters in which we write about roses
need not be red, and we can describe the rainbow by means of ink marks on white
paper. Textbooks are illustrated by line
engravings and half-tone plates; and these uncoloured images and diagrams
effectively convey information.
What is good enough for
the waking consciousness is evidently good enough for the personal
subconscious, which finds it possible to express its meanings through
uncoloured symbols. Colour turns out to
be a kind of touchstone of reality. That
which is given is coloured; that which our symbol-creating intellect and fancy
put together is uncoloured. Thus the
external world is perceived as coloured.
Dreams, which are not given but fabricated by the personal subconscious,
are generally in black and white. (It is
worth remarking that, in most people's experience, the most brightly coloured
dreams are those of landscapes, in which there is no drama, no symbolic
reference to conflict, merely the presentation to consciousness of a given,
non-human fact.)
The images of the
archetypal world are symbolic; but since we, as individuals, do not fabricate
them, but find them 'out there' in the collective unconscious, they exhibit
some at least of the characteristics of given reality and are coloured. The non-symbolic inhabitants of the mind's
antipodes exist in their own right, and like the given facts of the external
world are coloured. Indeed, they are far
more intensely coloured than external data.
This may be explained, at least in part, by the fact that our
perceptions of the external world are habitually clouded by the verbal notions
in terms of which we do our thinking. We
are for ever attempting to convert things into signs for the most intelligible
abstractions of our own invention. But
in doing so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native thinghood.
At the antipodes of the
mind, we are more or less completely free of language, outside the system of
conceptual thought. Consequently our
perception of visionary objects possesses all the freshness, all the naked
intensity, of experiences which have never been verbalized, never assimilated
to lifeless abstractions. Their colour
(that hallmark of givenness) shines forth with a
brilliance which seems to us preternatural, because it is in fact entirely
natural - entirely natural in the sense of being entirely unsophisticated by
language or the scientific, philosophical, and utilitarian notions, by means of
which we ordinarily re-create the given world in our own drearily human image.
In his Candle of Vision, the Irish poet A.E. (George
Russell) has analysed his visionary experiences with remarkable acuity. 'When I meditate,' he writes, 'I feel in the
thoughts and images that throng about me the reflections of personality; but
there are also windows in the soul, through which can be seen images created
not by human but by the divine imagination.'
Our linguistic habits
lead us into error. For example, we are
apt to say, 'I imagine', when what we should have said is, 'The curtain was
lifted that I might see'. Spontaneous or
induced, visions are never our personal property. Memories belonging to the ordinary self have
no place in them. The things seen are
wholly unfamiliar. 'There is no reference
or resemblance', in Sir William Herschel's phrase, 'to any objects recently
seen or even thought of.' When faces
appear, they are never the faces of friends or acquaintances. We are out of the
For most of us most of
the time, the world of everyday experience seems rather dim and drab. But for a few people often, and for a fair
number occasionally, some of the brightness of visionary experience spills
over, as it were, into common seeing, and the everyday universe is
transfigured. Though still recognizably
itself, the
'I was sitting on the
seashore, half listening to a friend arguing violently about something which
merely bored me. Unconsciously to
myself, I looked at a film of sand I had picked up on my hand, when I suddenly
saw the exquisite beauty of every little grain of it; instead of being dull, I
saw that each particle was made up on a perfect geometrical pattern, with sharp
angles, from each of which a brilliant shaft of light was reflected, while each
tiny crystal shone like a rainbow.... The rays crossed and recrossed,
making exquisite patterns of such beauty that they left me breathless.... Then,
suddenly, my consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way
how the whole universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter
how dull and lifeless they might seem, were nevertheless filled with this
intense and vital beauty. For a second
or two the whole world appeared as a blaze of glory. When it died down, it left me with something
I have never forgotten and which constantly reminds me of the beauty locked up
in every minute speck of material around us.'
Similarly, George
Russell writes of seeing the world illumined by 'an intolerable lustre of
light'; of finding himself looking at 'landscapes as lovely as a lost
Many similar
descriptions are to be found in the poets and in the literature of religious
mysticism. One thinks, for example, of
Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of immortality in Early Childhood;
of certain lyrics by George Herbert and Henry Vaughan; of Traherne's
Centuries of Meditations; of the passage in his autobiography, where
Father Surin describes the miraculous transformation
of an enclosed convent garden into a fragment of heaven.
Preternatural light and
colour are common to all visionary experiences.
And along with light and colour there goes, in every case, a recognition
of heightened significance. The
self-luminous objects which we see in the mind's antipodes possess a meaning,
and this meaning is, in some sort, as intense as their colour. Significance here is identical with being;
for, at the mind's antipodes, objects do not stand for anything but
themselves. The images which appear in
the nearer reaches of the collective subconscious have meaning in relation to
the basic facts of human experience; but here, at the limits of the visionary
world, we are confronted by facts which, like the facts of external nature, are
independent of man, both individually and collectively, and exist in their own
right. And their meaning consists
precisely in this, that they are intensely themselves and, being intensely
themselves, are manifestations of the essential givenness,
the non-human otherness of the universe.
Light, colour, and significance do not exist in isolation. They modify, or are manifested by,
objects. Are there any special classes
of objects common to most visionary experiences? The answer is: Yes, there are. Under mescalin and
hypnosis, as well as in spontaneous visions, certain classes of perceptual
experiences turn up again and again.
The typical mescalin or lysergic acid [diethylamide] experience begins
with perceptions of coloured, moving, living geometrical forms. In time, pure geometry becomes concrete, and
the visionary perceives not patterns but patterned things, such as carpets,
carvings, mosaics. These give place to
vast and complicated buildings, in the midst of landscapes, which change
continuously, passing from richness to more intensely coloured richness, from
grandeur to deepening grandeur. Heroic
figures, of the kind that Blake called 'The Seraphim', may make their
appearance, alone or in multitudes.
Fabulous animals move across the scene.
Everything is novel and amazing.
Almost never does the visionary see anything that reminds him of his own
past. he is not remembering scenes,
persons, or objects, and he is not inventing them; he is looking on at a new
creation.
The raw material for
this creation is provided by the visual experiences of ordinary life; but the moulding
of this material into forms is the work of someone who is most certainly not
the self, who originally had the experiences, or who later recalled and
reflected upon them. They are (to quote
the words used by Dr J.R. Smythies in a recent paper
in the American Journal of Psychiatry) 'the work of a highly
differentiated mental compartment, without any apparent connection, emotional
or volitional, with the aims, interests, or feelings of the person concerned'.
Here, in quotation or
condensed paraphrase, is Weir Mitchell's account of the visionary world to
which he was transported by peyote, the cactus which is the natural source of mescalin.
At his entry into that
world he saw a host of 'star points' and what looked like 'fragments of stained
glass'. Then came 'delicate floating
films of colour'. These were displaced
by an 'abrupt rush of colourless points of white light', sweeping across the
field of vision. Next there were zigzag
lines of very bright colours, which somehow turned into swelling clouds of
still more brilliant hues. Buildings now
made their appearance, and then landscapes.
There was a Gothic tower of elaborate design with worn statues in the
doorways or on stone brackets. 'As I
gazed, every projecting angle, cornice and even the faces of the stones at
their joinings were by degrees covered or hung
with clusters of what seemed to be huge
precious stones, but uncut stones, some being more like masses of transparent
fruit.... All seemed to possess an interior light'. The Gothic tower gave place to a mountain, a
cliff of inconceivable height, a colossal birdclaw
carved in stone and projecting over the abyss, an endless unfurling of coloured
draperies, and an efflorescence of more precious stones. Finally there was a view of green and purple
waves breaking on a beach 'with myriads of lights of the same tint as the
waves'.
Every mescalin experience, every vision arising under hypnosis,
is unique; but all recognizably belong to the same species. The landscapes, the architectures, the clustering
gems, the brilliant and intricate patterns - these, in their atmosphere of
preternatural light, preternatural colour, and preternatural significance, are
the stuff of which the mind's antipodes are made. Why this should be so, we have no idea. It is a brute fact of experience which,
whether we like it or not, we have to accept - just as we have to accept the
fact of kangaroos.
From these facts of visionary experience let us now pass to the
accounts preserved in all the cultural traditions, of Other Worlds - the worlds
inhabited by the gods, by the spirits of the dead, by man in his primal state
of innocence.
Reading these accounts,
we are immediately struck by the close similarity between induced or
spontaneous visionary experience and the heavens and fairylands of folklore and
religion. Preternatural light,
preternatural intensity of colouring, preternatural significance - these are
characteristic of all the Other Worlds and Golden Ages. And in virtually every case this
preternaturally significant light shines on, or shines out of, a landscape of
such surpassing beauty that words cannot express it.
Thus in the Greco-Roman
tradition we find the lovely Garden of the Hesperides,
the Elysian Plain, and the fair Island of Leuke, to
which Achilles was transported. Memnon went to another luminous island, somewhere in the
East. Odysseus and Penelope travelled in
the opposite direction and enjoyed their immortality with Circe in
Magically lovely
islands reappear in the folklore of the Celts and, at the opposite side of the world,
in that of the Japanese. And between
Avalon in the extreme West and Horaisan in the
Uttarakuru,
we see, resembles the landscapes of the mescalin
experience in being rich with precious stones.
And this characteristic is common to virtually all the Other Worlds of
religious tradition. Every paradise
abounds in gems, or at least in gem-like objects resembling, as Weir Mitchell
puts it, 'transparent fruit'. Here, for
example, is Ezekiel's version of the Garden of Eden. 'Thou hast been in
In describing their
Other Worlds, the Celts and Teutons speak very little
of precious stones, but have much to say of another and, for them, equally
wonderful substance - glass. The Welsh
had a blessed land called Ynisvitrin, the Isle of
Glass; and one of the names of the Germanic kingdom of the dead was Glasberg. One is
reminded of the
Most paradises are adorned with buildings, and, like the trees,
the waters, the hills and fields, these buildings are bright with gems. We are all familiar with the New Jerusalem. 'And the building of the wall of it was of
jasper, and the city was of pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city
were garnished with all manner of precious stones.'
Similar descriptions
are to be found in the eschatological literature of Hinduism, Buddhism, and
Islam. Heaven is always a place of
gems. Why should this be the case? Those who think of all human activities in
terms of a social and economic frame of reference will give some such answer as
this: Gems are very rare on earth. Few
people possess them. To compensate
themselves for these facts, the spokesmen for the poverty-stricken majority
have filled their imaginary heavens with precious stones. This 'pie in the sky' hypothesis contains, no
doubt, some element of truth; but it fails to explain why precious stones
should have come to be regarded as precious in the first place.
Men have spent enormous
amounts of time, energy, and money on the finding, mining, and cutting of
coloured pebbles. Why? The utilitarian can offer no explanation for
such fantastic behaviour. But as soon as
we take into account the facts of visionary experience, everything becomes
clear. In vision, men perceive a
profusion of what Ezekiel calls 'stones of fire', of what Weir Mitchell
describes as 'transparent fruit'. These
things are self-luminous, exhibit a preternatural brilliance of colour and
possess a preternatural significance.
The material objects which most nearly resemble these sources of
visionary illumination are gem-stones.
To acquire such a stone is to acquire something whose preciousness is
guaranteed by the fact that it exists in the Other World.
Hence man's otherwise
inexplicable passion for gems and hence his attribution to precious stones of
therapeutic and magical virtue. The
causal chain, I am convinced, begins in the psychological Other World of
visionary experience, descends to earth, and mounts again to the theological
Other World of heaven. In this context
the words of Socrates, in the Phaedo, take on
a new significance. There exists, he
tells us, an ideal world above and beyond the world of matter. 'In this other earth the colours are much
purer and much more brilliant than they are down here.... The very mountains,
the very stones have a richer gloss, a lovelier transparency and intensity of
hue. The precious stones of this lower
world, our highly prized carnelians, jaspers, emeralds, and all the rest, are
but the tiny fragments of these stones above.
In the other earth there is no stone but is precious and exceeds in
beauty every gem of ours.'
In other words,
precious stones are precious because they bear a faint resemblance to the
glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary. 'The view of that world,' says Plato, 'is a
vision of blessed beholders'; for to see things 'as they are in themselves' is
bliss unalloyed and inexpressible.
Among people who have
no knowledge of precious stones or of glass, heaven is adorned not with
minerals, but flowers. Preternaturally
brilliant flowers bloom in most of the Other Worlds described by primitive
eschatologists, and even in the begemmed and glassy
paradises of the more advanced religions they have their place. One remembers the lotus of Hindu and Buddhist
tradition, the roses and lilies of the West.
'God first planted a
garden.' The statement expresses a deep
psychological truth. Horticulture has
its source - or at any rate one of its sources - in the Other World of the mind's
antipodes. When worshippers offer
flowers at the altar, they are returning to the gods things which they know, or
(if they are not visionaries) obscurely feel, to be indigenous of heaven.
And this return to the
source is not merely symbolical; it is also a matter of immediate
experience. For the traffic between our
Indeed, we may risk a
generalization and say that whatever, in nature or in a work of art, resembles
one of those intensely significant, inwardly glowing objects encountered at the
mind's antipodes, is capable of inducing, if only in a partial and attenuated
form, the visionary experience. At this
point a hypnotist will remind us that, if he can be induced to stare intently
at a shiny object, a patient may go into trance; and that if he goes into
trance, or if he goes only into reverie, he may very well see visions within
and a transfigured world without.
But how, precisely, and
why does the view of a shiny object induce a trance or a state of reverie? Is it, as the Victorians maintained, a simple
matter of eye strain resulting in general nervous exhaustion? Or shall we explain the phenomenon in purely
psychological terms - as concentration pushed to the point of mono-ideism and leading to dissociation?
But there is a third
possibility. Shiny objects may remind
our unconscious of what it enjoys at the mind's antipodes, and these obscure
intimations of life in the Other World are so fascinating that we pay less
attention to this world and so become capable of experiencing consciously
something of that which, unconsciously, is always with us.
We see then that there are in nature certain scenes, certain
classes of objects, certain materials, possessed of the power to transport the
beholder's mind in the direction of its antipodes, out of the everyday Here and
towards the Other World of Vision.
Similarly, in the realm of art, we find certain works, even certain
classes of works, in which the same transporting power is manifest. These vision-inducing works may be executed
in vision-inducing materials, such as glass, metal, gems, or gem-like
pigments. In other cases their power is
due to the fact that they render, in some peculiarly expressive way, some
transporting scene or object.
The best
vision-inducing art is produced by men and women who have themselves had the
visionary experience; but it is also possible for any reasonably good artist,
simply by following an approved recipe, to create works which shall have at
least some transporting power.
Of all the
vision-inducing arts that which depends most completely on its raw materials
is, of course, the art of the goldsmith and jeweller. Polished metals and precious stones are so
intrinsically transporting that even a Victorian, even an Art Nouveau jewel is
a thing of power. And when to this
natural magic of glinting metal and self-luminous stone is added the other
magic of noble forms and colours artfully blended, we find ourselves in the
presence of a genuine talisman.
Religious art has
always and everywhere made use of these vision-inducing materials. The shrine of gold, the chryselephantine
statue, the jewelled symbol or image, the glittering furniture of the altar -
we find these things in contemporary
The products of the
goldsmith's art are intrinsically numinous.
They have their place at the very heart of every Mystery, in every holy
of holies. This sacred jewellery has
always been associated with the light of lamps and candles. For Ezekiel, a gem was a stone of fire. Conversely, a flame is a living gem, endowed
with all the transporting power that belongs to the precious stone and, to a
lesser degree, to polished metal. This
transporting power of flame increases in proportion to the depth and extent of
the surrounding darkness. The most
impressively numinous temples are caverns of twilight, in which a few tapers
give life to the transporting, other-worldly treasures on the altar.
Glass is hardly less
effective as an inducer of visions than are the natural gems. In certain respects, indeed, it is more
effective, for the simple reason that there is more of it. Thanks to glass, a whole building - the
Sainte-Chapelle, for example, the cathedrals of
For the men of the
Middle Ages, it is evident, visionary experience was supremely valuable. So valuable, indeed, that they were ready to
pay for it in hard-earned cash. In the
twelfth century collecting-boxes were placed in the churches for the upkeep and
installation of stained-glass windows. Suger, the Abbot of Saint-Denis, tells us that they were
always full.
But self-respecting artists cannot be expected to go on doing what
their fathers have already done supremely well.
In the fourteenth century colour gave place to grisaille, and windows
ceased to be vision-inducing. When, in the
later fifteenth century, colour came into fashion again, the glass painters
felt the desire, and found themselves, at the same time, technically equipped,
to imitate Renaissance painting in transparency. The results were often interesting; but they
were not transporting.
Then came the
Reformation. The Protestants disapproved
of visionary experience and attributed a magical virtue to the printed
word. In a church with clear windows the
worshippers could read their Bibles and prayer books and were not tempted to
escape from the sermon into the Other World.
On the Catholic side the men of the Counter-Reformation found themselves
in two minds. They thought visionary
experience was a good thing, but they also believed in the supreme value of
print.
In the new churches
stained glass was rarely installed, and in many of the older churches it was
wholly or partially replaced by clear glass.
The unobscured light permitted the faithful to
follow the service in their books, and at the same time to see the
vision-inducing works created by the new generations of baroque sculptors and
architects. These transporting works
were executed in metal and polished stone.
Wherever the worshipper turned, he found the glint of bronze, the rich
radiance of coloured marble, the unearthly whiteness of statuary.
On the rare occasions when
the Counter-Reformation made use of glass, it was as a surrogate for diamonds,
not for rubies or sapphires. Faceted
prisms entered religious art in the seventeenth century, and in Catholic
churches they dangle to this day from innumerable chandeliers. (These charming and slightly ridiculous
ornaments are among the very few vision-inducing devices permitted in
Islam. Mosques have no images or
reliquaries; but in the
From glass, stained or
cut, we pass to marble and the other stones that take a high polish and can be
used in mass. The fascination exercised
by such stones may be gauged by the amount of time and trouble spent in obtaining
them. At
What a labour of
giants! And, from the utilitarian point
of view, how marvellously pointless! But
in fact, of course, there was a point - a point that existed in a region beyond
mere utility. Polished to a visionary
glow, the rosy shafts proclaimed their manifest kinship with the Other
World. At the cost of enormous efforts
men had transported these stones from their quarry on the Tropic of Cancer; and
now, by way of recompense, the stones were transporting their transporters
half-way to the mind's visionary antipodes.
The question of utility and of the motives that lie beyond utility
arises once more in relation to ceramics.
Few things are more useful, more absolutely indispensable, than pots and
plates and jugs. But at the same time
few human beings concern themselves less with utility than do the collectors of
porcelain and glazed earthenware. To say
that these people have an appetite for beauty is not a sufficient
explanation. The commonplace ugliness of
the surroundings in which find ceramics are so often displayed is proof enough
that what their owners crave is not beauty in all its manifestations, but only
a special kind of beauty - the beauty of curved reflections, of softly lustrous
glazes, of sleek and smooth surfaces. In
a word, the beauty that transports the beholder, because it reminds him,
obscurely or explicitly, of the preternatural lights and colours of the Other
World. In the main, the art of the
potter has been a secular art - but a secular art which its innumerable
devotees have treated with an almost idolatrous reverence. From time to time, however, this secular art
has been placed at the service of religion.
Glazed tiles have found their way into mosques and, here and there, into
Christian churches. From
Plato and, during a
later flowering of religious art, St Thomas Aquinas maintained that pure, bright
colours were of the very essence off artistic beauty. A Matisse, in that case, would be
intrinsically superior to a Goya or a Rembrandt. One has only to translate the philosophers'
abstractions into concrete terms to see that this equation of beauty in general
with bright, pure colours is absurd. But
though untenable as it stands, the venerable doctrine is not altogether devoid
of truth.
Bright, pure colours
are characteristic of the Other World.
Consequently works of art painted in bright, pure colours are capable,
in suitable circumstances, of transporting the beholder's mind in the direction
of its antipodes. Bright, pure colours
are of the essence not of beauty in general but only of a special kind of beauty,
the visionary. Gothic churches are Greek
temples, the statues of the thirteenth century after Christ and of the fifth
century before Christ - all were brilliantly coloured.
For the Greeks and the
men of the Middle Ages, this art of the merry-go-round and the waxwork show was
evidently transporting. To us it seems
deplorable. We prefer our Praxiteleses plain, our marble and our limestone au naturel. Why
should our modern taste be so different, in this respect, from that of our
ancestors? The reason, I presume, is
that we have become too familiar with bright, pure pigments to be greatly moved
by them. We admire them, of course, when
we see them in some grand or subtle composition; but in themselves and as such,
they leave us untransported.
Sentimental lovers of the past complain of the drabness of our age
and contrast it unfavourably with the gay brilliance of earlier times. In actual fact, of course, there is a far
greater profusion of colour in the modern than in the ancient world. Lapis lazuli and Tyrian
purple were costly rarities; the rich velvets and brocades of princely
wardrobes, the woven or painted hangings of medieval and early modern houses,
were reserved for a privileged minority.
Even the great ones of
the earth possessed very few of these vision-inducing treasures. As late as the seventeenth century, monarchs
owned so little furniture that they had to travel from palace to palace with
wagon-loads of plate and bedspreads, of carpets and tapestries. For the great mass of the people there were
only homespun and a few vegetable dyes; and, for interior decoration, there
were at best the earth colours, at worst (and in most cases) 'the floor of
plaster and the walls of dung'.
At the antipodes of
every mind lay the Other World of preternatural light and preternatural colour,
of ideal gems and visionary gold. But
before every pain of eyes was only the dark squalor of the family hovel, the
dust or mud of the village street, the dirty whites, the duns and goose-turd greens of ragged clothing. Hence a passionate, an almost desperate,
thirst for bright, pure colours; and hence the overpowering effect produced by
such colours whenever, in church or at court, they were displayed. Today the chemical industry turns out paints,
inks, and dyes in endless variety and enormous quantities. In our modern world there is enough bright
colour to guarantee the production of billions of flags and comic strips,
millions of stop signs and tail lights, fire engines and Cola containers by the
hundred thousand, carpets, wallpapers, and non-representational art by the
square mile.
Familiarity breeds
indifference. We have seen too much
pure, bright colours at Woolworth's to find it intrinsically transporting. And here we may note that, by its amazing
capacity to give us too much of the best things, modern technology has tended
to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was
once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the
canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the
virtues of gin, films, [I have substituted 'films' for 'cigarettes' in view of the
current ban on and irrelevance of cigarette advertising. - Editor's note.] and toothpaste.
In
Only in floodlighting
do we recapture the unearthly significance which used, in the age of oil and
wax, even in the age of gas and the carbon filament, to shine forth from
practically any island of brightness in the boundless dark. Under the searchlights Notre-Dame de Paris
and the Roman Forum are visionary objects, having power to transport the
beholder's mind towards the Other World. [See Appendix III.]
Modern technology has
had the same devaluating effect on glass and polished metal as it has had on
fairy lamps and pure, bright colours. By
John of Patmos and his contemporaries walls of glass
were conceivable only in the New Jerusalem.
Today they are a feature of every up-to-date office building and
bungalow. And this glut of glass has
been paralleled by a glut of chrome and nickel, of stainless steel and
aluminium and a host of alloys old and new.
Metal surfaces wink at us in the bathroom, shine from the kitchen sink,
go glittering across country in cars and trains.
Those rich convex
reflections, which so fascinated Rembrandt that he never tired of rendering
them in paint, are now the commonplaces of home and street and factory. The fine point of selfdom pleasure has been
blunted. What was once a needle of
visionary delight has now become a piece of disregarded linoleum.
I have spoken so far only of vision-inducing materials and their
psychological devaluation by modern technology.
It is time now to consider the purely artistic devices, by means of
which vision-inducing works have been created.
Light and colour tend
to take on a preternatural quality when seen in the midst of environing
darkness. Fra Angelico's Crucifixion at the Louvre
has a black background. So have the
frescoes of the Passion painted by Andrea del Castagno
for the nuns of Santa Apollonia at
With the development of
chiaroscuro, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, night came out of the
background and installed itself within the picture, which became the scene of a
kind of Manichean struggle between Light and Darkness. At the time they were painted these works
must have possessed a real transporting power.
To us, who have seen altogether too much of this kind of thing, most of
them seem merely theatrical. But a few
still retain their magic. There is
Caravaggio's Entombment, for example; there are a dozen magical
paintings by Georges de La Tour; [See Appendix IV.] there
are all those visionary Rembrandts where the lights have the intensity and
significance of light at the mind's antipodes, where the darks are full of rich
potentialities waiting their turn to become actual, to make themselves
glowingly present to our consciousness.
In most cases the
ostensible subject-matter of Rembrandt's pictures is taken from real life or
the Bible - a boy at his lessons or Bathsheba bathing; a woman wading in a pond
or Christ before His judges.
Occasionally, however, these messages from the Other World are
transmitted by means of a subject drawn, not from real life or history, but
from the realm of archetypal symbols.
There hangs in the Louvre a Méditation du philosophe, whose symbolical subject-matter is nothing
more nor less than the human mind, with its teeming darkness, its moments of
intellectual and visionary illumination, its mysterious stairways winding
downwards and upwards into the unknown.
The meditating philosopher sits there in his island of inner
illumination; and at the opposite end of the symbolic chamber, in another,
rosier island, an old woman crouches before the hearth. The firelight touches and transfigures her
face, and we see, concretely illustrated, the impossible paradox and supreme
truth - that perception is (or at least can be, ought to be) the same as
Revelation, that Reality shines out of every appearance, that the One is
totally, infinitely present in all particulars.
Along with the
preternatural lights and colours, the gems and the ever-changing patterns,
visitors to the mind's antipodes discover a world of sublimely beautiful
landscapes, of living architecture, and of heroic figures. The transporting power of many works of art
is attributable to the fact that their creators have painted scenes, persons,
and objects which remind the beholder of what, consciously or unconsciously, he
knows about the Other World at the back of his mind.
Let us begin with the human or, rather, the more than human
inhabitants of these far-off regions.
Blake called them the Cherubim.
And in effect that is what, no doubt, they are - the psychological
originals of those beings who, in the theology of every religion, serve as
intermediaries between man and the Clear Light.
The more than human personages of visionary experience never 'do
anything'. (Similarly the blessed never
'do anything' in heaven.) They are
content merely to exist.
Under many names and
attired in an endless variety of costumes, these heroic figures of man's
visionary experience have appeared in the religious art of every culture. Sometimes they are shown at rest, sometimes
in historical or mythological action.
But action, as we have seen, does not come naturally to the inhabitants
of the mind's antipodes. To be busy is
the law of our being. The law of theirs
is to do nothing. When we force these
serene strangers to play a part in one of our all too human dramas, we are
being false to visionary truth. That is
why the most transporting (though not necessarily the most beautiful)
representations of 'the Cherubim' are those which show them as they are in
their native habitat - doing nothing in particular.
And that accounts for
the overwhelming, the more than merely aesthetic, impression made upon the
beholder by the great masterpieces of religious art. The sculptured figures of Egyptian gods and
god-kings, the Madonnas and Pantocrators
of the Byzantine mosaics, the Bodhisattvas and Lohans
of China, the seated Buddhas of Khmer, the steles and
statues of Copan, the wooden idols of tropical Africa - these have one
characteristic in common: a profound stillness.
And it is precisely this which gives them their numinous quality, their
power to transport the beholder out of the
There is, of course,
nothing intrinsically excellent about static art. Static or dynamic, a bad piece of work is always
a bad piece of work. All I mean to imply
is that, other things being equal, a heroic figure at rest has a greater
transporting power than one which is shown in action.
The Cherubim live in
Reviewing the
succession of human cultures, we find that landscape painting is either
non-existent, or rudimentary, or of very recent development. In
This is a curious fact
that demands an explanation. Why should
landscapes have found their way into the visionary literature of a given epoch
and a given culture, but not into the painting?
Posed in this way, the question provides its own best answer. People may be content with the merely verbal
expression of this aspect of their visionary experience and feel no need for
its translation into pictorial terms.
That this often happens
in the case of individuals is certain.
Blake, for example, saw visionary landscapes, 'articulated beyond all
that the mortal and perishing nature can produce' and 'infinitely more perfect
and minutely organized than anything seen by the mental eye'. Here is the description of such a visionary
landscape, which Blake gave at one of Mrs Aders'
evening parties: 'The other evening, taking a walk, I came to a meadow and at
the further corner of it I saw a fold of lambs.
Coming nearer, the ground blushed with flowers, and the wattled cote and its woolly tenants were of an exquisite
pastoral beauty. But I looked again, and
it proved to be no living flock, but beautiful sculpture.'
Rendered in pigments,
this vision would look, I suppose, like some impossibly beautiful blending of
Constable's freshest oil sketches with an animal painting in the magically
realistic style of Zurbarán's haloed lamb now in the
San Diego Museum. But Blake never
produced anything remotely resembling such a picture. He was content to talk and write about his
landscape visions, and to concentrate in his painting upon 'the Cherubim'.
What is true of an
individual artist may be true of a whole school. There are plenty of things which men
experience, but do not choose to express; or they may try to express what they
have experienced, but in only one of their arts. In yet other cases they will express
themselves in ways having no immediately recognizable affinity to the original
experience. In this last context Dr A.K.
Coomaraswamy has some interesting things to say about
the mystical art of the
The supreme example of
such mystical art is the Zen-inspired landscape painting, which arose in
'Bed,' as the Italian proverb succinctly puts it, 'is the poor
man's opera.' Analogously, sex is the
Hindu's Sung; wine, the Persian's Impressionism. The reason being, of course, that the
experiences of sexual union and intoxication partake of that essential
otherness characteristic of all vision, including that of landscapes.
If, at any time, men
have found satisfaction in a certain kind of activity, it is to be presumed
that, at periods when this satisfying activity was not manifested, there must
have been some kind of equivalent for it.
In the Middle Ages, for example, men were preoccupied in an obsessive,
an almost maniacal way with words and symbols.
Everything in nature was instantly recognized as the concrete
illustration of some notion formulated in one of the books or legends currently
regarded as sacred.
And yet, at other
periods of history men have found a deep satisfaction in recognizing the
autonomous otherness of nature, including many aspects of human nature. The experience of this otherness was
expressed in terms of art, religion, or science. What were the medieval equivalents of
Constable and ecology, of bird watching and
In spite of a Natural
History that was nothing but a set of drearily moralistic symbols, in the teeth
of a theology which, instead of regarding words as the signs of things, treated
things and events as the signs of biblical or Aristotelian words, our ancestors
remained relatively sane. And they
achieved this feat by periodically escaping from the stifling prison of their bumptiously rationalistic philosophy, their
anthropomorphic, authoritarian, and non-experimental science, their all too
articulate religion, into non-verbal, other than human worlds inhabited by
their instincts, by the visionary fauna of their mind's antipodes, and, beyond
and yet within all the rest, by the indwelling Spirit.
From this wide-ranging but necessary digression, let us return to
the particular case from which we set out.
Landscapes, as we have seen, are a regular feature of the visionary
experience. Descriptions of visionary
landscapes occur in the ancient literature of folklore and religion; but
paintings of landscapes do not make their appearance until comparatively recent
times. To what has been said, by way of
explanation about psychological equivalents, I will add a few brief notes on
the nature of landscape paintings as a vision-inducing art.
Let us begin by asking
a question. What landscapes - or, more
generally, what representations of natural objects - are most transporting,
most intrinsically vision-inducing? In
the light of my own experiences and of what I have heard other people say about
their reactions to works of art, I will risk an answer. Other things being equal (for nothing can
make up for lack of talent), the most transporting landscapes are, first, those
which represent natural objects a very long way off, and, second, those which
represent them at close range.
Distance lends
enchantment to the view; but so does propinquity. A Sung painting of far-away mountains,
clouds, and torrents is transporting; but so are the close-ups of tropical
leaves in the Douanier Rousseau's jungles. When I look at the Sung landscape, I am
reminded (or one of my not-I's is reminded) of the
crags, the boundless expanses of plain, the luminous skies and seas of the
mind's antipodes. And those
disappearances into mist and cloud, those sudden emergences of some strange,
intensely definite form, a weathered rock, for example, or an ancient pine tree
twisted by years of struggle with the wind - these, too, are transporting. For they remind me, consciously or
unconsciously, of the Other World's essential alienness
and unaccountability.
It is the same with the
close-up. I look at those leaves with
their architecture of veins, their stripes and mottlings,
I peer into the depths of interlacing greenery, and something in me is reminded
of those living patterns, so characteristic of the visionary world, of those
endless births and proliferations of geometrical forms that turn into objects,
of things that are for ever being transmuted into other things.
This painted close-up
of a jungle is what, on one of its aspects, the Other World is like, and so it
transports me, it makes me see with eyes that transfigure a work of art into
something else, something beyond art.
I remember - very
vividly, though it took place many years ago - a conversation with Roger
Fry. We were talking about Monet's Water
Lilies. They had no right, Roger Fry
kept insisting, to be so shockingly unorganized, so totally without a proper
compositional skeleton. They were all
wrong, artistically speaking. And yet,
he had to admit, and yet.... And yet, as I should now say, they were
transporting. An artist of astounding
virtuosity had chosen to paint a close-up of natural objects seen in their own
context and without reference to merely human notions of what's what, or what
ought to be what. Man, we like to say,
is the measure of all things. For Monet,
on this occasion, water lilies were the measure of water lilies; and so he
painted them.
The same non-human
point of view must be adopted by any artist who tries to render the distant
scene. How tiny, in the Chinese
painting, are the travellers who make their way along the valley! How fail the bamboo hut on the slope above
them! And all the rest of the vast
landscape is emptiness and silence. This
revelation of the wilderness, living its own life according to the laws of its
own being, transports the mind towards its antipodes; for primeval Nature bears
a strange resemblance to that inner world where no account is taken of our
personal wishes or even of the enduring concerns of man in general.
Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter
foreground are strictly human. When we
look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his
primacy. The astronomer looks even
further afield than the Sung painter and sees even
less of human life. At the other end of
the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up -
the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic, and subatomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm's
length, looked and sounded like a human being, no trace remains.
Something analogous
happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover. In the nuptial embrace personality is melted
down; the individual (it is the recurrent theme of
And so it is with the
artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near point. In his work humanity loses its importance,
even disappears completely. Instead of
men and women playing their fantastic tricks before high heaven, we are asked
to consider the lilies, to meditate on the unearthly beauty of 'mere things',
when isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and
for themselves. Alternatively (or, at an
earlier stage of artistic development, exclusively), the non-human world of the
near-point is rendered in patterns.
These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves and flowers
- the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus - and are elaborated, with
recurrences and variations, into something transporting reminiscent of the
living geometries of the Other World.
Freer and more
realistic treatments of Nature at the near-point make their appearance at a
relatively recent date - but far earlier than those treatments of the distant
scene, to which alone (and mistakenly) we give the name of landscape painting.
For theological
reasons, Islam had to be content, for the most part, with 'arabesques' -
luxuriant and (as in visions) continually varying patterns, based upon natural
objects seen at the near-point. But even
in Islam the genuine close-up landscape was not unknown. Nothing can exceed in beauty and in
vision-inducing power the mosaics of gardens and buildings in the great Omayyad mosque at
In medieval
The frescoes in the
papal palace at
Vuillard,
incidentally, was a supreme master both of the transporting close-up and of the
transporting distant view. His bourgeois
interiors are masterpieces of vision-inducing art, compared with which the
works of such conscious and so to say professional visionaries as Blake and Odilon Redon seem feeble in the
extreme. In Vuillard's
interiors every detail however trivial, however hideous even - the pattern of
the late Victorian wallpaper, the Art Nouveau bibelot, the Brussels carpet - is
seen and rendered as a living jewel; and all these jewels are harmoniously
combined into a whole which is a jewel of a yet higher order of visionary
intensity. And when the upper-middle
class inhabitants of Vuillard's New Jerusalem go for
a walk, they find themselves not, as they had supposed, in the department of
Seine-et-Oise, but in the Garden of Eden, in an Other
World which is yet essentially the same as this world, but transfigured and therefore
transporting. [ See
Appendix V.]
I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience and
of its interpretation in terms of theology, its translation into art. But visionary experience is not always
blissful. It is sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven.
Like heaven, the
visionary hell has its preternatural light and its preternatural
significance. But the significance is
intrinsically appalling and the light is 'the smoky light' of the Tibetan
Book of the Dead, the 'darkness visible' of
But for poor Renée, the
schizophrenic, the illumination is infernal - an intense electric glare without
a shadow, ubiquitous and implacable.
Everything that, for healthy visionaries, is a source of bliss, brings
to Renée only fear and a nightmarish sense of unreality. The summer sunshine is malignant; the gleam
of polished surfaces is suggestive not of gems but of machinery and enamelled
tin; the intensity of existence which animates every object, when seen at close
range and out of its utilitarian context, is felt as a menace.
And then there is the
horror of infinity. For the healthy
visionary, the perception of the infinite in a finite particular is a
revelation of divine immanence; for Renée, it was a revelation of what she
called 'the System', the vast cosmic mechanism which exists only to grind out
guilt and punishment, solitude and unreality. [See Appendix VI.]
Sanity is a matter of
degree, and there are plenty of visionaries who see the world as Renée saw it,
but contrive, nonetheless, to live outside the asylum. For them, as for the positive visionary, the
universe is transfigured - but for the worse.
Everything in it, from the stars in the sky to the dust under their
feet, is unspeakably sinister or disgusting; every event is charged with a
hateful significance; every object manifests the presence of an Indwelling
Horror, infinite, all-powerful, eternal.
This negatively
transfigured world has found its way, from time to time, into literature and
the arts. It writhed and threatened in
Van Gogh's later landscapes; it was the setting and the theme of all Kafka's
stories; it was Géricault's spiritual home; [See Appendix VII.] it was inhabited by Goya during the years of his deafness and
solitude; it was glimpsed by Browning when he wrote Childe Roland; it
has its place, over against the theophanies, in the
novels of Charles Williams.
The negative visionary
experience is often accompanied by bodily sensations of a very special and
characteristic kind. Blissful visions
are generally associated with a sense of separation from the body, a feeling of
de-individualization. (It is, no doubt,
this feeling of de-individualization which makes it possible for the Indians
who practise the peyote cult to use the drug not merely as a short cut to the
visionary world, but also as an instrument for creating a loving solidarity
within the participating group.) When
the visionary experience is terrible and the world is transfigured for the
worse, individualization is intensified and the negative visionary finds
himself associated with a body that seems to grow progressively more dense,
more tightly packed, until he finds himself at last reduced to being the
agonized consciousness of an inspissated lump of
matter, no bigger than a stone, that can be held between the hands.
It is worth remarking
that many of the punishments described in the various accounts of hell are
punishments of pressure and constriction.
Dante's sinners are buried in mud, shut up in the trunks of trees,
frozen solid in blocks of ice, crushed beneath stones. The Inferno is psychologically
true. Many of its pains are experienced
by schizophrenics, and by those who have taken mescalin
or lysergic acid [diethylamide] under unfavourable conditions. [See Appendix VIII.]
What is the nature of
these unfavourable conditions? How and
why is heaven turned into hell? In
certain cases the negative visionary experience is the result of predominantly
physical causes. Mescalin
tends, after ingestion, to accumulate in the liver. If the liver is diseased, the associated mind
may find itself in hell. But what is
more important for our present purposes is the fact that negative visionary
experience may be induced by purely psychological means. Fear and anger bar the way to the heavenly
Other World and plunge the mescalin taker into hell.
And what is true of the
mescalin taker is also true of the person who sees
visions spontaneously or under hypnosis.
Upon this psychological foundation has been reared the theological
doctrine of saving faith - a doctrine to be met with in all the great religious
traditions of the world. Eschatologists
have always found it difficult to reconcile their rationality and their
morality with the brute facts of psychological experience. As rationalists and moralists, they feel that
good behaviour should be rewarded and that the virtuous deserve to go to
heaven. But as psychologists they know
that virtue is not the sole or sufficient condition of blissful visionary
experience. They know that works alone
are powerless and that it is faith, or loving confidence, which guarantees that
visionary experience shall be blissful.
Negative emotions - the
fear which is the absence of confidence, the hatred, anger, or malice which
exclude love - are the guarantee that visionary experience, if and when it
comes, shall be appalling. The Pharisee
is a virtuous man; but his virtue is of the kind which is compatible with negative
emotion. His visionary experiences are
therefore likely to be infernal rather than blissful.
The nature of the mind
is such that the sinner who repents and makes an act of faith in a higher power
is more likely to have a blissful visionary experience than is the
self-satisfied pillar of society with his righteous indignations, his anxiety
about possessions and pretensions, his ingrained habits of blaming, despising,
and condemning. Hence the enormous
importance attached, in all the great religious traditions, to the state of
mind at the moment of death.
Visionary experience is
not the same as mystical experience.
Mystical experience is beyond the realm of opposites. Visionary experience is still within that
realm. Heaven entails hell, and 'going
to heaven' is no more liberation than is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a vantage point from which
the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary
individualized existence.
If consciousness
survives bodily death, it survives, presumably, on every mental level - on the
level of mystical experience, on the level of blissful visionary experience, on
the level of infernal visionary experience, and on the level of everyday
individual existence.
In life, even the
blissful visionary experience tends to change its sign if it persists too
long. Many schizophrenics have their
times of heavenly happiness; but the fact that (unlike the mescalin
taker) they do not know when, if ever, they will be permitted to return to the
reassuring banality of everyday experience causes even heaven to seem
appalling. But for those who, for
whatever reason, are appalled, heaven turns into hell, bliss into horror, the
Clear Light into the hateful glare of 'the land [country] of lit-upness'.
Something of the same
kind may happen in the posthumous state.
After having had a glimpse of the unbearable splendour of ultimate
Reality, and after having shuttled back and forth between heaven and hell, most
souls find it possible to retreat into that more reassuring region of the mind,
where they can use their own and other people's wishes, memories, and fancies
to construct a world very like that in which they lived on earth.
Of those who die an
infinitesimal minority are capable of immediate union with the divine Ground, a
few are capable of supporting the visionary bliss of heaven, a few find
themselves in the visionary horrors of hell and are unable to escape; the great
majority end up in the kind of world described by Swedenborg
and the mediums. From this world it is
doubtless possible to pass, when the necessary conditions have been fulfilled,
to worlds of visionary bliss or the final enlightenment.
My own guess is that
modern spiritualism and ancient tradition are both correct. There is a posthumous state of the
kind described in Sir Oliver Lodge's book, Raymond; but there is also a
heaven of blissful visionary experience; there is also a hell of the same kind
of appalling visionary experience as is suffered here by schizophrenics and
some of those who take mescalin; and there is also an
experience, beyond time, of union with the divine Ground.
_________________
Appendix I
Two other, less effective aids to visionary experience deserve
mention - carbon dioxide and the stroboscopic lamp. A mixture (completely non-toxic) of seven
parts of oxygen and three of carbon dioxide produces, in those who inhale it,
certain physical and psychological changes, which have been exhaustively
described by Meduna.
Among these changes the most important, in our present context, is a
marked enhancement of the ability to 'see things', when the eyes are
closed. In some cases only swirls of
patterned colour are seen. In others,
there may be vivid recalls of past experiences.
(Hence the value of CO2 as a therapeutic agent.)
In yet other cases, carbon dioxide transports the subject to the Other
World at the antipodes of his everyday consciousness, unconnected with his own
personal history or with the problems of the human race in general.
In the light of these
facts, it becomes easy to understand the rationale of yogic breathing
exercises. Practised systematically,
these exercises result, after a time, in prolonged suspensions of breath. Long suspensions of breath lead to a high
concentration of carbon dioxide in the lungs and blood, and this increase in
the concentration of CO2 lowers the efficiency of the brain as a reducing valve and
permits the entry into consciousness of experiences, visionary or mystical,
from 'out there'.
Prolonged and
continuous shouting or singing may produce similar, but less strongly marked,
results. Unless they are highly trained,
singers tend to breathe out more than they breathe in. Consequently the concentration of carbon
dioxide in the alveolar air and the blood is increased and, the efficiency of
the cerebral reducing valve being lowered, visionary experience becomes
possible. Hence the interminable 'vain
repetitions' of magic and religion. The
chanting of the curandero, the medicine-man,
the shaman; the endless psalm-singing and sutra-intoning of Christian and
Buddhist monks; the shouting and howling, hour after hour, of revivalists -
under all the diversities of theological belief and aesthetic convention, the psychochemico-physiological intention remains
constant. To increase the concentration
of CO2 in the lungs and blood and so to lower the efficiency of the
cerebral reducing valve, until it will admit biologically useless material from
Mind-at-Large - this, though the shouters, singers, and mutterers did not know
it, has been at all times the real purpose and point of magic spells, of
mantras, litanies, psalms, and sutras.
'The heart,' said Pascal, 'has its reasons.' Still more cogent and much harder to unravel
are the reasons of the lungs, the blood, and the enzymes, of neurones and
synapses. The way to the superconscious is through the subconscious, and the way, or
at least one of the ways, to the subconscious is through the chemistry of
individual cells.
With the stroboscopic
lamp we descend from chemistry to the still more elementary realm of
physics. Its rhythmically flashing light
seems to act directly, through the optic nerves, on the electrical
manifestations of the brain's activity.
(For this reason there is always a slight danger involved in the use of
the stroboscopic lamp. Some persons
suffer from petit mal without being made aware of the fact by any
clear-cut and unmistakable symptoms.
Exposed to a stroboscopic lamp, such persons may go into a full-blown
epileptic fit. The risk is not very
great; but it must always be recognized.
One case in eighty may turn out badly.)
To sit, with eyes
closed, in front of a stroboscopic lamp is a very curious and fascinating
experience. No sooner is the lamp turned
on than the most brilliantly coloured patterns make themselves visible. These patterns are not static, but change
incessantly. Their prevailing colour is
a function of the stroboscope's rate of discharge. When the lamp is flashing at any speed
between ten to fourteen or fifteen times a second, the patterns are
prevailingly orange and red. Green and
blue make their appearance when the rate exceeds fifteen flashes a second. After eighteen or nineteen, the patterns
become white and grey. Precisely why we
should see such patterns under the stroboscope is not know. The most obvious explanation would be in
terms of the interference of two or more rhythms - the rhythm of the lamp and
the various rhythms of the brain's electrical activity. Such interferences may be translated by the
visual centre and optic nerves into something, of which the mind becomes
conscious as a coloured, moving pattern.
Far more difficult to explain is the fact, independently observed by
several experimenters, that the stroboscope tends to enrich and intensify the
visions induced by mescalin or lysergic acid
[diethylamide]. Here, for example, is a
case communicated to me by a medical friend.
He had taken LSD and was seeing, with his eyes shut, only coloured,
moving patterns. Then he sat down in
front of a stroboscope. The lamp was
turned on and, immediately, abstract geometry was transformed into what my
friend described as 'Japanese landscapes' of surpassing beauty. But how on earth can the interference of two
rhythms produce an arrangement of electrical impulses interpretable as a
living, self-modulating Japanese landscape unlike anything the subject has ever
seen, suffused with preternatural light and colour, and charged with
preternatural significance?
This mystery is merely
a particular case of a large, more comprehensive mystery - the nature of the
relations between visionary experience and events on the cellular, chemical,
and electrical levels. By touching
certain areas of the brain with a very fine electrode, Penfield has been able
to induce the recall of a long chain of memories relating to some past
experience. This recall is not merely
accurate on every perceptual detail; it is also accompanied by all the emotions
which were aroused by the events when they originally occurred. The patient, who is under a local anaesthetic,
finds himself simultaneously in two times and places - in the operating room,
now, and in his childhood home, hundreds of miles away and thousands of days in
the past. Is there, one wonders, some
area in the brain from which the probing electrode could elicit Blake's
Cherubim, or Weir Mitchell's self-transforming Gothic tower encrusted with
living gems, or my friend's unspeakably lovely Japanese landscapes? And if, as I myself believe, visionary
experiences enter our consciousness from somewhere 'out there' in the infinity
of Mind-at-Large, what sort of an ad hoc neurological pattern is created
for them by the receiving and transmitting brain? And what happens to this ad hoc
pattern when the vision is over? Why do
all visionaries insist on the impossibility of recalling, in anything even
faintly resembling its original form and intensity, their transfiguring
experiences? How many questions - and,
as yet, how few answers!
Appendix II
In the Western world visionaries and mystics are a good deal less
common than they used to be. There
are two principal reasons for this state of affairs - a philosophical reason
and a chemical reason. In the currently
fashionable picture of the universe there is no place for valid transcendental
experience. Consequently those who have
had what they regard as valid transcendental experiences are looked upon with
suspicion, as being either lunatics or swindlers. To be a mystic or a visionary is no longer
creditable.
But it is not only our
mental climate that is unfavourable to the visionary and the mystic; it is also
our chemical environment - an environment profoundly different from that in
which our forefathers passed their lives.
The brain is chemically
controlled, and experience has shown that it can be made permeable to the
(biologically speaking) superfluous aspects of Mind-at-Large by modifying the
(biologically speaking) normal chemistry of the body.
For almost half of
every year our ancestors ate no fruit, no green vegetables, and (since it was
impossible for them to feed more than a few oxen, cows, swine, and poultry
during the winter months) very little butter or fresh meat, and very few
eggs. By the beginning of each
successive spring, most of them were suffering, mildly or acutely, from scurvy,
due to lack of vitamin C, and pellagra, caused by a shortage in their diet of
the B complex. The distressing physical
symptoms of these diseases are associated with no-less distressing
psychological symptoms. [See THE BIOLOGY OF HUMAN
STARVATION, by A. Keys (University of Minnesota Press, 1950); also the recent
(1955) reports of the work on the role of vitamin deficiencies in mental
disease carried out by Dr George Watson and his associates in Southern
California.]
The nervous system is more vulnerable than the other tissues of
the body; consequently vitamin deficiencies tend to affect the state of mind
before they affect, at least in any very obvious way, the skin, bones, mucous
membranes, muscles, and viscera. The
first result of an inadequate diet is a lowering of the efficiency of the brain
as an instrument for biological survival.
The undernourished person tends to be afflicted by anxiety, depression,
hypochondria, and feelings of anxiety.
He is also liable to see visions; for when the cerebral reducing valve
has its efficiency reduced, much (biologically speaking) useless material flows
into consciousness from 'out there', in Mind-at-Large.
Much of what the
earlier visionaries experienced was terrifying.
To use the language of Christian theology, the Devil revealed himself in
their visions and ecstasies a good deal more frequently than did God. In an age when vitamins were deficient and a
belief in Satan universal, this was not surprising. The mental distress, associated with even
mild cases of pellagra and scurvy, was deepened by fears of damnation and a
conviction that the powers of evil were omnipresent. This distress was apt to tinge with its own
dark colouring the visionary material, admitted to consciousness through a
cerebral valve whose efficiency had been impaired by underfeeding. But in spite of their preoccupations with
eternal punishment and in spite of their deficiency disease, spiritually minded
ascetics often saw heaven and might even be aware, occasionally, of that
divinely impartial One, in which the polar opposites are reconciled. For a glimpse of beatitude, for a foretaste
of unitive knowledge, no price seemed too high. Mortification of the body may produce a host
of undesirable mental symptoms; but it may also open a door into a transcendental
world of Being, Knowledge, and Bliss.
That is why, in spite of its obvious disadvantages, almost all aspirants
to the spiritual life have, in the past, undertaken regular courses of bodily
mortification.
So far as vitamins were
concerned, every medieval winter was a long involuntary fast, and this
involuntary fast was followed, during Lent, by forty days of voluntary
abstinence. Holy Week found the faithful
marvellously well prepared, so far as their body chemistry was concerned, for
its tremendous incitements to grief and joy, for seasonable remorse of
conscience and a self-transcending identification with the risen Christ. At this season of the highest religious
excitement and the lowest vitamin intake, ecstasies and visions were almost a commonplace. It was only to be expected.
For cloistered
contemplatives, there were several Lents in every year. And even between fasts their diet was meagre
in the extreme. Hence those agonies of
depression and scrupulosity described by so many spiritual writers; hence their
frightful temptations to despair and self-slaughter. But hence too those 'gratuitous graces', in
the forms of heavenly visions and locutions, of prophetic insights, of
telepathic 'discernments of spirits'.
And hence, finally, their 'infused contemplation', their 'obscure
knowledge' of the One in all.
Fasting was not the
only form of physical mortification resorted to by the earlier aspirants to
spirituality. Most of them regularly
used upon themselves the whip of knotted leather or even of iron wire. These beatings were the equivalent of fairly
extensive surgery without anaesthetics, and their effects on the body chemistry
of the patient were considerable. Large
quantities of histamine and adrenalin were released while the whip was actually
being plied; and when the resulting wounds began to fester (as wounds
practically always did before the age of soap), various toxic substances,
produced by the decomposition of protein, found their way into the bloodstream. But histamine produces shock, and shock
affects the mind no less profoundly than the body. Moreover, large quantities of adrenalin may
cause hallucinations, and some of the products of its decomposition are known
to induce symptoms resembling those of schizophrenia. As for toxins from wounds - these upset the
enzyme systems regulating the brain, and lower its efficiency as an instrument
for getting on in a world where the biologically fittest survive. This may explain why the Curé
d'Arts used to say that, in the days when he was free
to flagellate himself without mercy, God would refuse him nothing. In other words, when remorse, self-loathing,
and the fear of hell release adrenalin, when self-inflicted surgery releases
adrenalin and histamine, and when infected wounds release decomposed protein
into the blood, the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve is lowered and
unfamiliar aspects of Mind-at-Large (including psi
phenomena, visions, and, if he is philosophically and ethically prepared for
it, mystical experiences) will flow into the ascetic's consciousness.
Lent, as we have seen,
followed a long period of involuntary fasting.
Analogously, the effects of self-flagellation were supplemented, in
earlier times, by much involuntary absorption of decomposed protein. Dentistry was non-existent, surgeons were
executioners, and there were no safe antiseptics. Most people, therefore, must have lived out
their lives with focal infections; and focal infections, though out of fashion as
the cause of all the ills that flesh is heir to, can certainly lower the
efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve.
And the moral of all
this is - what? Exponents of a
Nothing-But philosophy will answer that, since changes in body chemistry can
create the conditions favourable to visionary and mystical experience,
visionary and mystical experience cannot be what they claim to be - what, for
those who have had them, they self-evidently are. But this, of course, is a non sequitur.
A similar conclusion
will be reached by those whose philosophy is unduly 'spiritual'. God, they will insist, is a spirit and is to
be worshipped in spirit. Therefore an
experience which is chemically conditioned cannot be an experience of the
divine. But, in one way or another, all
our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of
them are purely 'spiritual', purely 'intellectual', purely 'aesthetic', it is
merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical
environment at the moment of their occurrence.
Furthermore, it is a matter of historical record that most
contemplatives worked systematically to modify their body chemistry, with a
view to creating the internal conditions favourable to spiritual insight. When they were not starving themselves into
low blood sugar and vitamin deficiency, or beating themselves into intoxication
by histamine, adrenalin, and decomposed protein, they were cultivating insomnia
and praying for long periods in uncomfortable positions, in order to create the
psycho-physical symptoms of stress. In
the intervals they sang interminable psalms, thus increasing the amount of
carbon dioxide in the lungs and the bloodstream, or, if they were Orientals,
they did breathing exercises to accomplish the same purpose. Today we know how to lower the efficiency of
the cerebral reducing valve by direct chemical action, and without the risk of
inflicting serious damage on the psycho-physical organism. For an aspiring mystic to revert, in the
present state of knowledge, to prolonged fasting and violent self-flagellation
would be as senseless as it would be for an aspiring cook to behave like
Charles Lamb's Chinaman, who burned down the house in order to roast a
pig. Knowing as he does (or at least as
he can know, if he so desires) what are the chemical conditions of
transcendental experience, the aspiring mystic should turn for technical help
to the specialists - in pharmacology, in biochemistry, in physiology and
neurology, in psychology and psychiatry and parapsychology. And on their part, of course, the specialists
(if any of them aspire to be genuine men of science and complete human beings)
should turn, out of their respective pigeonholes, to the artist, the sibyl, the
visionary, the mystic - all those, in a word, who have had experience of the
Other World and who know, in their different ways, what to do with that
experience.
Appendix III
Vision-like effects and vision-inducing devices have played a
greater part in popular entertainment than in the fine arts. Fireworks, pageantry, theatrical spectacle -
these are essentially visionary arts.
Unfortunately they are also ephemeral arts, whose earlier masterpieces
are known to us only by report. Nothing
remains of all the Roman triumphs, the medieval tournaments, the Jacobean
masques, the long succession of state entries and coronations, of royal
marriages and solemn decapitations, of canonizations and the funerals of
Popes. The best that can be hoped for
such magnificences is that they may 'live in Settle's numbers one day more'.
An interesting feature
of these popular visionary arts is their close dependence upon contemporary
technology. Fireworks, for example, were
once no more than bonfires (and to this day, I may add, a good bonfire on a
dark night remains one of the most magical and transporting of spectacles. Looking at it, one can understand the
mentality of the Mexican peasant, who sets out to burn an acre of woodland in
order to plant his maize, but is delighted when, by a happy accident, a square
mile or two goes up in bright, apocalyptic flame.) True pyrotechny
began (in
Mobile
ponderibus descendat pegma reductis
inque chori speciem
spargentes ardua flammas
scaena rotet varios,
et fingat Mulciber orbis
per tabulas impune vagos pictaeque citato
ludant igne trabes,
et non permissa morari
fida per innocuas errent incendia turres.
'Let the counterweights be removed,' Mr Platnauer
translates with a straightforwardness of language that does less than justice
to the syntactical extravagances of the original, 'and let the mobile crane
descend, lowering on to the lofty stage men who, wheeling chorus-wise, scatter
flames. Let Vulcan forge balls of fire
to roll innocuously across the boards.
Let the flames appear to play about the sham beams of the scenery and a
tame conflagration, never allowed to rest, wander among the untouched towers.'
After the fall of
During the Renaissance
fireworks re-entered the world of popular entertainment. With every advance in the science of
chemistry, they became more and more brilliant.
By the middle of the nineteenth century pyrotechny
had reached a peak of technical perfection and was capable of transporting vast
multitudes of spectators towards the visionary antipodes of minds which,
consciously, were respectable Methodist, Puseyites, Utilitarians, disciples of Mill or Marx, of Newman, or Bradlaugh, or Samuel Smiles. In the Piazza del Popolo,
at Ranelagh and the Crystal Palace, on every Fourth
and Fourteenth of July, the popular subconscious was reminded by the crimson
glare of strontium, by copper blue and barium green and sodium yellow, of that
Other World down under, in the psychological equivalent of Australia.
Pageantry is a
visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political
instrument. The gorgeous fancy dress
worn by Kings, Popes, and their respective retainers, military and
ecclesiastical, has a very practical purpose - to impress the lower classes
with a lively sense of their masters' superhuman greatness. By means of fine clothes and solemn
ceremonies, de facto domination is transformed into a rule not merely de
jure, but positively de jure
divino.
The crowns and tiaras, the assorted jewellery, the satins, silks, and velvets,
the gaudy uniforms and vestments, the crosses and medals, the sword hilts and
the croziers, the plumes in the cocked hats and their
A clerical equivalents, those huge feather fans which make every papal function
look like a tableau from Aida - all these vision-inducing properties,
designed to make all-too-human gentlemen and ladies look like heroes,
demigoddesses, and seraphs, and giving, in the process, a great deal of
innocent pleasure to all concerned, actors and spectators alike.
In the course of the
last two hundred years the technology of artificial lighting has made enormous
progress, and this progress has contributed very greatly to the effectiveness
of pageantry and the closely related art of theatrical spectacle. The first notable advance was made in the
eighteenth century, with the introduction of moulded spermaceti candles in
place of the older tallow dip and poured wax taper. Next came the invention of Argand's tubular wick, with an air supply on the inner as
well as the outer surface of the flame.
Glass chimneys speedily followed, and it became possible, for the first
time in history, to burn oil with a bright and completely smokeless light. Coal gas was first employed as an illuminant in the early years of the nineteenth century, and
in 1825 Thomas Drummond found a practical way of heating lime to incandescence
by means of an oxygen-hydrogen or oxygen-coal-gas flame. Meanwhile parabolic reflectors for
concentrating light into a narrow beam had come into use. (The first English lighthouse equipped with
such a reflector was built in 1790.)
The influence on
pageantry and theatrical spectacle of these inventions was profound. In earlier times civic and religious ceremonies
could only take place during the day (and days were as often cloudy as fine),
or by the light, after sunset, of smoky lamps and torches or the feeble
twinkling of candles. Argand and Drummond, gas, limelight, and, forty years
later, electricity made it possible to evoke, from the boundless chaos of
night, rich island universes, in which the glitter of metal and gems, the
sumptuous glow of velvets and brocades were intensified to the highest pitch of
what may be called intrinsic significance.
A recent example of ancient pageantry, raised by twentieth-century
lighting to a higher magical power, was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth
II. In the motion picture of the event,
a ritual of transporting splendour was saved from the oblivion which, up till
now, has always been the fate of such solemnities, and preserved it, blazing
preternaturally under the floodlights, for the delight of a vast contemporary
and future audience.
Two distinct and
separate arts are practised in the theatre - the human art of the drama, and
the visionary, other-world art of spectacle.
Elements of the two arts may be combined in a single evening's
entertainment - the drama being interrupted (as so often happens in elaborate
productions of Shakespeare) to permit the audience to enjoy a tableau vivant,
in which the actors either remain still or, if they move, move only in a
non-dramatic way, ceremonially, processionally, or in
a formal dance. Our concern here is not
with drama; it is with theatrical spectacle, which is simply pageantry without
its political or religious overtones.
In the minor visionary
arts of the costumier and the designer of stage jewellery our ancestors were
consummate masters. Nor, for all their
dependence on unassisted muscle power, were they far behind us in the building
and working of stage machinery, the contrivance of 'special effects'. In the masques of Elizabethan and early
Stuart times, divine descents and irruptions of demons from the cellarage were
a commonplace; so were apocalypses, so were the most amazing
metamorphoses. Enormous sums of money
were lavished on these spectacles. The
Inns of Court, for example, put on a show for Charles I which cost more than
twenty thousand pounds - at a date when the purchasing power of the pound was
six or seven times what it is today.
'Carpentry,' said Ben Jonson sarcastically, 'is the soul of masque.' His contempt was motivated by
resentment. Inigo
Jones was paid as much for designing the scenery as was Ben for writing the
libretto. The outrages laureate had
evidently failed to grasp the fact that masque is a visionary art, and that
visionary experience is beyond words (at any rate beyond all but the most
Shakespearean words) and is to be evoked by direct, unmediated perceptions of
things that remind the beholder of what is going on at the unexplored antipodes
of his own personal consciousness. The
soul of masque could never, in the very nature of things, be a Jonsonian libretto; it had to be carpentry. But even carpentry could not be the masque's
whole soul. When it comes to us from
within, visionary experience is always preternaturally brilliant. But the early set designers possessed no
manageable illuminant brighter than a candle. At close range a candle can create the most
magical lights and contrasting shadows.
The visionary paintings of Rembrandt and Georges de La Tour are of
things and persons seen by candlelight.
Unfortunately light obeys the law of the inverse squares. At a safe distance from an actor in
inflammable fancy dress, candles are hopelessly inadequate. At ten feet, for example, it would take one
hundred of the best wax tapers to produce an effective illumination of one
foot-candle. With such miserable lighting
only a fraction of the masque's visionary potentialities could be made
actual. Indeed, its visionary
potentialities were not fully realized until long after it had ceased, in its
original form, to exist. It was only in
the nineteenth century, when advancing technology had equipped the theatre with
limelight and parabolic reflectors, that the masque came fully into its own.
Athanasius
Kircher's invention - if his, indeed, it was - was
christened from the first Lanterna Magica. The name
was everywhere adopted as perfectly appropriate to a machine, whose raw
material was light, and whose finished product was a coloured image emerging
from the darkness. To make the original
magic lantern show yet more magical, Kircher's
successors devised a number of methods for imparting life and movement to the
projected image. There were 'chromatropic' slides, in which two painted glass discs
could be made to revolve in opposite directions, producing a crude but still
effective imitation of those perpetually changing three-dimensional patterns,
which have been seen by virtually everyone who has had a vision, whether
spontaneous or induced by drugs, fasting, or the stroboscopic lamp. Then there were those 'dissolving views',
which reminded the spectator of the metamorphoses going on incessantly at the
antipodes of his everyday consciousness.
To make one scene turn imperceptibly into another, two magic lanterns
were used, projecting coincident images on the screen. Each lantern was fitted with a shutter, so
arranged that the light of one could be progressively dimmed, while the light
of the other (originally completely obscured) was progressively
brightened. In this way the view
projected by the first lantern was insensibly replaced by the view by the
second - to the delight and astonishment of all beholders. Another device was the mobile magic lantern,
projecting its image on a semi-transparent screen, on the further side of which
sat the audience. When the lantern was
wheeled close to the screen, the projected image was very small. As it was withdrawn, the image became progressively
larger. An automatic focusing device
kept the changing images sharp and unblurred at all
distances. The word 'phantasmagoria' was
coined in 1802 by the inventors of this new kind of peepshow.
All these improvements
in the technology of magic lanterns were contemporary with the poets and
painters of the Romantic Revival, and may perhaps have exercised a certain
influence on their choice of subject-matter and their methods of treating
it. Queen Mab
and The Revolt of Islam, for example, are full of Dissolving Views and
Phantasmagorias. Keats' descriptions of
scenes and persons, of interiors and furniture and effects of light, have the
intense beamy quality of coloured images on a white sheet in a darkened
room. John Martin's representations of
Satan and Belshazzar, of Hell and
The twentieth-century
equivalent of the magic lantern show is [was] the coloured movie. In the huge, expensive 'spectaculars', the
soul of masque goes marching along - with a vengeance sometimes, but sometimes
also with taste and a real feeling for vision-inducing phantasy. Moreover, thanks to advancing technology, the
coloured documentary has proved itself, in skilful hands, a notable new form of
popular visionary art. The immensely
magnified cactus blossoms, into which, at the end of Disney's The Living
Desert, the spectator finds himself sinking, come straight from the Other
World. And then what transporting
visions, in the best of the nature films, of foliage in the wind, of the
textures of rock and sand, of the shadows and emerald lights in grass or among
the reeds, of birds and insects and four-footed creatures going about their
business in the underbrush or among the branches of forest trees! Here are the magical close-up landscapes
which fascinated the makers of mille-feuilles
tapestries, the medieval painters of gardens and hunting scenes. Here are the enlarged and isolated details of
living nature out of which the artists of the
And then there is what
may be called the Distorted Documentary - a strange new form of visionary art,
admirably exemplified by Mr Francis Thompson's film, '
Our ability to project
a powerful beam of light has not only enabled us to create new forms of
visionary art; it has also endowed one of the most ancient arts, the art of
sculpture, with a new visionary quality which it did not previously
possess. I have spoken in an early
paragraph of the magical effects produced by the floodlighting of ancient
monuments and natural objects. Analogous
effects are seen when we turn the spotlights on to sculptured stone. Fuseli got the
inspiration for some of his best and wildest pictorial ideas by studying the
statues on Monte Cavallo by the light of the setting
sun, or, better still, when illuminated by lightning flashes at
The past is not
something fixed and unalterable. Its
facts are rediscovered by every succeeding generation, its values reassessed,
its meanings redefined in the context of present tastes and
preoccupations. Out of the same
documents and monuments and works of art, every epoch invents its own Middle
Ages, its private
Appendix IV
Painter in ordinary first to the Duke of his native
George de La Tour was
one of those extroverted visionaries, whose art faithfully reflects certain
aspects of the outer world, but reflects them in a state of transfigurement,
so that every meanest particular becomes intrinsically significant, a
manifestation of the absolute. Most of
his compositions are of figures seen by the light of a single candle. A single candle, as Caravaggio and the
Spaniards had shown, can give rise to the most enormous theatrical
effects. But La Tour took no interest in
theatrical effects. There is nothing
dramatic in his pictures, nothing tragic or pathetic or grotesque, no
representation of action, no appeal to the sort of emotions which people go to
the theatre to have excited and then appeased.
His personages are essentially static.
They never do anything; they are simply there in the same
way in which a granite Pharaoh is there, or a Bodhisattva from Khmer, or one of
Piero's flat-footed angels. And the single candle is used, in every case,
to stress the intense but unexcited, impersonal thereness. By exhibiting common things in an uncommon
light, its flame makes manifest the living mystery and inexplicable marvel of
mere existence. There is so little
religiosity in the paintings that in many cases it is impossible to decide
whether we are confronted by an illustration to the Bible or a study of models
by candlelight. Is the 'Nativity' at
It must be added that,
as a man, this great painter of God's immanence seems to have been proud, hard,
intolerably overbearing, and avaricious.
Which goes to show, yet once more, that there is never a one-to-one
correspondence between an artist's work and his character.
Appendix V
At the near point Vuillard painted
interiors for the most part, but sometimes also gardens. In a few compositions he managed to combine
the magic of propinquity with the magic of remoteness by representing a corner
of a room, in which there stands or hangs one of his own, or someone else's,
representation of a distant view of trees, hills, and sky. It is an invitation to make the best of both
worlds, the telescopic and the microscopic, at a single glance.
For the rest, I can
think of only a very few close-up landscapes by modern European artists. There is a strange Thicket by Van Gogh
at the Metropolitan. There is
Constable's wonderful Dell in Helmingham Park
at the Tate. There is a bad picture, Millais' Orphelia, made
magical, in spite of everything, by its intricacies of summer greenery seen
from the point of view, very nearly, of a water rat. And I remember a Delacoix,
glimpsed long ago at some Loan Exhibition, of bark and leaves and blossom at
the closest range. There must, of
course, be others; but either I have forgotten, or have never seen them. In any case there is nothing in the West
comparable to the Chinese and Japanese renderings of nature at the
near-point. A spray of blossoming plum,
eighteen inches of a bamboo stem with its leaves, tits or finches seen at
hardly more than arm's length among the bushes, all kinds of flowers and
foliage, of birds and fish and small mammals.
Each small life is represented as the centre of its own universe, the
purpose, in its own estimation, for which the world and all that is in it were
created; each issues its own specific and individual declaration of
independence from human imperialism; each, by ironic implication, derides our
absurd pretensions to lay down merely human rules for the conduct of the cosmic
game; each mutely repeats the divine tautology: I am that I am.
Nature at the middle
distance is familiar - so familiar that we are deluded into believing that we
really know what it is all about. Seen
very close at hand, or at a great distance, or from an odd angle, it seems disquietingly
strange, wonderful beyond all comprehension.
The close-up landscapes of
In nature, as in a work
of art, the isolation of an object tends to invest it with absoluteness, to
endow it with that more-than-symbolic meaning which is identical with being.
But
there's a tree - of many, one -
A single
field which I have looked upon:
Both
of them speak of something that is gone.
The something which Wordsworth could no longer see was 'the
visionary gleam'. That gleam, I
remember, and that intrinsic significance were the properties of a solitary oak
that could be seen from the train, between Reading and Oxford, growing from the
summit of a little knoll in a wide expanse of ploughland,
and silhouetted against the pale northern sky.
The effects of
isolation combined with proximity may be studied, in all their magical
strangeness, in an extraordinary painting by a seventeenth-century Japanese
artist, who was also a famous swordsman and a student of Zen. It represents a butcher bird, perched on the
very tip of a naked branch, 'waiting without purpose, but in the state of
highest tension'. Beneath, above, and
all around is nothing. The bird emerges
from the Void, from that eternal namelessness and formlessness, which is yet
the very substance of the manifold, concrete, and transient universe. That shrike on its bare branch is first
cousin to Hardy's wintry thrush. But whereas the Victorian thrush insists on
teaching us some kind of a lesson, the Far Eastern butcher bird is content
simply to exist, to be intensely and absolutely there.
Appendix VI
Many schizophrenics pass most of their time neither on earth, nor
in heaven, nor even in hell, but in a grey, shadowy world of phantoms and
unrealities. What is true of these
psychotics is true, to a lesser extent, of certain neurotics afflicted by a
milder form of mental illness. Recently
it has been found possible to induce this state of ghostly existence by
administering a small quantity of one of the derivatives of adrenalin. For the living, the doors of heaven, hell,
and limbo are opened not by 'massy keys of metals twain', but by the presence in
the blood of one set of chemical compounds and the absence of another set. The shadow-world inhabited by some
schizophrenics and neurotics closely resembles the world of the dead, as
described in some of the earlier religious traditions. Like the wraiths in Sheol
and in Homer's Hades, these mentally disturbed persons have lost touch with
matter, language, and their fellow beings.
They have no purchase on life and are condemned to ineffectiveness,
solitude, and a silence broken only by the senseless squeak and gibber of
ghosts.
The history of
eschatological ideas marks a genuine progress - a progress which can be
described in theological terms as the passage from Hades to Heaven, in chemical
terms as the substitution of mescalin and lysergic
acid [diethylamide] for adrenolutin, and in psychological
terms as the advance from catatonia and feelings of unreality to a sense of
heightened reality in vision and, finally, in mystical experience.
Appendix VII
Géricault as a negative visionary; for though his art was almost
obsessively true to nature, it was true to a nature that had been magically
transfigured, in his perceiving and rendering of it, for the worse. 'I start to paint a woman,' he once said,
'but it always ends up as a lion.' More
often, indeed, it ended up as something a good deal less amiable than a lion -
as a corpse, for example, or as a demon.
His masterpiece, the prodigious Raft of the Medusa, was painted
not from life but from dissolution and decay - from bits of cadavers supplied
by medical students, from the emaciated torso and jaundiced face of a friend
who was suffering from a disease of the liver.
Even the waves on which the raft is floating, even the overarching sky
are corpse-coloured. It is as though the
entire universe had become a dissecting room.
And then there are his
demonic pictures. The Derby, it
is obvious, is being run in hell, against a background fairly blazing with
darkness visible. 'The Horse startled by
Lightning', in the National Gallery, is the revelation, in a single frozen
instant, of the strangeness, the sinister, and even infernal otherness that
hides in familiar things. In the
From the accounts which
his friends have left of him it is evident that Géricault
habitually saw the world about him as a succession of visionary
apocalypses. The prancing horse of his
early Officier de Chasseurs was seen
one morning, on the road to Saint-Cloud, in a dusty glare of summer sunshine,
rearing and plunging between the shafts of an omnibus. The personages in the Raft of the Medusa
were painted in finished detail, one by one, on the virgin canvas. There was no outline drawing of the whole
composition, no gradual building up of an over-all harmony of tones and hues. Each particular revelation - of a body in
decay, of a sick man in the ghastly extremity of hepatitis - was fully rendered
as it was seen and artistically realized.
By a miracle of genius, every successive apocalypse was made to fit,
prophetically, into a harmonious composition which existed, when the first of
the appalling visions was transferred to canvas, only in the artist's
imagination.
Appendix VIII
In Sartor Resartus
Carlyle has left what (in Mr Carlyle, my Patient) his psychosomatic
biographer, Dr James Halliday, calls 'an amazing description
of a psychotic state of mind, largely depressive, but partly schizophrenic'.
The men and women
around me,' writes Carlyle, 'even speaking with me, were but Figures; I had
practically forgotten that they were alive, that they were not merely automata. Friendship was but an incredible
tradition. In the midst of their crowded
streets and assemblages I walked solitary; and (except that it was my own
heart, not another's, that I kept devouring) savage also as the tiger in the
jungle.... To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition,
even of Hostility; it was once huge, dead immeasurable steam-engine, rolling on
in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.... Having no hope,
neither had I any definite fear, were it of Man or of the Devil. And yet, strangely enough, I lived in a
continual, indefinite, pining fear, tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I
knew not what; it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath,
would hurt me; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but the boundless jaws of a
devouring Monster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured.' Renée and the idolater of heroes are
evidently describing the same experience.
Infinity is apprehended by both, but in the form of 'the System', the
'immeasurable Steam-Engine'. To both,
again, all is significant, but negatively significant, so that every event is
utterly pointless, every object intensely unreal, every self-styled human being
a clockwork dummy, grotesquely going through the motions of work and play, of
loving, hating, thinking, of being eloquent, heroic, saintly, what you will -
the robots are nothing if not versatile.
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