Examples of Interaction
Theoretical accounts of what great paintings are supposed to do, or how they are supposed to act on the viewer, often bear little relation to the actual experience of looking at them. These accounts can in fact become barriers, hindering a real encounter with the painting.
Each time we look at a picture, it is a fresh experience. One could argue that at each fresh viewing, we should wipe our minds clean of previous experience and acquired knowledge, in order to be alive to the seemingly inexhaustible potential within a painting. In this respect, a picture can be said to be never ‘finished’, because there will never come a moment when we have understood the sum of all its experiences. The enigma of the picture, which is its life, has no end.
Are intellect and perception mutually exclusive? Can a true response to a picture only be intuitive or is that a rather one-sided and Romantic position to take? Although it is true that a person with an excessive amount of theoretical preconceptions, can be prevented from ‘seeing’ the picture, from responding to it spontaneously, it would be error to ignore the part that intellect plays in aesthetic experience.
For example, the tree in a pot (so winning to the senses) in Bellini’s Allegoria Sacra, is enhanced immeasurably by the knowledge that it belongs to the tradition of ‘tree of life’ motifs, and to the wider realm of tree symbolism. The intellect thus provides a parallel cultural universe, or garden, in which fleeting sensations provoked by the image, can recognise, as it were, where they come from, their origins, their parents.
Another example comes from personal experience as a painter. My wife had bought as a Christmas decoration, a very life-like red bird. From the first I was drawn to this red bird, but I could not put that allure into words. In due course I set up a Still Life with the red bird in it, and throughout the long course of its painting, I was none the wiser – absolutely certain in terms of perceiving what the red bird was, but absolutely incapable of putting that perception into words. Long after finishing the picture, I read in Hall’s ‘Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art’, that, ‘a bird in Pagan antiquity signified the soul of man that flew away at his death’. At the precise moment of reading these words, there was an instant and unforeseen connection between the red bird of the still life and this older image-idea of the bird as a universal symbol going back to man’s earliest times. It was a moment of profound consolation – I understood finally why the red bird had had such an effect, as if something from the deep past, of immemorial potency, had suddenly reappeared in the present.
Intellectual knowledge can thus help to root intuitive perception. By providing knowledge of the hinterland, or ancestry, of an image that wakens rich but enigmatic feeling in us, the intellect gives this feeling a home, a family and a family history. As a result the feeling is stronger and more secure, not just here today and gone tomorrow in the flux of capricious mood changes, but genuinely rooted in tradition from which more enrichment will come.
Although perception-intuition and understanding-intellect could be said therefore to be mutually beneficial, they appear to operate independently as two distinct capacities of the mind. Perception operates in a spontaneous, unpremeditated way, achieves fruition almost instantaneously, and is volatile. As soon as we try to catch hold of the perception, in order to understand it, it vanishes, and no conscious effort of mind will induce it to return, rather like the elusive nymphs of Greek mythology who are constantly flitting away or changing into trees or water.
In contrast to this Ariel like perception, the work of the intellect – the acquirement of knowledge and the comprehension of the complexities therein – is laborious and slow. I mentioned that the realm of intellect can be seen as a garden, and continuing this analogy, intuitions or perceptions, like seed or scent blowing around in the air, need the intellect’s garden for their parent ideas or schools of thought and belief, to be rooted in and tended. When an image/idea finds its root stock, it becomes both more permanent and more pro-genitive.
The contrast between the earth-bound nature of the intellect and the volatile, air-born qualities of perception, is also demonstrated when perception affords us glimpses of things that we cannot name. On one level we know and fully understand what these things are, it is just that that kind of knowledge does not translate itself into words. Although in a strange way we are perfectly familiar with these things that only perception sees, it is as if they live high up on a mountain where words cannot go.
Yet without words, logic and the whole apparatus of the intellect, we would have built up no tradition, no repositories or stores of acquired knowledge, belief and experience, no family tree of ideas. And who is to say which came first – the rich tradition of stories, religions, philosophies and all the images, ideas and sensations they contain – or the spontaneous awareness of significance in something seen, that a painter can experience in the plain light of the present, which can seem like a personal inspiration. It may be, however, that rather than experiencing something new and privately creditable to him, the painter is instead opening himself to tradition which speaks through him in oblique and unforeseeable ways.
Another example from actual experience as a painter, shows the same pattern: first the moment of perception, spontaneous, rapid, active of its own volition rather than of the conscious will; followed much later by the intellect, via the process of reading, locating that perception’s ancestor or archetype.
I had for some time been trying to set up a Still Life. Most of it was in place except the cloth. After many unsatisfactory attempts, the cloth fell in such a way that when I went back to the viewing area, I immediately saw that I had found what I was looking for and the whole still life now had its own mysterious logic.
Through the course of the painting, this cloth shape resembling a mountain, never lost its vital stimulus, but as with the red bird, I could not articulate it verbally, could not account for it. I knew perfectly well what it was in some inaccessible part of my mind, but knew also that words would be denied entry.
Much later the clue finally was given, again through reading. In his’ Preface to Paradise Lost’, C.S. Lewis discusses Milton’s treatment of the final entry into Paradise. Lewis writes: ‘And all this realm was studded once with rich and ancient cities; a ‘pleasant soil’, but the mountain of Paradise, like a jewel set in gold, ‘far more pleasant…’
At the instant of reading this passage, there was a similar moment of revelation as experienced with the red bird. The cloth mountain in the still life, and the ‘mountain of paradise’ of tradition, merged. Ancient symbol and individual contemporary perception suddenly became one and the same. In that moment, the intellect and perception, so often at odds with each other, were able to join in sudden consummation. I finally understood why the cloth mountain had so haunted me.
Coming Home
The solace gained from such moments, indicates a need to connect with the immemorial, the undying, the deeper truths. Lewis is characteristically lucid on these matters. He speaks of, ‘Milton’s theme ‘leading’ him to deal with certain very basic images in the human mind’ and of the, ‘Paradisal idea as it exists in our minds’, as, ‘something coming through the particularities, some light which transfigures them’; and later that Milton arouses our own imagination, ‘to find again in our own depth the Paradisal light’.
‘These references’, Lewis writes, ‘to the obvious and the immemorial are there not to give us new ideas about the lost garden but to make us know that the garden is found, that we have come home at last and reached the centre of the maze – our centre, humanity’s centre, not some private centre of the poet’s.’
In this last comment, Lewis would seem to confirm my earlier suggestion that inspiration might not be a matter of personal invention, but something immemorially alive, speaking through one’s own perception.
It might seem quite a step, to move from a personal account by a painter of his thoughts about painting, to the profundity and majesty of ‘Paradise Lost’, but we are dealing with the same area of human sensibility – images, how they act upon us, and what they mean to us. And being human we share, or have the potential to share, the same depth of experience and the same moments of fulfilment.
So poet, painter, anybody, can and do share ‘certain very basic images in the human mind’, that can become images of poetry and power, images that seem to come from a great depth of time. In highlighting the differing roles of intellect and perception in aesthetic experience, it seems that we first come across these images through the agency of perception, which perceives and recognises them but cannot articulate them verbally. In turn this leaves a feeling of incompleteness, because that other side of us – the reflective, thoughtful, analytical side, that loves to compare and consider, and to find the proper place and context of things – has not yet caught up, leaving perception somehow incomplete, fugitive and homeless.
The intoxication of the senses in the moment of perception, so easily forgotten or dismissed as fanciful, needs to be underlaid with something more permanent and enduring. This is the task of the intellect, and in the time-honoured tradition of opposites attracting, perception, intuitive and volatile longs for the stability and objectivity of the intellect, while the intellect, slow and careful, in turn longs for the headlong impetuosity and vitality of perception.
It is the old mutual attraction and opposition that has re-appeared under different guises throughout history and, one might say, in each individual soul – Apollo versus Dionysus, Classicism versus Romanticism, Love versus Chastity, indeed the essential duality of human nature. The sense of coming home, of plumbing the depths to find some original state of truth and integrity – ‘the garden’ – that Lewis articulates, seems to chime with the sense of solace and completeness felt on those rare occasions when the ‘opposites’, perception and intellect, are able to join.
The workings of perception however, remain mysterious. The intellect may from time to time unearth antecedents, that pre-figure the contemporary image-object, but this is not guaranteed. The key thing is that perception instantly ‘recognises’ the poetic potency of an image, and will sense its importance even if it cannot ‘translate’ it. If in the course of time, the intellect does, through reading, hit upon the ancestor, or an ancestor, of the image, and its genealogy is understood, we then experience a profound sense of completeness, as the airy spirit of perception is somehow linked to the earth, but we cannot always expect this happy marriage to happen.
Symbol
The fact that perception does pick up on these veiled and mysterious sonorities, coming to us from beyond our time, conveys the sense that behind the bland surface of the present there is depth, and hidden within that depth, riches. Life would seem poor and meagre if, from time to time, some chance noticed thing, catching the light in a particular way – a tree, a building, a fold in cloth, a flower – did not strike a chord or catch an echo from far-off days. We all long for depth of experience, and it is only when we are vouchsafed this, that we feel complete and fulfilled.
That perception occurs is undeniable. It cannot be faked, and any attempt to do so leaves us feeling oddly ashamed, as if we have tried to besmirch something pure and unalloyed. We are visited by perception. We do not possess it. It comes to us then goes, free and independent, like a spirit of the air.
To use a phrase like ‘spirit of the air’, in today’s secular world, is to invite ridicule, but the ‘supernatural’ has always been with us. Religion, plays, myth, folk-tale and story, teem with supernatural events, such as the dove visiting the Virgin in the Annunciation, or Ariel, invisible but with a voice, flying hither and thither at Prospero’s bidding in the ‘Tempest’. It is good to develop a sceptical turn of mind, but we are the poorer when our imaginative impulsiveness can no longer embellish our lives. Secularism, scientific and technological dominance, can seem to drain the life out of the world.
Yet the moments of perception still occur, those odd accidents, empirical facts in themselves, when we suddenly notice something peculiar, a quality ‘rich and strange’, in an aspect of the world around us. In these moments, it is impossible to say whether it is the perception that animates the object, or whether it is something in or behind the object that animates the perception.
This ambiguity lies at the heart of symbolism, that uncertain area of study. Symbolism is closely linked to perception, because when something in the world animates, or is animated by perception, it is then that a symbol comes into being. The examples I have cited of perception in action – the red bird and the cloth mountain – are at the same time accounts of a symbol being incarnated, or of perception perceiving in an object its symbolic antecedents.
Symbolism then, is something active, unpredictable and alive, as opposed to the more static ciphers of allegory. For CS Lewis, symbolism and allegory are opposites. On allegory he writes: ‘You can start with an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience, and can then invent VISIBILIA to express them’…such as…’a person called IRA contending with another invented person called PATIENTA.’
In contrast, symbolism, Lewis argues, works in the exact opposite way: ‘If our passions, being immaterial, can be copied by material inventions’ (allegory), ‘then it is possible that our material world in its turn is the copy of the invisible world’….’The attempt to read that something else through its sensible imitations, to see the archetype in the copy, is what I mean by symbolism.’
This concurs with my experience in the studio, when an aspect of the world becomes suffused with a sense of ‘something else’, of richness and profound truth. ‘To read that something else through its sensible imitations’, in my view describes the essence of objective painting, when in painting an apple, for example, ‘the archetype’ is seen in the ‘copy’.
We perceive the symbol, which seems to animate a particular aspect of the world, and in so doing, it brings an awareness that there is ‘something else’, potent but invisible behind day to day experience.
The problem here is the term ‘invisible world’. It will stick in the throat of the intellect. The sceptic in us will raise an eyebrow and say: “Oh yes, what world is this?” And the perceptor will have no answer, other than to say rather feebly, that it feels sometimes as if there is an invisible world ‘somewhere’, from which symbols, archetypes and riches come.
The Advantages of Inarticulacy
It is a question of whether you trust the sensations you have, over and above their plausibility. Cezanne spoke of the importance of his ‘petit sensations’, and it is the case that the painter, once he has learnt the trade, relies almost entirely on his sensations as to whether something ‘works’. Arising from this, or so it used to be, is the characteristic taciturnity of painters. They do not need words, their sensations are eloquent enough, and it follows, when perception is honed on a daily basis, that it can reveal things hitherto undreamt of.
The effort of active discernment necessary to objective painting, clarifies and heightens perceptive power, until there is a change of dimension. Perception widens to include ‘all time’, or so it seems. The physical aspects of a Still Life take on a life which is not the painter’s. The studio seems to become a place where, to quote Edgar Wind, ‘the universal invades the particular’.
There are times when the painter will be aware of this silent language, but it is often the case that he is absorbed in the task of painting, and he only becomes aware of the mysterious portent of something he has painted, long after it has been completed. Montaigne, in talking of writers, speaks of the poetic flights which the author himself acknowledges ‘to proceed from something else than himself.’ ‘It is the same with painting’, Montaigne continues, ‘for it sometimes happens that touches escape the brush of the artist that so far exceed his conception and his art as to excite his own admiration and astonishment.’ Montaigne puts his finger on the key element of this mystery when, apropos of certain paintings, he comments on, ‘the charm and the beauty which enter into them’ (the works), ‘not only in spite of the intention, but without even the knowledge of the workman.’
Often the best things happen when our backs are turned, it seems, and mystery, that something that cannot be explained within the process of painting, is established as empirical fact. The intellect, however, while noting all these things, cannot take part in the sensation. It cannot digest the rapidity and abundance of symbolic life, one definition of which is that a symbol holds several meanings simultaneously. Perception on the other hand can comprehend, or partake, effortlessly, in these silent revelations, but it cannot speak of them; and the rule of the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece, forbidding those who took part, from speaking of what they saw, comes to mind.
So mystery and silence are fitting when it comes to these matters, but the intellect cannot help pondering these things, because that is what intellect does, it tries to understand.
Paradox – the Dark and the Light
This contradictory position, where on the one hand we perceive truths that cannot speak their name, and on the other, we endeavour to apply intellectual probity to these sensations; is expressed memorably by the 3rd Century AD Neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus: ‘He that would speak exactly must not name it (the ultimate one) by this name or that; we can circle, as it were, about its circumference, seeking to interpret in speech our experience of it, now shooting near the mark, and again disappointed of our aim by reason of the antinomies we find in it. The greatest antinomy arises in this, that our understanding of it is…by a presence higher than all knowing… Hence the word of the Master (Plato), that it overpasses speech and writing. And yet we speak and write, seeking to forward the pilgrim upon his journey thither…’
The essential paradox, or antinomy, is, that the intellect cannot know what perception is able to perceive. In Plato’s ‘Phaedrus’, Socrates refused to dismiss as mere fancies, the creatures of myth and religion – centaurs, nymphs, gods and goddesses. His reason being, that as he does not know his own self, how can he be sure of the existence or not of such other things?
If we do not know ourselves, then it would behove us to be hospitable to contradiction, as many other great thinkers of the past have been. Peter Vansittart, in his history of England, wrote that in the 16th Century, “Science, religion and hermeticism could jostle within the same head …Galileo did not disdain astrology, Blake and Keppler dabbled in it. Newton, profoundest thinker of Europe, respected certain branches of alchemy, and the magic properties of numbers, from which Pythagoras himself had not escaped.”
In the Age of Enlightenment, Goya, on the title page of his etching series ‘Los Caprichos’, wrote the famous line, ‘The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters’. This enigmatic statement can be interpreted in two ways, as Kenneth Clarke observed – either that when we abandon the discipline of reason we become monstrous in our behaviour, or that even when we try to follow reason, when we sleep our dreams show that we are still haunted by fears and terrors, ‘of a kind which have haunted the human imagination throughout history’.
Jung encouraged the study of the darker, unknown areas of ourselves, which became known as the ‘unconscious’ within the discipline of psychoanalysis. Jung described psychoanalysis as a shining of a light into a darkness that could harbour riches as well as terrors. In other words, by talking in a clinical setting and by recollecting dreams, the obscure terrors and destructive impulses that haunt us, are made more visible, thus enabling us to understand better what is disturbing us, thereby leading to a more balanced and less destructive life.
As regards the negative aspects of the ‘unconscious’ that can so damage our lives, Jung’s strategy was akin to the military dictum of ‘Know thy Enemy’, but for Jung the unconscious was also the source of good things. Like Plato’s black and white horses, the unconscious could release fair as well as foul, and the shining of the light could open a window on the latent richness of our nature, encouraging inspiration and energy. But key to Jung’s practice was the application of reason, or rather the study of the irrational by the rational.
The subject of this essay, the duality of perception and the intellect, deals with the same essential reality, that artistic practice has to be open to what is known, and what is unknown. The vital energy, the perceptive triggers, come from we know not where (Jung’s definition of the unconscious was simply – everything that which we have no knowledge of), and yet the intellect in endeavouring to find things out, is sometimes able to ‘plant’ the perception, with a resulting increase in vigour and permanence that is discussed earlier in the essay. And a balance has to be found between the unpredictable, fugitive nature of perception, and a steady working practice through which the unknown can transpire. As CS Lewis said, ‘he who does his own work well will do work he never dreamed of.’
Apollo and Marsyas
I mentioned earlier Socrates’ refusal to disavow the centaurs and other supernatural inhabitants of myth and religion (which he is urged to do by his companion Phaedrus). His refusal stems, I suggest, from his recognition that such ‘fantasy’ is actually a very real part of ourselves: Socrates mocks “the over-clever and laborious person…who is sceptical about these,” (the creatures of myth) “and tries with his boorish kind of wisdom to reduce each to what is likely… . As for me, there’s no way I have the leisure for it all, and the reason for it, my friend, is this. I am not yet capable of ‘knowing myself’, in accordance with the Delphic inscription; so it seems absurd to me that while I am still ignorant of this subject I should inquire into these things which do not belong to me. So then saying goodbye to these things, and believing what is commonly thought about them…, I inquire not into these but into myself…” (‘Phaedrus, section ‘a’ of page 229/230).
Much nearer our own time, JRR Tolkien, with an equal scorn for secular ‘realism’, asserted the validity of the fairy tale and the vitality of fantasy. “The maddest castle that ever came out of a giant’s bag in a wild Gaelic story is…a great deal more real,” he wrote, than the ephemeral products of so-called ‘real life’, such as motor cars or fridges.
In my view both Tolkien and Socrates recognise that the imaginative and perceptive powers come from a natural and age-old part of ourselves, without whose vigour we would have none of the myths and tales that have sprung up the world over, and none of the nourishment that these stories bring. The difference between the calm objectivity of reason and intellect, and the perceptive vigour of imagination, is that the latter is productive. For the painter beauty does not come into the world through rational debate, and yet reason plays a vital role in beauty’s genesis. The good gardener trains and guides, cuts back excessive growth, but he needs the wild energy of nature. Conversely, without the necessary husbandry, the garden swiftly degenerates into overgrowth, darkness and forlorn wilderness. So painting, without the corrective of reason, will descend into incoherence and vacuity.
The life of the mind and the making of art need the cold edge of reason, to disentangle, to clarify, to order; but without the vigour and richness of the natural and instinctive part of ourselves, it would become sterile, an academic exercise without warmth and vitality. All would be explainable and all would be dull.
The myth of the Flaying of Marsyas is both an example of the richness that the human mind is capable of, and is also useful in expanding on the contrast between the intellect and perception that is the theme of this essay. The story, like most myth, is simple yet bizarre, not to say baffling.
Marsyas, a satyr (half man – half beast), finds the flute discarded by Athena because the playing of it distorted her features. He challenges Apollo to a musical contest, on the condition that the victor should do what he liked with the vanquished. The Muses decide in favour of Apollo, who bound Marsyas to a tree and flayed him alive. His blood was the source of the River Marsyas.
In Edgar Wind’s elucidation of this ‘gloomy’ mystery (‘Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance’) based on Raphael’s painting of the subject, the classic interpretations focus on the opposition between the heavenly and the earthly, between a god and a satyr – half man, half beast representing ‘the vital powers of nature’. Wind speaks of the closely juxtaposed ‘glory and agony’ in Raphael’s painting, as Marsyas faces the victorious God who issues the command to have him flayed. In Ovid’s account Marsyas awaits his ‘living death’ and cries out to Apollo: “Why do you tear me from myself?” (Metamorphoses)
‘Marsyas’ Wind writes ‘was a follower of Bacchus, and his flute was the Bacchic instrument for arousing the dark and uncontrollable passions that conflict with the purity of Apollo’s lyre. The musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas was therefore concerned with the relative powers of Dionysian darkness and Apllonian clarity, and if the contest ended with the flaying of Marsyas, it was because flaying was itself a Dionysian rite, a tragic ordeal of purification by which the ugliness of the outward man was thrown off and the beauty of his inward self revealed.’
Much of the material of this essay seems to be embodied in this myth. The ‘conflict’ between the earthly passions of Marsyas’ flute and the purity of Apollo’s heavenly lyre, seem to become in artistic experience, interwoven and mingled. Perception which appears to have heavenly powers of discernment and clarity beyond the power of speech, is also instinctive and alive with intoxicating richness and an almost animal vigour, like the rapid effoliation of Spring or the leap of a wild creature. Hence it seems to have both Apollonian and Dionysian traits.
Likewise intellect and clarity of reason, traditionally the gift of Apollo, the sky god from whom order, civilisation and the arts spring, take on more earth-bound characteristics. The airborne impetuosity of perception needs to be followed by the slower intellect, ordering, researching, recognising affinities. Once again the image that springs to mind is of the intellect as gardener and it is in his garden that perception needs to find its parent soil and archetypal forbears, for only then will a sense of completeness or unity be experienced.
Above all the myth brings to life in the starkest terms the two opposites that have always run through human nature and art: the need for clarity, reason and order that contrasts with the equally important need for richness, the progenititive darkness of the earth, the proliferating abundance of nature; in short the unpredictable versus the stable, the wild versus the civilised.
The myth also shows the ancient desire for release, release from our mortal limitation, the escape from the self into something larger that is at the root of the artistic impulse, and also the cleansing or purgation that we long for, despite knowing that it will be both pleasure and pain. As Wind points out: ‘The cry’ (of Marsyas): ‘ “Why do tear me from myself,” expresses then an agonised ecstasy and could be turned, as it was by Dante, into a prayer addressed to Apollo: “Enter my breast, and so infuse me with your spirit as you did Marsyas when you tore him from the cover of his limbs.”
Dante’s words highlight the violence inherent in the artistic venture, the sense that we are too small, with limitations that must be ripped away in order for inspiration to flow, that there is a hopeless disproportion between mortal frailty and godlike universality. Thus there is a triple action to the myth: the clash between the God and the mortal half-animal man, which results in the evisceration of the man but then also his salvation as his inner purity, or the immortal that is in him, is released in the river that flows from him.
The latent potency of the myth has attracted many painters, and one of the greatest interpretations was Titian’s. In the painting, as Apollo kneels down to his gruesome act of flaying, we perceive bewilderedly that this is a bitter-sweet occasion, tragic yet festive, with musicians looking on as they blithely and cheerfully play on their viols; while Apollo, intent on his grim task, is also benign and merciful, the surgeon god leading us through pain of death to joy and celebration. There is the sense that the God has come down to this woodland scene, to cut with his clarifying knife through confusion and excessive growth, and we are suddenly allowed glimpses of heaven and snatches of heavenly music, all the more poignant for being heard amidst the rough wildness of a tangled wood.
It is somewhat anti-climactic to return from these profound mysteries to the quiet everyday world of the studio, but the fathomless antiquity of the myth, and its beauty, both frightening and hopeful, painful and sweet, is based on the same pairing of opposites explored in this essay – heavenly and earthly, reason and instinct, taken to the ultimate conclusion – that in death we will find our ultimate release.
That release, as has been said, is the third element in the action of the myth. From the clash of opposites something new is born. From Marsyas’ death a river flows, whose waters, in Ovid’s account, are the clearest in the land. From the wrestling of contending forces of ardour and objectivity, richness and clarity; Art, something new from ancient stock, comes into being. And so art in its true role echoes or distantly rehearses mortality. Something new is born from us who will pass away. If art is a release from the contradictory nature of man, so this prefigures death which can be seen as the final release.
And although it might seem an overreach to be considering such profound matters in an essay that sets out to examine day-to-day artistic practice, these matters inevitably crop up in any serious consideration of artistic practice. Why, if it were not meant to portray the dilemma of mortality and being human, did art come into being in the first place? For surely the well-spring of art is to leave something behind, something so well-wrought and beautiful, that it defies time, and will centuries later be still here, still new, the contending imperatives that made it, blent into one strength that does not age or die.
Michael Sangster
November 2023
