Even the critics seldom emphasise the nature of the complex of references which emerge in those who wish really to see a work of art. And the reason for this may be that the condition of seeing or vision, or total experience (darshana in Sanskrit), with all its subtle implications in the body-soul, can never be totally defined or fixed. Very few attempts have so far been made to distinguish between looking and seeing, looking and noticing and, again, if I may put it in an ancient Indian form, "seeing and seeing." Nor have the neuromuscular phenomena of man's highly sensitive biological organism, the miraculous product of millions of years of vertebrate evolution, been deeply analysed, as yet, in relation to the feelings and recognitions, analogies and resonances which can occur between ourselves and works of art.
Always, however, we bring our human responses to a work of art instinctively. Sometimes these work well and the onlooker may carry away the "feel" of a painting or sculpture. More often than not there remain only casual, superficial experiences without much value. People sum up their reactions with ejaculations like "lovely," "beautiful," "marvellous," "splendid," "glorious," "wonderful," "great," "bad," "atrocious," "What does it mean?" and "Is it art or double-talk?"
If the purpose of a work of art is to intensify the emotions or to heighten the awareness of rhythm, colour, line, form or expression, then, even though a work of art may remain a "personal experience" for each individual, we must try to analyse the elements of art experience, to increase our enjoyment and to make it, as far as possible, darshana, total imaginative experience. We must try to achieve oneness with the internal rhythm, joy, catharsis or release, or whatever the aesthetic experience may be called.
In the following pages, we shall suggest some hypotheses for seeing beyond looking.
It is important to note that when we speak of pictures here, we do not refer to photographs. At its best, the camera does, indeed, select a visual situation, mood or symbol, and this involves the photographer's choice of qualities that suggest the whole vision. The photographer of talent is today an artist who is freed only by his machine.
But because the making of a painting or a sculpture involves an almost indefinable, prolonged and continuous creative process, the creative artist is more totally involved and does not necessarily depend on a particular tool. At any given moment, the heightened imagination of the artist is the real determining factor in so far as it gathers up all the strains of biological and psychophysical energies. (This has sometimes been done in photography, as by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, but is more integral to the artist who uses his total personality.)
Our vision or visionary image is revealed, after analysis, to be composed of many form-giving interpretations. We make certain voluntary and involuntary choices of colours, and we distinguish structures, emphasising certain elements and leaving out others. I will use a metaphorical method in describing what happens, since the response is more poetical in its nature than scientific, and since art experience is delight, deep sensitive awareness, a flight into the inner realm of a work, rather than the casual appeasement of an appetite for vulgar sensationalism or for precise intellectual understanding. I have, therefore, referred to the responses of the body-soul as "seven little-known birds of the inner eye,"
These birds may fly singly, or in unison, or in a haphazard manner. It seems to me that the total vision, or darshana, as I call it, is not an orderly process, because of the over-abundance of perceptions, apperceptions and vibrations which are the inner energies of the body-soul. Affiliated with these inner energies are emotions, moods and feelings and stirrings in the subconscious life. So many traces of experience become active along the tracks of the racial unconscious in the moment of seeing that it is difficult to distinguish them or to say which portion of the metabolism became energised first. Therefore, I am inclined to question the view that a work of art evokes a "pure aesthetic emotion." Though the response may ultimately be joy, the peripheral reactions do suggest practical significances. Thus the wall-painting The Dying Princess, in Ajanta, may conduce to karuna, or pity; Leonardo's Madonna and Child, in the Hermitage Museum, to love; Picasso's Guernica to horror of war. And these moods, or bhavas, are almost biological. So aesthetic response cannot be a class apart, but part of a totality of responses.
I am not sure in what order these responses emerge. But for the sake of convenience I have described the flight of the seven little-known birds or energies in a certain sequence, as indicative of what might happen to a good rasika in the first second or two of his mature contemplation of a work of art. But the actual response may or may not happen in this sequence.
Given the flight of the seven birds along the energised tracks of experience, we might, I believe, be able to see. That is, we might become more intensely aware of the suggestions made by the composition of colours, forms, lines, tones and textures, through the "poetry by analogy" of visual art, than we are when we are merely looking. Works of art are popularly understood as illustrations of poetry or stories, or as themes yielding logical meaning. But this idea may give place to the real response that lies, perhaps, in the awakening of the active body-soul.
When played upon by art experience, this active body-soul begins to release energies or vasanas and either allies itself with the experience or rejects it, completely or in part. In this process, works which are merely slick or clever, or unfelt imitations of appearances, are proved to be false, sentimental, tawdry and insincere, lacking the core of the vital creative process in the organisation of form. Such works are devoid of genuine struggle on the part of the artist to construct from a challenge, to ally himself with the creative vision of the intensely eager onlooker. These indifferent works can then be cast aside through the value judgements that are implicit in true seeing.
I wish to make it clear that many Western aesthetic systems, based on pure sensation, are inadequate. I feel that Lord Russell, following David Hume and Professor G. E. Moore, overplayed sensation and congeries of sensations. We become aware of sensations only after the impact has passed through our physiology. By that time sensations are not simple percepts, but have acquired affiliations which charge them with suggestions, vitalities and meanings. This is to say we have no pure abstract sensation but perceptions-apperceptions.
The process of contemplation, or total darshana, is something like this. The first bird flies off impetuously, propelled by curiosity, and communicates to the memory its discrimination of the lines, colours and forms beyond the light in the retina. The second, the memory bird, recognises the likeness of image or lines to what has been experienced before. The third bird flies off from the thalamus (the survival of the anthropoid ape in ail of us) underneath the cerebral cortex. Vibrating with questions ("What?" and "How?" and "Why?") this third bird transmits violent currents above and below, since the thalamus is connected with the brain as well as the spinal cord. The currents are transmitted downwards to the lumbar ganglion and to the mysterious kundalini, or the dormant serpent power, which may be the ultimate repository of all the rhythmic wavelengths. The fourth, the rhythm bird, follows the seminal possibilities, such as those from the various past and present rhythms. This fourth bird allies itself to or dissociates the body-soul from the organised pattern.
The fifth, the heart bird, is already filling the personality with the excitement of the gestalt. If its energies have been aroused by the art experience, the blood flow quickens. The sixth, the brain bird, always hovering over the personality from the field-station of the head, makes the image an autonomous reality, and at this point what began as a message from outside, "reading from," may turn into a "reading into." The seventh, the king bird, takes in the whole. Seeing everything by intuition, as it were, it makes the suggestions produced by the composition of colours, forms and other visual elements into integral projections of the inner world of the faculties. It transforms the outer experience, With sympathy, empathy or insight, into a total vision of the possibilities of expression and into the delectation which may ensue from a work of art.
Actually it is rarely that the "third eye" of the imagination opens up and enables the body-soul to see, absorb, "savor" or taste the work of art. Only in the gifted rasika can the body-soul achieve that release of incipient energies, vibrations and urges which is the condition of seeing all. This opening up of the third eye and release of energies unites the inner life of a work of art—its vibrations and stirrings—with