I have, called the last bird the king bird, or the Phoenix Bird of Paradise, because it is the bird of imagination, which ever renews ant) "connects." I define imagination in the poet Baudelaire's sense, as the faculty which rouses all the others, or in the sense of Shakespeare's words in A Midsummer Night's Dream: "imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown."
This analysis of the complex of references involved in the condition of seeing may, in the erratic flights of the seven birds, reveal some striking results.
First, we may find that there is a general connection between human breathing—the inhale-exhale process—and the feeling a work of art evokes. Paintings and sculptures ultimately fuse sounds, vibrations and stirrings in the inward life of the artist. They are never mere copies of outside objects. Certain forms, especially in architecture, tend to be relaxing. Others are constricting. And through long habit and association various colours, lines and forms have become the index of our own stirrings, moods and emotions, affecting our feelings and tending to create a new equilibrium. For this reason it has been said that all arts tend towards the condition of music.
Secondly, it may become clear that, apart from the eyes, the whole sensibility, including not only the five senses, but also the nerves, muscles, tendons and other parts of the body, as well as the soul, comes into operation, even in the few seconds most people take to look at a work of art, during the time they are unconsciously involved in the condition which may go beyond looking to seeing.
Thirdly, quite a few conventional attitudes may be upset. For instance, you may prefer to sit down to see a picture, and allow your rhythmic life to move or to dwell within (rather than look at it always standing up or walking about) so that the condition of seeing beyond looking may be stimulated. Also, art galleries and museums may change their methods of hanging pictures and put up one or two works where they generally crowd fourteen or fifteen on a single wall, thus cancelling out one image with the other.
So works of art may cease to be merely pleasant backgrounds, furniture or decor, because it may be found that even the "ugly" distortions of a so-called devil mask can, with the stirrings they excite, come within the purview of "beauty," in spite of the terrors, repulsions, even horrors they display. Their beauty comes from the essential vibrations which started off the artist's sheer delight in image-making. We may find that more often than not we listen to the music of the singing line or to the drip-drop of colours, and that the eye is not merely the looking eye but the "listening eye," aware of vibrations.
Again, the sense of touch may be found to have a good deal to do with the enjoyment of relief painting or sculpture. It has been found that eating with the fingers is not nearly so uncivilised as many Westerners have thought it to be in the past.
In fact, after tracing the erratic flights of the seven birds, some art-lovers may forget their snobbery and their easygoing habits and ask themselves what really happens to them during the few seconds in which they confront a work of art.
I shall, then, describe the activities of the seven little-known birds which stimulate the alliance of the onlooker's vision with art works and with some of those elusive, subtle rhythms that are part of the human metabolism from birth. Many of these rhythms have remained hidden or undiscovered, because of the conceptual and anti-imagist bias produced in literate people by faulty educational systems in which ideas and meanings are valued more than feelings. We must learn to avoid the easy quest for literary meaning in art and for dominantly philosophical and socio-historical facts. The distinction between poetry in words and the poetry by analogy of visual art must be emphasised.
The pictorial and plastic situation and its ancillary vibrations, in terms of expression of form and of philosophy, must become our chief concern. In this way we can explain by implication how the body-soul's whole range of feelings—from languor, delirium and abandon to studied cynicism—is often neglected in reactions to works of art. In this way, too, the creative process as the release of vision by the artist may be apprehended in the onlooker's complex of references and experiences. Thus some part of the total experience or darshana may be received, and the rasa, or flavour, consequent upon absorbing or savouring works of art may be tasted.
1: The Dickeybird
THE FIRST bird which flies off as soon as you look at a picture is the bird of optical vision, which emerges from the focus of the two eyes (Fig. 2). It is an eager, impatient, impetuous bird, which goes out flapping, flopping, excited and quick, from the converging point of the eyes and fixes its stare upon the work of art. It is almost like the bird the photographer releases when he clicks the shutter of his camera lens open, telling his youngest models to "watch the birdie" (Fig. 3).
In fact, it is an accepted idea that the first view of anything is very much like that of the camera, focussed in a particular orbit, except that the camera is a machine and the eye is a live instrument, intimately connected with the other organs of the human body. This has led many people to regard the optical vision as the "camera eye," And so the eyes are supposed to see, more or less, the likeness of an object in nature as a copy of the outside object, an imitation of reality.
This commonsense notion is fairly correct. But, beyond the camera eye, the retina helps to discriminate among the various parts of the area within the focus. As a result, our visual experience becomes, soon after the first impact, a complex of highly involved references. With the alacrity of an electrical signal, the eye bird, focussed upon a picture, sends messages to the other birds of our senses (Fig. 4). Like the ear, it gets a response and thus becomes the "listening eye," connected with the nervous system and the brain. Also, these senses, and the various energies of the vital organism— the other birds, as I prefer to call them—supply the material which enables the bird of reason to synthesise the messages. The bird of imagination may then ultimately fly out and comprehend the work of art as a whole.
4. "Medal of Alberti" by Matteo de' Pasti (Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
Thus even the simple optical vision is a phenomenon of such intricacy that it cannot be measured in all its subtle interconnections by any instrument so far invented. As a gateway to the outside world, it is one of the miraculous results of mankind's long evolutionary process. We can merely summarise its functions briefly and suggest the complex of references.
What happens when the dickeybird, or the bird of the eye, flies off? This affects not only the eyes; a person's body-soul, inspired by its goal-seeking desires and by conative will and curiosity, projects itself through the eyes towards an object. Light of a single colour is the simplest type of radiation, appearing as a single line in the spectrum. The sensation excited by monochromatic light is, therefore, the simplest type of visual sensation. But to sense even monochromatic light and recognise it involves a compulsion from within the spectator. Only through tension in the protoplasmic metabolism of the human being is it led to awareness of things in the universe outside.
Scientific observation of the human cornea lens and retina confirm the eye's similarity to a camera. But, because there is always a cameraman directing the lenses to the focus and opening the shutter, even as with any mechanical camera, the eye becomes an organic instrument or machine for perceiving things.
Until the moment of looking, there is the sensation of perception and only a little apperception, or understanding. But certain facts about the human eye complicate the pure sensation. The evidence for the existence of these facts, which are not known to common sense, comes from optical illusions.