Have You Ever…
Sometimes good advice comes from the most unlikely quarters.
A visit to the Biograph Theater was (in my day, anyway) one of the rites de passage for first-year students at the University of Chicago. The theater was famous because it was there, on the sidewalk in front, under the marquee, as he and the dame who betrayed him were exiting from a showing of Manhattan Melodrama, that John Dillinger was shot dead by the FBI. By the time I arrived there, that was about all the place had to commend it, though; it was now a revival house, and the movie that was showing that evening was a failed black-and-white British anthology film from the fifties called Three Cases of Murder.
Two of the three cases were supernatural. In one, a British statesman, incongruously played by Orson Welles, was murdered by a rival who had figured out a way to invade his dreams; all I remember from it is a scene in which the entire House of Commons hissed “Resign! Resign!” at one of the statesmen — I don't recall which.
The other supernatural thriller was about a painting. In this one, a visitor to a museum who is casually glancing at the painting is accosted by an ambiguous figure who asks him “Have you ever looked closely at the painting? I mean really closely?” Gradually the visitor gets cajoled into looking ever more closely, getting nearer and nearer to the painting, until — of course — he passes into it, and is trapped there forever — I think; the details are rather fuzzy after that.
Now the advice in question was not “Resign!” although that is good advice too, as we shall see, but to look closely at paintings. That paintings are to be “looked at” seems hardly worth saying, until you go to the Museum of Modern Art and find that very few of its six-million- visitors-a-year are looking at anything, or — God forbid you should pause in front of something — you get “moved along” by the guards, who may's well be muttering “nothing to see here” while they do it, like cops at a crime scene waving gawkers on. The “closely” part is more ambiguous, since some paintings may not call for the detailed examination that word implies; and perhaps it's just me, but I detect a kind of removal — hostility, perhaps? — in the “at” that I think inimical to the experiences to be had — we shoot at something, or spit at someone, and so on — so I will emend that part of the advice too, to read “look at any painting in such a way that you cross the magical threshold, after which the painting is no longer something you look at, but something you...”
You what? That is rather more difficult to say, for reasons that I hope will become clear shortly; and before I try to say it, and try to unfold whatever of general relevance the advice may have with respect to other arts (or to life in general — but perhaps that should be left up to you to gather, take or leave), I must try your patience with another reminiscence, this time a more recent one.
I had it on reliable authority that if I stood at a distance from the Rothko No.16 up at the Met, such that I could take in the whole of it, and “diffused my gaze,” the painting would begin to change.
The painting in question is composed, à la Rothko, of three separated horizontal fields, the bottom one brown (or let us agree so to designate it: in fact, this field, and the others, and the let-us-agree-to-call-it background have innumerable shades of the dominant color), the wider middle one black, and the narrower top one red; the background is dark blue.
Or so it seems to be composed when you look at it with your normal, focus-oriented conspectuities (your “fleshly eyes,” as the theologians might say) — the kind of looking, that is, of which the pedantic curatorial specifications of size (“8 ft. 6 in. × 9 ft. 11 1/2 in. × 1 3/4 in” in this case — centimeter measurements on request) and date (1960) are in some way “objectively” true (if irrelevant in most every other — when has knowing the thickness in quarter-inches of the support ever come into it?). But when you diffuse your gaze, and wait, all that begins to change: the middle field dilates upwards, and drives the now-intensely orange field to the very top of the painting, where a yellow band appears; the background blue inundates the bottom field; and all these changes are in motion, the whole painting continues to change in let-us-agree-to-call them (but “call” in a different sense: see below) the dimensions and colors of the three fields and what was formerly seen as the background.
Or it does as long as you keep your gaze diffused; for as soon as you focus on any part, the whole painting collapses back to its old curatorial self, the painting you saw before you crossed the magical threshold.
No doubt many will be inclined to doubt this whole account, or to discount it as a hallucination. All I can say is (and you can doubt this too) that others report similar experiences. Nor were the changes in question optical-illusory “effects” of some kind, or effects at all, if by that word is implied that the diffuser-of-his-or-her-gaze was purely passive; something had to be done by the gaze-diffuser to bring the transformation about, namely, diffuse his or her gaze, and, in my case anyway, most receptively wait. Nor were the changes the result of switching between two reversible organizations of the same field, as in an (instantaneous) switch of visual gestalt, as the two were not, or were no longer the same field, nor was there any independent, fixed field of which the two were reversible organizations.
Nor was the experience “visual” in the usual sense, if at all. Vision normally presents a various array of colors, edges, and shapes, variously disposed in space; in this case, it would present, to our fleshly eyes, the large rectangular surface, with the fields, etc., described above. But we would also be aware of the wall around it, the floor between it and us, the people walking by, the other paintings nearby, and so on — that is to say, of bodies and the space they occupy or move through. But in this experience, nothing was present to vision but the changes themselves, which occupied (I really mean possessed) the entire oval of vision. Just where they were happening is impossible to say, because it is impossible to specify a location when there is no space in which to situate it — or, and equally, to situate the subject in whose eyes the changes were going on — for it makes no sense to enforce the distinction of painting and viewer when there is no space in which the two can be juxtaposed. And the motion mentioned above was taking place in no-space, too — there was “qualitative succession,” as Bergson might say, motion, that is, without moving bodies or a medium for them to move through. And with no space, words like “dimensions” (even to the quarter-inch), “three” and “field” cannot be taken in their usual acceptations, “ballasted” as those are with spatial significance.
The sum of it all is that the distinction of viewer and painting, of subject and object — the distinction implied in that remote or hostile “at” — was annulled. That is: while it was annulled; for whenever you did anything to reintroduce it, by, say, focusing somewhere on it with your eyes, you were returned to the world of things external to one another, variously disposed in space, you included.
I need hardly say that any discourse about painting, be it art historical, biographical, or critical, is predicated precisely on that distinction, though in these cases, it is not the “at” that signals the (hostile?) separation but the “about.”
So to complete the ellipsis from a page or so back: “look at any painting in such a way that you cross the magical threshold, after which the painting is no longer something that you look at, but something you become, and in so becoming, are no longer a you, nor the painting an it.”
Any painting? Well, perhaps not; but the general principle would seem to be to let the artwork determine your perception, and not, as in “interpretations” of any kind, the other way around. And here that other bit of advice is not irrelevant: “Resign!” “Diffusing,” after all, is a kind of resignation of your focus, and with it, a resignation of what we might roughly call your point of view or individual perspective, or conscious ego. And “resign” is a good word for this, as it designates something you both do and stop doing at the same time: “controlled surrender,” Dewey would call it.
Before going on to adapt this principle to other arts — well, maybe just to poetry — let me anticipate a quibble about my use of the word “magical.” Surely that is just a piece of vulgar rhetorical gush, as when a restaurant reviewer calls a serving of asperges á la Flamande “magical,” or the soi-disant “Magic Pan” boasts of its amazing non-stick coating — surely I can't mean it “literally,” as they say? But I do mean it — though perhaps the right adverb here is “naively.” For whether the arts originated in magic or not, they never lose their connection to it. A painter picks up some goo on the end of her wand — I mean brush — moves her hand about in some mysterious way, and lo! a face appears. How is that possible? A sculptor takes a regular old bicycle seat and handlebars and claps them together in an unexpected way, and they become the head of a bull. (How was that possible?). An architect makes stones stand in air (think about that one). Poetry remains incantation and spells, and dance, invocation and spirit-possession. And how else but magically can air turn into a trio for two oboes and English horn? I know technicians can “let light in” on the magic of some of these (not all!) and I am as sophisticated as the next guy, and as overly-quick to accept materialist explanations of practically everything, but technical (or psychological or historical) explanations, supposing them adequate, don't efface the face the painter has summoned into being out of nowhere. “Transformation” is our usual word for these sorts of presto-chango, though its thoroughly magical sense lives on only in the cant of conjurers. And besides, I come from poetry, where it is normal for simple words, simply collocated, suddenly to work in unanticipatable and undecomposable ways, none know how — "shops” and “green” are just two words, the second names a subway line in Chicago, the first, the kind of things you find in a mall, but behold!
...spinning Worms,
That in their green shops weave the smooth-hair'd silk
is a different matter altogether. And the magician who worked this particular transformation put it in the mouth of a wand-wielding wizard.
Or — since I spoke of incantations — how's this:
How to keep–is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere
known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce,
latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?
Or — since I spoke of spells — this:
Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid
A transposition of the two lines, while retaining the (prose) sense, voids the pattern of consonants and vowels and, in true magical fashion, instantly destroys the efficacy of the spell.
Or — speaking of transpositions — this:
blue fur, moles have
Try transposing that into normal syntax, and see what happens.
Anyway, to return to the principle involved: we can approach a work of art with any of a thousand possible attitudes, or intentions. The person standing next to me at the Met might have been an international art thief, figuring out how to get so big a painting into his getaway car — would he have to cut the Rothko from its support? Here quarter inches might be decisive, and it is very generous of the museum to furnish them for the delectation of this class of connoisseur. And next to him is an insurance agent, trying to estimate the premium for so “major” a work; and next to him is a seething anarcho-avant-gardist, with a bandana around his neck, indignation in his heart and a box cutter in his pocket, checking out the guards to see if now is the time to start slashing it; and next to him is a tenured art historian, confirming that this painting is consistent with the “psychical ordeal” he confidently diagnoses the (long-dead) artist to have passed through at the time of its composition. All these attitudes, and others, are possible (I do not say laudable), and the object is a different thing to each — loot, risk, symbol of oppression, symptom of depression — but in none of them is it a work of art, and certainly not that work of art and no other. It remains an object and the variously interested parties, subjects.
So what to do, as the chess players say when analyzing a critical position, if it is as a work of art that you intend to encounter the painting, poem, sculpture, and so on?
Well, salsa dancers speak of “finding the clave,” the key that unlocks the rhythmic structure of a song, after which the music itself will tell you how to dance to it. How to find it? By waiting for it to tell itself to you — by letting the qualities of that rhythm as perceived determine your perception of that specific rhythm; and you can replace “rhythm” in that last clause with “poem,” “painting,” “sculpture” and so on: all these will tell themselves to you if you let them. The difference between this attitude and the others is that they are assumed before the work is encountered; here, the attitude is one in which you are waiting for the right attitude to reveal itself. But it is not merely a passive “waiting;” it requires, as did diffusing, an active suspension of those factors that would prejudice the reception of the work in one direction or another (which by the way is something that salsa dancers don't have to worry about — they are there to dance, not to “know something about” the music).
Those prejudicial factors may be personal, as in the once-familiar case of the sullen adolescent scribbling “this is me!” in the margin of his Housman; but they are principally the result of an expectation that requires of every artwork that it “mean” something detachable from the work itself. We are so used to subsuming all manners of meaning under semantic reference, in which the word (let us say) stands for something not the word, that a meaning that inheres in its very expression and nowhere else is hard to imagine; yet that Rothko means just those changes, and that snatch of Yeats means just those vowels and consonants in just that order. Santayana says of expressive beauty that, in it, the meaning and the words, their sounds and career, go into each other so remainderlessly that they form one indecomposable whole; any residue in either direction — towards discursive associations or mere sensation — destroys the beauty in question, be the residue a fault in the work, as when poetry becomes rhetoric (and/) or sing-song, or the fault of the reader, who obstructs or belies her experience by an exercise of her “critical” or “moral” intelligence, or by delectating in what in poetry is usually gushingly called “the music.” Now, in the arts, where beauty and meaning are the same thing, the way to feel the beauty most deeply, and apprehend the meaning most penetratively, is to become the work, to reach the point where the poem becomes an utterance independent of an utterer, be that the empirical author or the empirical reader, or the painting, a vision independent of either visionary. And so on with the others.
But is that really possible? Or is it just humbug, as magic usually is? Well, I would not argue for its possibility if I didn't know it for an actuality; and so, me hearties, do you too know it, in those experiences you later describe as your having “sunk into” something, probably a novel, or been “blown away” by something, possibly a poem, or been “stunned” by something, not-impossibly a painting — I mean just then, not just after, when, in our accounts of the experience, we perforce revert to ego-conscious subjectivity, and the world, to objecthood. If subjects and objects are natural categories of mind, then we are right to call such experiences as those “supernatural.”
