The following are excerpts taken from Rudolf Arnheim’s book ‘Parables of Sun Light’. It is a compendium of selections from his daily diary or notebooks. The book’s title, in turn, was taken from Dylan Thomas’s ‘Poem in October’:
a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
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Susanne Langer begins her chapter on music in Philosophy in a New Key with the assertion that a Greek vase is a work of art whereas a handmade bean pot is only an artifact, albeit it may have “a good shape.” And Nikolaus Pevsner starts his book on European architecture with the sentence: “A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.” This is ostensibly so because only the latter is designed for “aesthetic appeal.” My own conviction has always been that unless you recognize aesthetic expression in all good form, simple or complex, natural or man-made, intended or unintended to be art, you will never touch the root of art, which grows from the soil of universal perceptual expression. To look for the distinction between art and nonart is like seeking the cutoff point between plainness and beauty.
I feel about my violin as a man does about a woman whose beauty he feels he does not deserve. The elegance of the instrument’s curves and proportions, its delicate weight, and the precision of its shape — how do I dare to hug such perfection with my chin? We went to the concert of an elderly famous virtuoso. He waddled onto the stage, half penguin, half turtle, but as he lifted his violin, its voice began to vibrate and to sing, and the skillful ornaments rose like soap bubbles. It is this sort of sound that the Baroque curves of my wooden lady has in mind as she suffers in captivity.
After spending the morning on cleaning the house, she bicycled to the art school to model. At five dollars an hour, frozen into the beauty of a goddess, she joined the timelessness of the Greek marbles while watching the clock surreptitiously.
To celebrate the three-hundredth anniversary of Bach’s birth, a local church hosted a twenty-four-hour-long nonstop performance of his organ works, thereby desecrating the church, the composer, and the spirit of music in one sweeping demonstration of the deplorable fact that in our country quantity is still considered the safest measure of quality.
At times, themes for notebook entries stand in line waiting to be used, and then again, there are weeks and months without any such demand. I notice that when periods are meager, it is not because I lack ideas. The nourishing cues seem to be always around. What matters is the difference between times when I have, as it were, my tentacles out, and the ducts are open between observation and readiness to respond, and other times, when I watch and learn and think without the response urging me to write. I suspect the same is true for “inspiration” quite in general. Experience lies patiently in wait until the poet puts up the sign Open For Business.
When the cat, sitting on your lap, looks deeply into your eyes and you in turn look deeply into his, there is so direct a contact from being to being that the distinction between human and animal vanishes. Rather than see a specimen of a different breed, one sees a curiously masqued face, as at a costume ball the bizarre outfit of a partner does not hide the appeal of her searching glance.
There is art for art’s sake and art for English departments. In the latter category are works with provocative subject matter, preferably Surrealist, without much pictorial imagination but with lots of lack of obvious meaning. Karl Kraus called it “Auf einder Glatze Locken drehen”. ["Using curlers on a bald pate."]
The split between the self and the outer world goes right through our bodies. The dancer’s vision must be translated into the language of the body, which recommends certain motions and vetoes others. A young cat plays with his tail as though it were a toy; and in our handling of our bodily resources, even singing and speaking entail the enlisting of physical instruments that do not always oblige.
Not only the blind but we, too, have memories of nonvisual activities. Lying awake at night, I often occupy myself by remembering melodies which I mentally accompany by noting the sequence of the places the tones hold on the strings of the violin. Since when I actually play, I do not see what my fingers are doing, because my eyes are on the music, my memory images of the playing are equally tactile. In my nightly consciousness, a disembodied something leaps from place to place on an equally invisible fingerboard.
Mary [Arnheim's wife] tells that when as a camp counselor for a group of Detroit children she walked with them through the woods to give the city dwellers a first taste of nature, one of them asked her, “Miss Mary, is this also America?”
Gustaf Britsch offers the concept of Ueberbestimmung to describe the misinterpretation by which, for example, the simple early circle in a child’s drawing is interpreted as a head, or a “tree” is taken as, say, an oak. This corresponds to what I have called misplace specificity, namely the false conviction that a pictorial representation implies the same completeness as its model. “What is Rembrandt’s Aristotle thinking about?”
“The painter’s brush consumes his dream,” says Yeats in “Adam’s Curse.”
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Arnheim’s book The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts, is the art book which I value before all others. My first copy disintegrated (the spine broke into and all the pages fell out) due to repeated reading. I highly recommend it. However, his other books, of which there are many, are not particularly good, in my opinion. The one quoted above is my second choice among his works.
Also be aware that he has no love for photography and, in my opinion, does not understand it as an art form.
