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
[That's the same beginning that I used in a previous post of excerpts taken from Arnheim's book.]
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How can we tell whether the picture of a person represents a general type or the portrait of an individual? The ten disciples of Buddha look like faithful portraits of ten particular gentlemen but probably represent ten types of behavior. Generally, when a type is intended it is more likely to determine the total expression. A Venus is all Venus, but the Mona Lisa cannot be all smile.
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R.H. Blyth’s book on hiaku irritates me because he is one of the theorists who pride themselves on believing that poetry can be dealt with only by poetry and who therefore feel gulty about engaging in their undertaking. He keeps stopping short of the analysis he is pledged to offer and instead talks about poetry coyly, like an old maid talking about sex. He does not know that all things in this world, not just poems and paintings, are untouchable. Any sight, any noise, any experience has a virginity of its own. Philosophy and science do not violate it if wise thinkers are at work. Even the artist respects the gulf. The portrait of a flower leaves the flower unharmed. It is the lack of respect for nature that makes people have too much respect for poetry.
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In Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise the narrator, after learning about the care Julie takes not to disturb the birds in their natural setting, comments caustically, “So afraid were you to make the birds your slaves that you have become theirs!” Whereupon Julie, with the shiny cleverness of an eighteenth-century heroine, retorts, “Spoken like a tyrant, who thinks he cannot enjoy his freedom unless he interferes with that of others.” What an answer to the notion, Freudian and otherwise, that one is frustrated unless there is no constraint!
I can’t decide if he’s being sarcastic with “shiny cleverness”. Cleverness always risks being too shiny, but shiny as in ‘new’ would not be a bad thing. (The pejorative ’shiny cleverness’ fits me rather well. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to mind.)
-Julie
