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Title: Heaven & Hell
Date of first publication: 1956
Author: Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Date first posted: Oct. 22, 2017
Date last updated: Oct. 22, 2017
Faded Page eBook #20171022

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                                HEAVEN &
                                  HELL
                                  _By_
                             Aldous Huxley

                                  1956
                            CHATTO & WINDUS
                                 LONDON

                              PUBLISHED BY
                         CHATTO AND WINDUS LTD
                                 LONDON
                                   ★
                       CLARKE, IRWIN AND CO. LTD
                                TORONTO

                      PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
                        T. AND A. CONSTABLE LTD
                       HOPETOUN STREET, EDINBURGH
                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


                                Foreword
                                   ★

THIS little book is a sequel to an essay on the mescalin experience,
published two years ago under the title of _The Doors of Perception_.
For a person in whom 'the candle of vision' never burns spontaneously,
the mescalin experience is doubly illuminating. It throws light on the
hitherto unknown regions of his own mind; and at the same time it throws
light, indirectly, on other minds, more richly gifted in respect to
vision than his own. Reflecting on his experience, he comes to a new and
better understanding of the ways in which those other minds perceive and
feel and think, of the cosmological notions which seem to them
self-evident, and of the works of art through which they feel impelled
to express themselves. In what follows I have tried to set down, more or
less systematically, the results of this new understanding.

                                                                   A. H.

               Applications regarding translation rights
               in any work by Aldous Huxley should
               be addressed to Chatto & Windus,
               40 William IV Street, London, W.C. 2.




                           _Heaven and Hell_


IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE the collector of specimens preceded the
zoologist and followed the exponents of natural theology and magic. He
had ceased to study animals in the spirit of the authors of the
Bestiaries, for whom the ant was incarnate industry, the panther an
emblem, surprisingly enough, of Christ, the polecat a shocking example
of uninhibited lasciviousness. But, except in a rudimentary way, he was
not yet a physiologist, ecologist or student of animal behaviour. His
primary concern was to make a census, to catch, kill, stuff and describe
as many kinds of beasts as he could lay his hands on.

Like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest
Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins. In relation to the
fauna of these regions we are not yet zoologists, we are mere
naturalists and collectors of specimens. The fact is unfortunate; but we
have to accept it, we have to make the best of it. However lowly, the
work of the collector must be done, before we can proceed to the higher
scientific tasks of classification, analysis, experiment and theory
making.

Like the giraffe and the duck-billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting
these remoter regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable.
Nevertheless they exist, they are facts of observation; and as such,
they cannot be ignored by anyone who is honestly trying to understand
the world in which he lives.

It is difficult, it is all but impossible, to speak of mental events
except in similes drawn from the more familiar universe of material
things. If I have made use of geographical and zoological metaphors, it
is not wantonly, out of a mere addiction to picturesque language. It is
because such metaphors express very forcibly the essential otherness of
the mind's far continents, the complete autonomy and self-sufficiency of
their inhabitants. A man consists of what I may call an Old World of
personal consciousness and, beyond a dividing sea, a series of New
Worlds--the not too distant Virginias and Carolinas of the personal
subconscious and the vegetative soul; the Far West of the collective
unconscious, with its flora of symbols, its tribes of aboriginal
archetypes; and, across another, vaster ocean, at the antipodes of
everyday consciousness, the world of Visionary Experience.

If you go to New South Wales, you will see marsupials hopping about the
countryside. And if you go to the antipodes of the self-conscious mind,
you will encounter all sorts of creatures at least as odd as kangaroos.
You do not invent these creatures any more than you invent marsupials.
They live their own lives in complete independence. A man cannot control
them. All he can do is to go to the mental equivalent of Australia and
look around him.

Some people never consciously discover their antipodes. Others make an
occasional landing. Yet others (but they are few) find it easy to go and
come as they please. For the naturalist of the mind, the collector of
psychological specimens, the primary need is some safe, easy and
reliable method of transporting himself and others from the Old World to
the New, from the continent of familiar cows and horses to the continent
of the wallaby and the platypus.

Two such methods exist. Neither of them is perfect; but both are
sufficiently reliable, sufficiently easy and sufficiently safe to
justify their employment by those who know what they are doing. In the
first case the soul is transported to its far-off destination by the aid
of a chemical--either mescalin or lysergic acid. In the second case, the
vehicle is psychological in nature, and the passage to the mind's
antipodes is accomplished by hypnosis. The two vehicles carry the
consciousness to the same region; but the drug has the longer range and
takes its passengers further into the _terra incognita_.[1]

[1] See Appendix I.

                 *        *        *        *        *

How and why does hypnosis produce its observed effects? We do not know.
For our present purposes, however, we do not have to know. All that is
necessary, in this context, is to record the fact that some hypnotic
subjects are transported, in the trance state, to a region in the mind's
antipodes, where they find the equivalent of marsupials--strange
psychological creatures leading an autonomous existence according to the
law of their own being.

About the physiological effects of mescalin we know a little. Probably
(for we are not yet certain) it interferes with the enzyme system that
regulates cerebral functioning. By doing so it lowers the efficiency of
the brain as an instrument for focussing mind on the problems of life on
the surface of our planet. This lowering of what may be called the
biological efficiency of the brain seems to permit the entry into
consciousness of certain classes of mental events, which are normally
excluded, because they possess no survival value. Similar intrusions of
biologically useless, but aesthetically and sometimes spiritually
valuable material may occur as the result of illness or fatigue; or they
may be induced by fasting, or a period of confinement in a place of
darkness and complete silence.[2]

[2] See Appendix II.

A person under the influence of mescalin or lysergic acid will stop
seeing visions when given a large dose of nicotinic acid. This helps to
explain the effectiveness of fasting as an inducer of visionary
experience. By reducing the amount of available sugar, fasting lowers
the brain's biological efficiency and so makes possible the entry into
consciousness of material possessing no survival value. Moreover, by
causing a vitamin deficiency, it removes from the blood that known
inhibitor of visions, nicotinic acid. Another inhibitor of visionary
experience is ordinary, everyday, perceptual experience. Experimental
psychologists have found that, if you confine a man to a 'restricted
environment,' where there is no light, no sound, nothing to smell and,
if you put him in a tepid bath with only one, almost imperceptible thing
to touch, the victim will very soon start 'seeing things,' 'hearing
things' and having strange bodily sensations.

Milarepa, in his Himalayan cavern, and the anchorites of the Thebaid
followed essentially the same procedure and got essentially the same
results. A thousand pictures of the Temptations of St Anthony bear
witness to the effectiveness of restricted diet and restricted
environment. Asceticism, it is evident, has a double motivation. If men
and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this
way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments; it is also
because they long to visit the mind's antipodes and do some visionary
sightseeing. Empirically and from the reports of other ascetics, they
know that fasting and a restricted environment will transport them where
they long to go. Their self-inflicted punishment may be the door to
paradise. (It may also--and this is a point which will be discussed in a
later paragraph--be a door into the infernal regions.)

From the point of view of an inhabitant of the Old World, marsupials are
exceedingly odd. But oddity is not the same as randomness. Kangaroos and
wallabies may lack verisimilitude; but their improbability repeats
itself and obeys recognizable laws. The same is true of the
psychological creatures inhabiting the remoter regions of our minds. The
experiences encountered under the influence of mescalin or deep hypnosis
are certainly strange; but they are strange with a certain regularity,
strange according to a pattern.

                 *        *        *        *        *

What are the common features which this pattern imposes upon our
visionary experiences? First and most important is the experience of
light. Everything seen by those who visit the mind's antipodes is
brilliantly illuminated and seems to shine from within. All colours are
intensified to a pitch far beyond anything seen in the normal state, and
at the same time the mind's capacity for recognizing fine distinctions
of tone and hue is notably heightened.

In this respect there is a marked difference between these visionary
experiences and ordinary dreams. Most dreams are without colour, or else
are only partially or feebly coloured. On the other hand, the visions
met with under the influence of mescalin or hypnosis are always
intensely and, one might say, praeternaturally brilliant in colour.
Professor Calvin Hall, who has collected records of many thousands of
dreams, tells us that about two-thirds of all dreams are in black and
white. 'Only one dream in three is coloured, or has some colour in it.'
A few people dream entirely in colour; a few never experience colour in
their dreams; the majority sometimes dream in colour, but more often do
not.

'We have come to the conclusion,' writes Dr Hall, 'that colour in dreams
yields no information about the personality of the dreamer.' I agree
with this conclusion. Colour in dreams and visions tells us no more
about the personality of the beholder than does colour in the external
world. A garden in July is perceived as brightly coloured. The
perception tells us something about sunshine, flowers and butterflies,
but little or nothing about our own selves. In the same way the fact
that we see brilliant colours in our visions and in some of our dreams
tells us something about the fauna of the mind's antipodes, but nothing
whatever about the personality who inhabits what I have called the Old
World of the mind.

Most dreams are concerned with the dreamer's private wishes and
instinctive urges, and with the conflicts which arise when these wishes
and urges are thwarted by a disapproving conscience or a fear of public
opinion. The story of these drives and conflicts is told in terms of
dramatic symbols, and in most dreams the symbols are uncoloured. Why
should this be the case? The answer, I presume, is that, to be
effective, symbols do not require to be coloured. The letters in which
we write about roses need not be red, and we can describe the rainbow by
means of ink marks on white paper. Text-books are illustrated by line
engravings and half-tone plates; and these uncoloured images and
diagrams effectively convey information.

What is good enough for the waking consciousness is evidently good
enough for the personal subconscious, which finds it possible to express
its meanings through uncoloured symbols. Colour turns out to be a kind
of touchstone of reality. That which is given is coloured; that which
our symbol-creating intellect and fancy put together is uncoloured. Thus
the external world is perceived as coloured. Dreams, which are not given
but fabricated by the personal subconscious, are generally in black and
white. (It is worth remarking that, in most people's experience, the
most brightly coloured dreams are those of landscapes, in which there is
no drama, no symbolic reference to conflict, merely the presentation to
consciousness of a given, non-human fact.)

The images of the archetypal world are symbolic; but since we, as
individuals, do not fabricate them, but find them 'out there' in the
collective unconscious, they exhibit some at least of the
characteristics of given reality and are coloured. The non-symbolic
inhabitants of the mind's antipodes exist in their own right, and like
the given facts of the external world are coloured. Indeed, they are far
more intensely coloured than external data. This may be explained, at
least in part, by the fact that our perceptions of the external world
are habitually clouded by the verbal notions in terms of which we do our
thinking. We are for ever attempting to convert things into signs for
the more intelligible abstractions of our own invention. But in doing
so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native thinghood.

At the antipodes of the mind, we are more or less completely free of
language, outside the system of conceptual thought. Consequently our
perception of visionary objects possesses all the freshness, all the
naked intensity, of experiences which have never been verbalized, never
assimilated to lifeless abstractions. Their colour (that hallmark of
givenness) shines forth with a brilliance which seems to us
praeternatural, because it is in fact entirely natural--entirely natural
in the sense of being entirely unsophisticated by language or the
scientific, philosophical and utilitarian notions, by means of which we
ordinarily re-create the given world in our own drearily human image.

                 *        *        *        *        *

In his _Candle of Vision_, the Irish poet A. E. (George Russell) has
analysed his visionary experiences with remarkable acuity. 'When I
meditate,' he writes, 'I feel in the thoughts and images that throng
about me the reflections of personality; but there are also windows in
the soul, through which can be seen images created not by human but by
the divine imagination.'

Our linguistic habits lead us into error. For example, we are apt to
say, 'I imagine,' when what we should have said is, 'The curtain was
lifted that I might see.' Spontaneous or induced, visions are never our
personal property. Memories belonging to the ordinary self have no place
in them. The things seen are wholly unfamiliar. 'There is no reference
or resemblance,' in Sir William Herschel's phrase, 'to any objects
recently seen or even thought of.' When faces appear, they are never the
faces of friends or acquaintances. We are out of the Old World, and
exploring the antipodes.

For most of us most of the time, the world of everyday experience seems
rather dim and drab. But for a few people often, and for a fair number
occasionally, some of the brightness of visionary experience spills
over, as it were, into common seeing, and the everyday universe is
transfigured. Though still recognizably itself, the Old World takes on
the quality of the mind's antipodes. Here is an entirely characteristic
description of this transfiguration of the everyday world.

'I was sitting on the seashore, half listening to a friend arguing
violently about something which merely bored me. Unconsciously to
myself, I looked at a film of sand I had picked up on my hand, when I
suddenly saw the exquisite beauty of every little grain of it; instead
of being dull, I saw that each particle was made up on a perfect
geometrical pattern, with sharp angles, from each of which a brilliant
shaft of light was reflected, while each tiny crystal shone like a
rainbow. . . . The rays crossed and recrossed, making exquisite patterns
of such beauty that they left me breathless. . . . Then, suddenly, my
consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how
the whole universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter
how dull and lifeless they might seem, were nevertheless filled with
this intense and vital beauty. For a second or two the whole world
appeared as a blaze of glory. When it died down, it left me with
something I have never forgotten and which constantly reminds me of the
beauty locked up in every minute speck of material around us.'

Similarly George Russell writes of seeing the world illumined by 'an
intolerable lustre of light'; of finding himself looking at 'landscapes
as lovely as a lost Eden'; of beholding a world where the 'colours were
brighter and purer, and yet made a softer harmony.' Again, 'the winds
were sparkling and diamond clear, and yet full of colour as an opal, as
they glittered through the valley, and I knew the Golden Age was all
about me, and it was we who had been blind to it, but that it had never
passed away from the world.'

Many similar descriptions are to be found in the poets and in the
literature of religious mysticism. One thinks, for example, of
Wordsworth's _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood_;
of certain lyrics by George Herbert and Henry Vaughan; of Traherne's
_Centuries of Meditations_; of the passage in his autobiography, where
Father Surin describes the miraculous transformation of an enclosed
convent garden into a fragment of heaven.

Praeternatural light and colour are common to all visionary experiences.
And along with light and colour there goes, in every case, a recognition
of heightened significance. The self-luminous objects which we see in
the mind's antipodes possess a meaning, and this meaning is, in some
sort, as intense as their colour. Significance here is identical with
being; for, at the mind's antipodes, objects do not stand for anything
but themselves. The images which appear in the nearer reaches of the
collective subconscious have meaning in relation to the basic facts of
human experience; but here, at the limits of the visionary world, we are
confronted by facts which, like the facts of external nature, are
independent of man, both individually and collectively, and exist in
their own right. And their meaning consists precisely in this, that they
are intensely themselves and, being intensely themselves, are
manifestations of the essential givenness, the non-human otherness of
the universe.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Light, colour and significance do not exist in isolation. They modify,
or are manifested by, objects. Are there any special classes of objects
common to most visionary experiences? The answer is: Yes, there are.
Under mescalin and hypnosis, as well as in spontaneous visions, certain
classes of perceptual experiences turn up again and again.

The typical mescalin or lysergic acid experience begins with perceptions
of coloured, moving, living geometrical forms. In time, pure geometry
becomes concrete, and the visionary perceives, not patterns, but
patterned things, such as carpets, carvings, mosaics. These give place
to vast and complicated buildings, in the midst of landscapes, which
change continuously, passing from richness to more intensely coloured
richness, from grandeur to deepening grandeur. Heroic figures, of the
kind that Blake called 'The Seraphim,' may make their appearance, alone
or in multitudes. Fabulous animals move across the scene. Everything is
novel and amazing. Almost never does the visionary see anything that
reminds him of his own past. He is not remembering scenes, persons or
objects, and he is not inventing them; he is looking on at a new
creation.

The raw material for this creation is provided by the visual experiences
of ordinary life; but the moulding of this material into forms is the
work of someone who is most certainly not the self, who originally had
the experiences, or who later recalled and reflected upon them. They are
(to quote the words used by Dr J. R. Smythies in a recent paper in the
_American Journal of Psychiatry_) 'the work of a highly differentiated
mental compartment, without any apparent connection, emotional or
volitional, with the aims, interests, or feelings of the person
concerned.'

Here, in quotation or condensed paraphrase, is Weir Mitchell's account
of the visionary world to which he was transported by peyote, the cactus
which is the natural source of mescalin.

At his entry into that world he saw a host of 'star points' and what
looked like 'fragments of stained glass.' Then came 'delicate floating
films of colour.' These were displaced by an 'abrupt rush of countless
points of white light,' sweeping across the field of vision. Next there
were zigzag lines of very bright colours, which somehow turned into
swelling clouds of still more brilliant hues. Buildings now made their
appearance, and then landscapes. There was a Gothic tower of elaborate
design with worn statues in the doorways or on stone brackets. 'As I
gazed, every projecting angle, cornice and even the faces of the stones
at their joinings were by degrees covered or hung with clusters of what
seemed to be huge precious stones, but uncut stones, some being more
like masses of transparent fruit. . . . All seemed to possess an
interior light.' The Gothic tower gave place to a mountain, a cliff of
inconceivable height, a colossal birdclaw carved in stone and projecting
over the abyss, an endless unfurling of coloured draperies, and an
efflorescence of more precious stones. Finally there was a view of green
and purple waves breaking on a beach 'with myriads of lights of the same
tint as the waves.'

Every mescalin experience, every vision arising under hypnosis, is
unique; but all recognizably belong to the same species. The landscapes,
the architectures, the clustering gems, the brilliant and intricate
patterns--these, in their atmosphere of praeternatural light,
praeternatural colour and praeternatural significance, are the stuff of
which the mind's antipodes are made. Why this should be so, we have no
idea. It is a brute fact of experience which, whether we like it or not,
we have to accept--just as we have to accept the fact of kangaroos.

                 *        *        *        *        *

From these facts of visionary experience let us now pass to the accounts
preserved in all the cultural traditions, of Other Worlds--the worlds
inhabited by the gods, by the spirits of the dead, by man in his primal
state of innocence.

Reading these accounts, we are immediately struck by the close
similarity between induced or spontaneous visionary experience and the
heavens and fairylands of folklore and religion. Praeternatural light,
praeternatural intensity of colouring, praeternatural
significance--these are characteristic of all the Other Worlds and
Golden Ages. And in virtually every case this praeternaturally
significant light shines on, or shines out of, a landscape of such
surpassing beauty that words cannot express it.

Thus in the Graeco-Roman tradition we find the lovely Garden of the
Hesperides, the Elysian Plain, and the fair Island of Leuke, to which
Achilles was translated. Memnon went to another luminous island,
somewhere in the East. Odysseus and Penelope travelled in the opposite
direction and enjoyed their immortality with Circe in Italy. Still
further to the West were the Islands of the Blest, first mentioned by
Hesiod and so firmly believed in that, as late as the first century
B.C., Sertorius planned to send a squadron from Spain to discover them.

Magically lovely islands reappear in the folklore of the Celts and, at
the opposite side of the world, in that of the Japanese. And between
Avalon in the extreme West and Horaisan in the Far East, there is the
land of Uttarakuru, the Other World of the Hindus. 'The land,' we read
in the _Ramayana_, 'is watered by lakes with golden lotuses. There are
rivers by thousands, full of leaves of the colour of sapphire and lapis
lazuli; and the lakes, resplendent like the morning sun, are adorned by
golden beds of red lotus. The country all around is covered by jewels
and precious stones, with gay beds of blue lotus, golden-petalled.
Instead of sand, pearls, gems and gold form the banks of the rivers,
which are overhung with trees of fire-bright gold. These trees
perpetually bear flowers and fruit, give forth a sweet fragrance and
abound with birds.'

Uttarakuru, we see, resembles the landscapes of the mescalin experience
in being rich with precious stones. And this characteristic is common to
virtually all the Other Worlds of religious tradition. Every paradise
abounds in gems, or at least in gem-like objects resembling, as Weir
Mitchell puts it, 'transparent fruit.' Here, for example, is Ezekiel's
version of the Garden of Eden. 'Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of
God. Every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz and the
diamond, the beryl, the onyx and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald
and the carbuncle, and gold. . . . Thou art the anointed cherub that
covereth . . . thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones
of fire.' The Buddhist paradises are adorned with similar 'stones of
fire.' Thus, the Western Paradise of the Pure Land Sect is walled with
silver, gold and beryl; has lakes with jewelled banks and a profusion of
glowing lotuses, within which the Bodhisattvas sit enthroned.

In describing their Other Worlds, the Celts and Teutons speak very
little of precious stones, but have much to say of another and, for
them, equally wonderful substance--glass. The Welsh had a blessed land
called Ynisvitrin, the Isle of Glass; and one of the names of the
Germanic kingdom of the dead was Glasberg. One is reminded of the Sea of
Glass in the Apocalypse.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Most paradises are adorned with buildings, and, like the trees, the
waters, the hills and fields, these buildings are bright with gems. We
are all familiar with the New Jerusalem. 'And the building of the wall
of it was of jasper, and the city was of pure gold, like unto clear
glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with
all manner of precious stones.'

Similar descriptions are to be found in the eschatological literature of
Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Heaven is always a place of gems. Why
should this be the case? Those who think of all human activities in
terms of a social and economic frame of reference will give some such
answer as this: Gems are very rare on earth. Few people possess them. To
compensate themselves for these facts, the spokesmen for the
poverty-stricken majority have filled their imaginary heavens with
precious stones. This 'pie in the sky' hypothesis contains, no doubt,
some element of truth; but it fails to explain why precious stones
should have come to be regarded as precious in the first place.

Men have spent enormous amounts of time, energy and money on the
finding, mining and cutting of coloured pebbles. Why? The utilitarian
can offer no explanation for such fantastic behaviour. But as soon as we
take into account the facts of visionary experience, everything becomes
clear. In vision, men perceive a profusion of what Ezekiel calls 'stones
of fire,' of what Weir Mitchell describes as 'transparent fruit.' These
things are self-luminous, exhibit a praeternatural brilliance of colour
and possess a praeternatural significance. The material objects which
most nearly resemble these sources of visionary illumination are
gem-stones. To acquire such a stone is to acquire something whose
preciousness is guaranteed by the fact that it exists in the Other
World.

Hence man's otherwise inexplicable passion for gems and hence his
attribution to precious stones of therapeutic and magical virtue. The
causal chain, I am convinced, begins in the psychological Other World of
visionary experience, descends to earth and mounts again to the
theological Other World of heaven. In this context the words of
Socrates, in the _Phaedo_, take on a new significance. There exists, he
tells us, an ideal world above and beyond the world of matter. 'In this
other earth the colours are much purer and much more brilliant than they
are down here. . . . The very mountains, the very stones have a richer
gloss, a lovelier transparency and intensity of hue. The precious stones
of this lower world, our highly prized cornelians, jaspers, emeralds and
all the rest, are but the tiny fragments of these stones above. In the
other earth there is no stone but is precious and exceeds in beauty
every gem of ours.'

In other words, precious stones are precious because they bear a faint
resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the
visionary. 'The view of that world,' says Plato, 'is a vision of blessed
beholders'; for to see things 'as they are in themselves' is bliss
unalloyed and inexpressible.

Among people who have no knowledge of precious stones or of glass,
heaven is adorned not with minerals, but flowers. Praeternaturally
brilliant flowers bloom in most of the Other Worlds described by
primitive eschatologists, and even in the begemmed and glassy paradises
of the more advanced religions they have their place. One remembers the
lotus of Hindu and Buddhist tradition, the roses and lilies of the West.

'God first planted a garden.' The statement expresses a deep
psychological truth. Horticulture has its source--or at any rate one of
its sources--in the Other World of the mind's antipodes. When
worshippers offer flowers at the altar, they are returning to the gods
things which they know, or (if they are not visionaries) obscurely feel,
to be indigenous to heaven.

And this return to the source is not merely symbolical; it is also a
matter of immediate experience. For the traffic between our Old World
and its antipodes, between Here and Beyond, travels along a two-way
street. Gems, for example, come from the soul's visionary heaven; but
they also lead the soul back to that heaven. Contemplating them, men
find themselves (as the phrase goes) _transported_--carried away towards
that Other Earth of the Platonic dialogue, the magical place where every
pebble is a precious stone. And the same effects may be produced by
artifacts of glass and metal, by tapers burning in the dark, by
brilliantly coloured images and ornaments, by flowers, shells and
feathers, by landscapes seen, as Shelley from the Euganean Hills saw
Venice, in the transfiguring light of dawn or sunset.

Indeed, we may risk a generalization and say that whatever, in nature or
in a work of art, resembles one of those intensely significant, inwardly
glowing objects encountered at the mind's antipodes, is capable of
inducing, if only in a partial and attenuated form, the visionary
experience. At this point a hypnotist will remind us that, if he can be
induced to stare intently at a shiny object, a patient may go into
trance; and that if he goes into trance, or if he goes only into
reverie, he may very well see visions within and a transfigured world
without.

But how, precisely, and why does the view of a shiny object induce a
trance or a state of reverie? Is it, as the Victorians maintained, a
simple matter of eye strain resulting in general nervous exhaustion? Or
shall we explain the phenomenon in purely psychological terms--as
concentration pushed to the point of mono-ideism and leading to
dissociation?

But there is a third possibility. Shiny objects may remind our
unconscious of what it enjoys at the mind's antipodes, and these obscure
intimations of life in the Other World are so fascinating that we pay
less attention to this world and so become capable of experiencing
consciously something of that which, unconsciously, is always with us.

                 *        *        *        *        *

We see then that there are in nature certain scenes, certain classes of
objects, certain materials, possessed of the power to transport the
beholder's mind in the direction of its antipodes, out of the everyday
Here and towards the Other World of Vision. Similarly, in the realm of
art, we find certain works, even certain classes of works, in which the
same transporting power is manifest. These vision-inducing works may be
executed in vision-inducing materials, such as glass, metal, gems or
gem-like pigments. In other cases their power is due to the fact that
they render, in some peculiarly expressive way, some transporting scene
or object.

The best vision-inducing art is produced by men and women who have
themselves had the visionary experience; but it is also possible for any
reasonably good artist, simply by following an approved recipe, to
create works which shall have at least some transporting power.

Of all the vision-inducing arts that which depends most completely on
its raw materials is, of course, the art of the goldsmith and jeweller.
Polished metals and precious stones are so intrinsically transporting
that even a Victorian, even an Art Nouveau jewel is a thing of power.
And when to this natural magic of glinting metal and self-luminous stone
is added the other magic of noble forms and colours artfully blended, we
find ourselves in the presence of a genuine talisman.

Religious art has always and everywhere made use of these
vision-inducing materials. The shrine of gold, the chryselephantine
statue, the jewelled symbol or image, the glittering furniture of the
altar--we find these things in contemporary Europe as in ancient Egypt,
in India and China as among the Greeks, the Incas, the Aztecs.

The products of the goldsmith's art are intrinsically numinous. They
have their place at the very heart of every Mystery, in every holy of
holies. This sacred jewellery has always been associated with the light
of lamps and candles. For Ezekiel, a gem was a stone of fire.
Conversely, a flame is a living gem, endowed with all the transporting
power that belongs to the precious stone and, to a lesser degree, to
polished metal. This transporting power of flame increases in proportion
to the depth and extent of the surrounding darkness. The most
impressively numinous temples are caverns of twilight, in which a few
tapers give life to the transporting, otherworldly treasures on the
altar.

Glass is hardly less effective as an inducer of visions than are the
natural gems. In certain respects, indeed, it is more effective, for the
simple reason that there is more of it. Thanks to glass, a whole
building--the Sainte-Chapelle, for example, the cathedrals of Chartres
and Sens--could be turned into something magical and transporting.
Thanks to glass, Paolo Uccello could design a circular jewel thirteen
feet in diameter--his great window of the Resurrection, perhaps the most
extraordinary single work of vision-inducing art ever produced.

For the men of the Middle Ages, it is evident, visionary experience was
supremely valuable. So valuable, indeed, that they were ready to pay for
it in hard-earned cash. In the twelfth century collecting-boxes were
placed in the churches for the upkeep and installation of stained-glass
windows. Suger, the Abbot of St Denis, tells us that they were always
full.

                 *        *        *        *        *

But self-respecting artists cannot be expected to go on doing what their
fathers have already done supremely well. In the fourteenth century
colour gave place to grisaille, and windows ceased to be
vision-inducing. When, in the later fifteenth century, colour came into
fashion again, the glass painters felt the desire, and found themselves,
at the same time, technically equipped, to imitate Renaissance painting
in transparency. The results were often interesting; but they were not
transporting.

Then came the Reformation. The Protestants disapproved of visionary
experience and attributed a magical virtue to the printed word. In a
church with clear windows the worshippers could read their Bibles and
prayer books and were not tempted to escape from the sermon into the
Other World. On the Catholic side the men of the Counter-Reformation
found themselves in two minds. They thought visionary experience was a
good thing, but they also believed in the supreme value of print.

In the new churches stained glass was rarely installed, and in many of
the older churches it was wholly or partially replaced by clear glass.
The unobscured light permitted the faithful to follow the service in
their books, and at the same time to see the vision-inducing works
created by the new generations of baroque sculptors and architects.
These transporting works were executed in metal and polished stone.
Wherever the worshipper turned, he found the glint of bronze, the rich
radiance of coloured marble, the unearthly whiteness of statuary.

On the rare occasions when the Counter-Reformers made use of glass, it
was as a surrogate for diamonds, not for rubies or sapphires. Faceted
prisms entered religious art in the seventeenth century, and in Catholic
churches they dangle to this day from innumerable chandeliers. (These
charming and slightly ridiculous ornaments are among the very few
vision-inducing devices permitted in Islam. Mosques have no images or
reliquaries; but in the Near East, at any rate, their austerity is
sometimes mitigated by the transporting glitter of rococo crystal.)

From glass, stained or cut, we pass to marble and the other stones that
take a high polish and can be used in mass. The fascination exercised by
such stones may be gauged by the amount of time and trouble spent in
obtaining them. At Baalbek, for example, and, two or three hundred miles
further inland, at Palmyra, we find among the ruins columns of pink
granite from Aswan. These great monoliths were quarried in Upper Egypt,
were floated in barges down the Nile, were towed across the
Mediterranean to Byblos or Tripolis and from thence were hauled, by
oxen, mules and men, uphill to Homs, and from Homs southward to Baalbek,
or east, across the desert, to Palmyra.

What a labour of giants! And, from the utilitarian point of view, how
marvellously pointless! But in fact, of course, there was a point--a
point that existed in a region beyond mere utility. Polished to a
visionary glow, the rosy shafts proclaimed their manifest kinship with
the Other World. At the cost of enormous efforts men had transported
these stones from their quarry on the Tropic of Cancer; and now, by way
of recompense, the stones were transporting their transporters half way
to the mind's visionary antipodes.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The question of utility and of the motives that lie beyond utility
arises once more in relation to ceramics. Few things are more useful,
more absolutely indispensable, than pots and plates and jugs. But at the
same time few human beings concern themselves less with utility than do
the collectors of porcelain and glazed earthenware. To say that these
people have an appetite for beauty is not a sufficient explanation. The
commonplace ugliness of the surroundings in which fine ceramics are so
often displayed is proof enough that what their owners crave is not
beauty in all its manifestations, but only a special kind of beauty--the
beauty of curved reflections, of softly lustrous glazes, of sleek and
smooth surfaces. In a word, the beauty that transports the beholder,
because it reminds him, obscurely or explicitly, of the praeternatural
lights and colours of the Other World. In the main the art of the potter
has been a secular art--but a secular art which its innumerable devotees
have treated with an almost idolatrous reverence. From time to time,
however, this secular art has been placed at the service of religion.
Glazed tiles have found their way into mosques and, here and there, into
Christian churches. From China come shining ceramic images of gods and
saints. In Italy Luca della Robbia created a heaven of blue glaze, for
his lustrous white madonnas and Christ children. Baked clay is cheaper
than marble and, suitably treated, almost as transporting.

Plato and, during a later flowering of religious art, St Thomas Aquinas
maintained that pure, bright colours were of the very essence of
artistic beauty. A Matisse, in that case, would be intrinsically
superior to a Goya or a Rembrandt. One has only to translate the
philosophers' abstractions into concrete terms to see that this equation
of beauty in general with bright, pure colours is absurd. But though
untenable as it stands, the venerable doctrine is not altogether devoid
of truth.

Bright, pure colours are characteristic of the Other World. Consequently
works of art painted in bright, pure colours are capable, in suitable
circumstances, of transporting the beholder's mind in the direction of
its antipodes. Bright pure colours are of the essence, not of beauty in
general, but only of a special kind of beauty, the visionary. Gothic
churches and Greek temples, the statues of the thirteenth century after
Christ and of the fifth century before Christ--all were brilliantly
coloured.

For the Greeks and the men of the Middle Ages, this art of the
merry-go-round and the wax-work show was evidently transporting. To us
it seems deplorable. We prefer our Praxiteleses plain, our marble and
our limestone _au naturel_. Why should our modern taste be so different,
in this respect, from that of our ancestors? The reason, I presume, is
that we have become too familiar with bright pure pigments to be greatly
moved by them. We admire them, of course, when we see them in some grand
or subtle composition; but in themselves and as such, they leave us
untransported.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Sentimental lovers of the past complain of the drabness of our age and
contrast it unfavourably with the gay brilliance of earlier times. In
actual fact, of course, there is a far greater profusion of colour in
the modern than in the ancient world. Lapis lazuli and Tyrian purple
were costly rarities; the rich velvets and brocades of princely
wardrobes, the woven or painted hangings of mediaeval and early modern
houses, were reserved for a privileged minority.

Even the great ones of the earth possessed very few of these
vision-inducing treasures. As late as the seventeenth century, monarchs
owned so little furniture that they had to travel from palace to palace
with wagon-loads of plate and bedspreads, of carpets and tapestries. For
the great mass of the people there were only homespun and a few
vegetable dyes; and, for interior decoration, there were at best the
earth colours, at worst (and in most cases) 'the floor of plaster and
the walls of dung.'

At the antipodes of every mind lay the Other World of praeternatural
light and praeternatural colour, of ideal gems and visionary gold. But
before every pair of eyes was only the dark squalor of the family hovel,
the dust or mud of the village street, the dirty whites, the duns and
goose-turd greens of ragged clothing. Hence a passionate, an almost
desperate, thirst for bright, pure colours; and hence the overpowering
effect produced by such colours whenever, in church or at court, they
were displayed. Today the chemical industry turns out paints, inks and
dyes in endless variety and enormous quantities. In our modern world
there is enough bright colour to guarantee the production of billions of
flags and comic strips, millions of stop signs and tail lights, fire
engines and Coca-Cola containers by the hundred thousand, carpets,
wallpapers and non-representational art by the square mile.

Familiarity breeds indifference. We have seen too much pure, bright
colour at Woolworth's to find it intrinsically transporting. And here we
may note that, by its amazing capacity to give us too much of the best
things, modern technology has tended to devaluate the traditional
vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was
once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the
canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly
and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.

In London, fifty years ago, electric sky signs were a novelty and so
rare that they shone out of the misty darkness 'like captain jewels in
the carcanet.' Across the Thames, on the old Shot Tower, the gold and
ruby letters were magically lovely--_une féerie_. Today the fairies are
gone. Neon is everywhere and, being everywhere, has no effect upon us,
except perhaps to make us pine nostalgically for primeval night.

Only in floodlighting do we recapture the unearthly significance which
used, in the age of oil and wax, even in the age of gas and the carbon
filament, to shine forth from practically any island of brightness in
the boundless dark. Under the searchlights Notre-Dame de Paris and the
Roman Forum are visionary objects, having power to transport the
beholder's mind towards the Other World.[3]

[3] See Appendix III.

Modern technology has had the same devaluating effect on glass and
polished metal as it has had on fairy lamps and pure, bright colours. By
John of Patmos and his contemporaries walls of glass were conceivable
only in the New Jerusalem. Today they are a feature of every up-to-date
office building and bungalow. And this glut of glass has been paralleled
by a glut of chrome and nickel, of stainless steel and aluminium and a
host of alloys old and new. Metal surfaces wink at us in the bathroom,
shine from the kitchen sink, go glittering across country in cars and
trains.

Those rich convex reflections, which so fascinated Rembrandt that he
never tired of rendering them in paint, are now the commonplaces of home
and street and factory. The fine point of seldom pleasure has been
blunted. What was once a needle of visionary delight has now become a
piece of disregarded linoleum.

                 *        *        *        *        *

I have spoken so far only of vision-inducing materials and their
psychological devaluation by modern technology. It is time now to
consider the purely artistic devices, by means of which vision-inducing
works have been created.

Light and colour tend to take on a praeternatural quality when seen in
the midst of environing darkness. Fra Angelico's Crucifixion at the
Louvre has a black background. So have the frescoes of the Passion
painted by Andrea del Castagno for the nuns of Santa Apollonia at
Florence. Hence the visionary intensity, the strange transporting power
of these extraordinary works. In an entirely different artistic and
psychological context the same device was often used by Goya in his
etchings. Those flying men, that horse on a tightrope, the huge and
ghastly incarnation of Fear--all of them stand out, as though floodlit,
against a background of impenetrable night.

With the development of chiaroscuro, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, night came out of the background and installed itself within
the picture, which became the scene of a kind of Manichean struggle
between Light and Darkness. At the time they were painted these works
must have possessed a real transporting power. To us, who have seen
altogether too much of this kind of thing, most of them seem merely
theatrical. But a few still retain their magic. There is Caravaggio's
_Entombment_, for example; There are a dozen magical paintings by
Georges de Latour;[4] there are all those visionary Rembrandts where the
lights have the intensity and significance of light at the mind's
antipodes, where the darks are full of rich potentialities waiting their
turn to become actual, to make themselves glowingly present to our
consciousness.

[4] See Appendix IV.

In most cases the ostensible subject-matter of Rembrandt's pictures is
taken from real life or the Bible--a boy at his lessons or Bathsheba
bathing; a woman wading in a pond or Christ before His judges.
Occasionally, however, these messages from the Other World are
transmitted by means of a subject drawn, not from real life or history,
but from the realm of archetypal symbols. There hangs in the Louvre a
_Méditation du Philosophe_, whose symbolical subject-matter is nothing
more nor less than the human mind, with its teeming darknesses, its
moments of intellectual and visionary illumination, its mysterious
stairways winding downwards and upwards into the unknown. The meditating
philosopher sits there in his island of inner illumination; and at the
opposite end of the symbolic chamber, in another, rosier island, an old
woman crouches before the hearth. The firelight touches and transfigures
her face, and we see, concretely illustrated, the impossible paradox and
supreme truth--that perception is (or at least can be, ought to be) the
same as Revelation, that Reality shines out of every appearance, that
the One is totally, infinitely present in all particulars.

Along with the praeternatural lights and colours, the gems and the
ever-changing patterns, visitors to the mind's antipodes discover a
world of sublimely beautiful landscapes, of living architecture and of
heroic figures. The transporting power of many works of art is
attributable to the fact that their creators have painted scenes,
persons and objects which remind the beholder of what, consciously or
unconsciously, he knows about the Other World at the back of his mind.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Let us begin with the human or, rather, the more than human inhabitants
of these far-off regions. Blake called them the Cherubim. And in effect
that is what, no doubt, they are--the psychological originals of those
beings who, in the theology of every religion, serve as intermediaries
between man and the Clear Light. The more than human personages of
visionary experience never 'do anything.' (Similarly the blessed never
'do anything' in heaven.) They are content merely to exist.

Under many names and attired in an endless variety of costumes, these
heroic figures of man's visionary experience have appeared in the
religious art of every culture. Sometimes they are shown at rest,
sometimes in historical or mythological action. But action, as we have
seen, does not come naturally to the inhabitants of the mind's
antipodes. To be busy is the law of _our_ being. The law of _theirs_ is
to do nothing. When we force these serene strangers to play a part in
one of our all too human dramas, we are being false to visionary truth.
That is why the most transporting (though not necessarily the most
beautiful) representation of 'the Cherubim' are those which show them as
they are in their native habitat--doing nothing in particular.

And that accounts for the overwhelming, the more than merely aesthetic,
impression made upon the beholder by the great static masterpieces of
religious art. The sculptured figures of Egyptian gods and god-kings,
the Madonnas and Pantocrators of the Byzantine mosaics, the Bodhisattvas
and Lohans of China, the seated Buddhas of Khmer, the steles and statues
of Copan, the wooden idols of tropical Africa--these have one
characteristic in common: a profound stillness. And it is precisely this
which gives them their numinous quality, their power to transport the
beholder out of the Old World of his everyday experience, far away,
towards the visionary antipodes of the human psyche.

There is, of course, nothing intrinsically excellent about static art.
Static or dynamic, a bad piece of work is always a bad piece of work.
All I mean to imply is that, other things being equal, a heroic figure
at rest has a greater transporting power than one which is shown in
action.

The Cherubim live in Paradise and the New Jerusalem--in other words,
among prodigious buildings set in rich, bright gardens with distant
prospects of plain and mountain, of rivers and the sea. This is a matter
of immediate experience, a psychological fact which has been recorded in
folklore and the religious literature of every age and country. It has
not, however, been recorded in pictorial art.

Reviewing the succession of human cultures, we find that landscape
painting is either non-existent, or rudimentary, or of very recent
development. In Europe a full-blown art of landscape painting has
existed for only four or five centuries, in China for not more than a
thousand years, in India, for all practical purposes, never.

This is a curious fact that demands an explanation. Why should
landscapes have found their way into the visionary literature of a given
epoch and a given culture, but not into the painting? Posed in this way,
the question provides its own best answer. People may be content with
the merely verbal expression of this aspect of their visionary
experience and feel no need for its translation into pictorial terms.

That this often happens in the case of individuals is certain. Blake,
for example, saw visionary landscapes, 'articulated beyond all that the
mortal and perishing nature can produce' and 'infinitely more perfect
and minutely organized than anything seen by the mortal eye.' Here is
the description of such a visionary landscape, which Blake gave at one
of Mrs Aders' evening parties: 'The other evening, taking a walk, I came
to a meadow and at the further corner of it I saw a fold of lambs.
Coming nearer, the ground blushed with flowers, and the wattled cote and
its woolly tenants were of an exquisite pastoral beauty. But I looked
again, and it proved to be no living flock, but beautiful sculpture.'

Rendered in pigments, this vision would look, I suppose, like some
impossibly beautiful blending of one of Constable's freshest oil
sketches with an animal painting in the magically realistic style of
Zurbaran's haloed lamb now in the San Diego Museum. But Blake never
produced anything remotely resembling such a picture. He was content to
talk and write about his landscape visions, and to concentrate in his
painting upon 'the Cherubim.'

What is true of an individual artist may be true of a whole school.
There are plenty of things which men experience, but do not choose to
express; or they may try to express what they have experienced, but in
only one of their arts. In yet other cases they will express themselves
in ways having no immediately recognizable affinity to the original
experience. In this last context Dr A. K. Coomaraswamy has some
interesting things to say about the mystical art of the Far East--the
art where 'denotation and connotation cannot be divided' and 'no
distinction is felt between what a thing "is" and what it "signifies."'

The supreme example of such mystical art is the Zen-inspired landscape
painting, which arose in China during the Sung period and came to new
birth in Japan four centuries later. India and the Near East have no
mystical landscape painting; but they have its equivalents--'Vaisnava
painting, poetry and music in India, where the theme is sexual love; and
Sufi poetry and music in Persia, devoted to praises of intoxication.'[5]

[5] A. K. Coomaraswamy, _The Transformation of Nature in Art_, p. 40.

                 *        *        *        *        *

'Bed,' as the Italian proverb succinctly puts it, 'is the poor man's
opera.' Analogously, sex is the Hindu's Sung; wine, the Persian's
Impressionism. The reason being, of course, that the experiences of
sexual union and intoxication partake of that essential otherness
characteristic of all vision, including that of landscapes.

If, at any time, men have found satisfaction in a certain kind of
activity, it is to be presumed that, at periods when this satisfying
activity was not manifested, there must have been some kind of
equivalent for it. In the Middle Ages, for example, men were preoccupied
in an obsessive, an almost maniacal way with words and symbols.
Everything in nature was instantly recognized as the concrete
illustration of some notion formulated in one of the books or legends
currently regarded as sacred.

And yet, at other periods of history men have found a deep satisfaction
in recognizing the autonomous otherness of nature, including many
aspects of human nature. The experience of this otherness was expressed
in terms of art, religion or science. What were the mediaeval
equivalents of Constable and ecology, of bird watching and Eleusis, of
microscopy and the rites of Dionysos and the Japanese Haiku? They were
to be found, I suspect, in Saturnalian orgies at one end of the scale
and in mystical experience at the other. Shrovetides, May Days,
Carnivals--these permitted a direct experience of the animal otherness
underlying personal and social identity. Infused contemplation revealed
the yet otherer otherness of the divine Not-Self. And somewhere between
the two extremes were the experiences of the visionaries and the
vision-inducing arts, by means of which it was sought to recapture and
re-create those experiences--the art of the jeweller, of the maker of
stained glass, of the weaver of tapestries, of the painter, poet and
musician.

In spite of a Natural History that was nothing but a set of drearily
moralistic symbols, in the teeth of a theology which, instead of
regarding words as the signs of things, treated things and events as the
signs of biblical or Aristotelian words, our ancestors remained
relatively sane. And they achieved this feat by periodically escaping
from the stifling prison of their bumptiously rationalistic philosophy,
their anthropomorphic, authoritarian and non-experimental science, their
all too articulate religion, into non-verbal, other than human worlds
inhabited by their instincts, by the visionary fauna of their mind's
antipodes and, beyond and yet within all the rest, by the indwelling
Spirit.

                 *        *        *        *        *

From this wide-ranging but necessary digression, let us return to the
particular case from which we set out. Landscapes, as we have seen, are
a regular feature of the visionary experience. Descriptions of visionary
landscapes occur in the ancient literature of folklore and religion; but
paintings of landscapes do not make their appearance until comparatively
recent times. To what has been said, by way of explanation about
psychological equivalents, I will add a few brief notes on the nature of
landscape paintings as a vision-inducing art.

Let us begin by asking a question. What landscapes--or, more generally,
what representations of natural objects--are most transporting, most
intrinsically vision-inducing? In the light of my own experiences and of
what I have heard other people say about their reactions to works of
art, I will risk an answer. Other things being equal (for nothing can
make up for lack of talent), the most transporting landscapes are,
first, those which represent natural objects a very long way off, and,
second, those which represent them at close range.

Distance lends enchantment to the view; but so does propinquity. A Sung
painting of far away mountains, clouds and torrents is transporting; but
so are the close-ups of tropical leaves in the Douanier Rousseau's
jungles. When I look at the Sung landscape, I am reminded (or one of my
not-I's is reminded) of the crags, the boundless expanses of plain, the
luminous skies and seas of the mind's antipodes. And those
disappearances into mist and cloud, those sudden emergences of some
strange, intensely definite form, a weathered rock, for example, an
ancient pine tree twisted by years of struggle with the wind--these too,
are transporting. For they remind me, consciously or unconsciously, of
the Other World's essential alienness and unaccountability.

It is the same with the close-up. I look at those leaves with their
architecture of veins, their stripes and mottlings, I peer into the
depths of interlacing greenery, and something in me is reminded of those
living patterns, so characteristic of the visionary world, of those
endless births and proliferations of geometrical forms that turn into
objects, of things that are for ever being transmuted into other things.

This painted close-up of a jungle is what, on one of its aspects, the
Other World is like, and so it transports me, it makes me see with eyes
that transfigure a work of art into something else, something beyond
art.

I remember--very vividly, though it took place many years ago--a
conversation with Roger Fry. We were talking about Monet's 'Water
Lilies.' They had no right, Roger kept insisting, to be so shockingly
unorganized, so totally without a proper compositional skeleton. They
were all wrong, artistically speaking. And yet, he had to admit, and
yet. . . . And yet, as I should now say, they were transporting. An
artist of astounding virtuosity had chosen to paint a close-up of
natural objects seen in their own context and without reference to
merely human notions of what's what, or what ought to be what. Man, we
like to say, is the measure of all things. For Monet, on this occasion,
water lilies were the measure of water lilies; and so he painted them.

The same non-human point of view must be adopted by any artist who tries
to render the distant scene. How tiny, in the Chinese painting, are the
travellers who make their way along the valley! How frail the bamboo hut
on the slope above them! And all the rest of the vast landscape is
emptiness and silence. This revelation of the wilderness, living its own
life according to the laws of its own being, transports the mind towards
its antipodes; for primeval Nature bears a strange resemblance to that
inner world where no account is taken of our personal wishes or even of
the enduring concerns of man in general.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground
are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either
vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even
further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life.
At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the
physiologist pursue the close-up--the cellular close-up, the molecular,
the atomic and sub-atomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm's
length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains.

Something analogous happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover. In
the nuptial embrace personality is melted down; the individual (it is
the recurrent theme of Lawrence's poems and novels) ceases to be himself
and becomes a part of the vast impersonal universe.

And so it is with the artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near
point. In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears
completely. Instead of men and women playing their fantastic tricks
before high heaven, we are asked to consider the lilies, to meditate on
the unearthly beauty of 'mere things,' when isolated from their
utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves.
Alternatively (or, at an earlier stage of artistic development,
exclusively), the non-human world of the near-point is rendered in
patterns. These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves
and flowers--the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus--and are
elaborated, with recurrences and variations, into something
transportingly reminiscent of the living geometries of the Other World.

Freer and more realistic treatments of Nature at the near-point make
their appearance at a relatively recent date--but far earlier than those
treatments of the distant scene, to which alone (and mistakenly) we give
the name of landscape painting. Rome, for example, had its close-up
landscapes. The fresco of a garden, which once adorned a room in Livia's
villa, is a magnificent example of this form of art.

For theological reasons, Islam had to be content, for the most part,
with 'arabesques'--luxuriant and (as in visions) continually varying
patterns, based upon natural objects seen at the near-point. But even in
Islam the genuine close-up landscape was not unknown. Nothing can exceed
in beauty and in vision-inducing power the mosaics of gardens and
buildings in the great Omayyad mosque at Damascus.

In mediaeval Europe, despite the prevailing mania for turning every
datum into a concept, every immediate experience into a mere symbol of
something in a book, realistic close-ups of foliage and flowers were
fairly common. We find them carved on the capitals of Gothic pillars, as
in the Chapter House of Southwell Minster. We find them in paintings of
the chase--paintings whose subject was that ever present fact of
mediaeval life, the forest, seen as the hunter or the strayed traveller
sees it, in all its bewildering intricacy of leafy detail.

The frescoes in the papal palace at Avignon are almost the sole
survivors of what, even in the time of Chaucer, was a widely practised
form of secular art. A century later this art of the forest close-up
came to its self-conscious perfection in such magnificent and magical
works as Pisanello's _St Hubert_ and Paolo Uccello's _Hunt in a Wood_,
now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Closely related to the wall
paintings of forest close-ups were the tapestries, with which the rich
men of northern Europe adorned their houses. The best of these are
vision-inducing works of the highest order. In their own way they are as
heavenly, as powerfully reminiscent of what goes on at the mind's
antipodes, as are the great masterpieces of landscape painting at the
furthest point--Sung mountains in their enormous solitude, Ming rivers
interminably lovely, the blue sub-Alpine world of Titian's distances,
the England of Constable; the Italies of Turner and Corot; the Provences
of Cézanne and Van Gogh; the Île de France of Sisley and the Île de
France of Vuillard.

Vuillard, incidentally, was a supreme master both of the transporting
close-up and of the transporting distant view. His bourgeois interiors
are masterpieces of vision-inducing art, compared with which the works
of such conscious and so to say professional visionaries as Blake and
Odilon Redon seem feeble in the extreme. In Vuillard's interiors every
detail however trivial, however hideous even--the pattern of the late
Victorian wallpaper, the Art Nouveau bibelot, the Brussels carpet--is
seen and rendered as a living jewel; and all these jewels are
harmoniously combined into a whole which is a jewel of a yet higher
order of visionary intensity. And when the upper middle-class
inhabitants of Vuillard's New Jerusalem go for a walk, they find
themselves not, as they had supposed, in the department of Seine et
Oise, but in the Garden of Eden, in an Other World which is yet
essentially the same as this world, but transfigured and therefore
transporting.[6]

[6] See Appendix V.

                 *        *        *        *        *

I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience and of
its interpretation in terms of theology, its translation into art. But
visionary experience is not always blissful. It is sometimes terrible.
There is hell as well as heaven.

Like heaven, the visionary hell has its praeternatural light and its
praeternatural significance. But the significance is intrinsically
appalling and the light is 'the smoky light' of the _Tibetan Book of the
Dead_, the 'darkness visible' of Milton. In the _Journal d'une
Schizophrène_,[7] the autobiographical record of a young girl's passage
through madness, the world of the schizophrenic is called _le Pays
d'Éclairement_--'the country of lit-upness.' It is a name which a mystic
might have used to denote his heaven.

[7] _Journal d'une Schizophrène_, by M. A. Sèchehaye. Paris, 1950.

But for poor Renée, the schizophrenic, the illumination is infernal--an
intense electric glare without a shadow, ubiquitous and implacable.
Everything that, for healthy visionaries, is a source of bliss, brings
to Renée only fear and a nightmarish sense of unreality. The summer
sunshine is malignant; the gleam of polished surfaces is suggestive, not
of gems, but of machinery and enamelled tin; the intensity of existence
which animates every object, when seen at close range and out of its
utilitarian context, is felt as a menace.

And then there is the horror of infinity. For the healthy visionary, the
perception of the infinite in a finite particular is a revelation of
divine immanence; for Renée, it was a revelation of what she calls 'the
System,' the vast cosmic mechanism which exists only to grind out guilt
and punishment, solitude and unreality.[8]

[8] See Appendix VI.

Sanity is a matter of degree, and there are plenty of visionaries who
see the world as Renée saw it, but contrive, none the less, to live
outside the asylum. For them, as for the positive visionary, the
universe is transfigured--but for the worse. Everything in it, from the
stars in the sky to the dust under their feet, is unspeakably sinister
or disgusting; every event is charged with a hateful significance; every
object manifests the presence of an Indwelling Horror, infinite,
all-powerful, eternal.

This negatively transfigured world has found its way, from time to time,
into literature and the arts. It writhed and threatened in Van Gogh's
later landscapes; it was the setting and the theme of all Kafka's
stories; it was Géricault's spiritual home;[9] it was inhabited by Goya
during the years of his deafness and solitude; it was glimpsed by
Browning when he wrote _Childe Roland_; it had its place, over against
the theophanies, in the novels of Charles Williams.

[9] See Appendix VII.

The negative visionary experience is often accompanied by bodily
sensations of a very special and characteristic kind. Blissful visions
are generally associated with a sense of separation from the body, a
feeling of deindividualization. (It is, no doubt, this feeling of
deindividualization which makes it possible for the Indians who practice
the peyote cult to use the drug not merely as a short cut to the
visionary world, but also as an instrument for creating a loving
solidarity within the participating group.) When the visionary
experience is terrible and the world is transfigured for the worse,
individualization is intensified and the negative visionary finds
himself associated with a body that seems to grow progressively more
dense, more tightly packed, until he finds himself at last reduced to
being the agonized consciousness of an inspissated lump of matter, no
bigger than a stone that can be held between the hands.

It is worth remarking, that many of the punishments described in the
various accounts of hell are punishments of pressure and constriction.
Dante's sinners are buried in mud, shut up in the trunks of trees,
frozen solid in blocks of ice, crushed beneath stones. The _Inferno_ is
psychologically true. Many of its pains are experienced by
schizophrenics, and by those who have taken mescalin or lysergic acid
under unfavourable conditions.[10]

[10] See Appendix VIII.

What is the nature of these unfavourable conditions? How and why is
heaven turned into hell? In certain cases the negative visionary
experience is the result of predominantly physical causes. Mescalin
tends, after ingestion, to accumulate in the liver. If the liver is
diseased, the associated mind may find itself in hell. But what is more
important for our present purposes is the fact that negative visionary
experience may be induced by purely psychological means. Fear and anger
bar the way to the heavenly Other World and plunge the mescalin taker
into hell.

And what is true of the mescalin taker is also true of the person who
sees visions spontaneously or under hypnosis. Upon this psychological
foundation has been reared the theological doctrine of saving faith--a
doctrine to be met with in all the great religious traditions of the
world. Eschatologists have always found it difficult to reconcile their
rationality and their morality with the brute facts of psychological
experience. As rationalists and moralists, they feel that good behaviour
should be rewarded and that the virtuous deserve to go to heaven. But as
psychologists they know that virtue is not the sole or sufficient
condition of blissful visionary experience. They know that works alone
are powerless and that it is faith, or loving confidence, which
guarantees that visionary experience shall be blissful.

Negative emotions--the fear which is the absence of confidence, the
hatred, anger or malice which exclude love--are the guarantee that
visionary experience, if and when it comes, shall be appalling. The
Pharisee is a virtuous man; but his virtue is of the kind which is
compatible with negative emotion. His visionary experiences are
therefore likely to be infernal rather than blissful.

The nature of the mind is such that the sinner who repents and makes an
act of faith in a higher power is more likely to have a blissful
visionary experience than is the self-satisfied pillar of society with
his righteous indignations, his anxiety about possessions and
pretensions, his ingrained habits of blaming, despising and condemning.
Hence the enormous importance attached, in all the great religious
traditions, to the state of mind at the moment of death.

Visionary experience is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical
experience is beyond the realm of opposites. Visionary experience is
still within that realm. Heaven entails hell, and 'going to heaven' is
no more liberation than is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a
vantage point from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than
on the level of ordinary individualized existence.

If consciousness survives bodily death, it survives, presumably, on
every mental level--on the level of mystical experience, on the level of
blissful visionary experience, on the level of infernal visionary
experience, and on the level of everyday individual existence.

In life, even the blissful visionary experience tends to change its sign
if it persists too long. Many schizophrenics have their times of
heavenly happiness; but the fact that (unlike the mescalin taker) they
do not know when, if ever, they will be permitted to return to the
reassuring banality of everyday experience causes even heaven to seem
appalling. But for those who, for whatever reason, are appalled, heaven
turns into hell, bliss into horror, the Clear Light into the hateful
glare of the land of lit-upness.

Something of the same kind may happen in the posthumous state. After
having had a glimpse of the unbearable splendour of ultimate Reality,
and after having shuttled back and forth between heaven and hell, most
souls find it possible to retreat into that more reassuring region of
the mind, where they can use their own and other people's wishes,
memories and fancies to construct a world very like that in which they
lived on earth.

Of those who die an infinitesimal minority are capable of immediate
union with the divine Ground, a few are capable of supporting the
visionary bliss of heaven, a few find themselves in the visionary
horrors of hell and are unable to escape; the great majority end up in
the kind of world described by Swedenborg and the mediums. From this
world it is doubtless possible to pass, when the necessary conditions
have been fulfilled, to worlds of visionary bliss or the final
enlightenment.

My own guess is that modern spiritualism and ancient tradition are both
correct. There is a posthumous state of the kind described in Sir Oliver
Lodge's book, _Raymond_; but there is also a heaven of blissful
visionary experience; there is also a hell of the same kind of appalling
visionary experience as is suffered here by schizophrenics and some of
those who take mescalin; and there is also an experience, beyond time,
of union with the divine Ground.




                              _Appendix I_


Two other, less effective aids to visionary experience deserve
mention--carbon dioxide and the stroboscopic lamp. A mixture (completely
non-toxic) of seven parts of oxygen and three of carbon dioxide
produces, in those who inhale it, certain physical and psychological
changes, which have been exhaustively described by Meduna. Among these
changes the most important, in our present context, is a marked
enhancement of the ability to 'see things,' when the eyes are closed. In
some cases only swirls of patterned colour are seen. In others there may
be vivid recalls of past experiences. (Hence the value of CO_{2} as a
therapeutic agent.) In yet other cases carbon dioxide transports the
subject to the Other World at the antipodes of his everyday
consciousness, and he enjoys very briefly visionary experiences entirely
unconnected with his own personal history or with the problems of the
human race in general.

In the light of these facts it becomes easy to understand the rationale
of yogic breathing exercises. Practised systematically, these exercises
result, after a time, in prolonged suspensions of breath. Long
suspensions of breath lead to a high concentration of carbon dioxide in
the lungs and blood, and this increase in the concentration of CO_{2}
lowers the efficiency of the brain as a reducing valve and permits the
entry into consciousness of experiences, visionary or mystical, from
'out there.'

Prolonged and continuous shouting or singing may produce similar, but
less strongly marked, results. Unless they are highly trained, singers
tend to breathe out more than they breathe in. Consequently the
concentration of carbon dioxide in the alveolar air and the blood is
increased and, the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve being
lowered, visionary experience becomes possible. Hence the interminable
'vain repetitions' of magic and religion. The chanting of the
_curandero_, the medicine-man, the shaman; the endless psalm-singing and
sutra-intoning of Christian and Buddhist monks; the shouting and
howling, hour after hour, of revivalists--under all the diversities of
theological belief and aesthetic convention, the
psychochemico-physiological intention remains constant. To increase the
concentration of CO_{2} in the lungs and blood and so to lower the
efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve, until it will admit
biologically useless material from Mind-at-Large--this, though the
shouters, singers and mutterers did not know it, has been at all times
the real purpose and point of magic spells, of mantrams, litanies,
psalms and sutras. 'The heart,' said Pascal, 'has its reasons.' Still
more cogent and much harder to unravel are the reasons of the lungs, the
blood and the enzymes, of neurones and synapses. The way to the
superconscious is through the subconscious, and the way, or at least one
of the ways, to the subconscious is through the chemistry of individual
cells.

With the stroboscopic lamp we descend from chemistry to the still more
elementary realm of physics. Its rhythmically flashing light seems to
act directly, through the optic nerves, on the electrical manifestations
of the brain's activity. (For this reason there is always a slight
danger involved in the use of the stroboscopic lamp. Some persons suffer
from _petit mal_ without being made aware of the fact by any clear-cut
and unmistakable symptoms. Exposed to a stroboscopic lamp, such persons
may go into a full-blown epileptic fit. The risk is not very great; but
it must always be recognized. One case in eighty may turn out badly.)

To sit, with eyes closed, in front of a stroboscopic lamp is a very
curious and fascinating experience. No sooner is the lamp turned on than
the most brilliantly coloured patterns make themselves visible. These
patterns are not static, but change incessantly. Their prevailing colour
is a function of the stroboscope's rate of discharge. When the lamp is
flashing at any speed between ten to fourteen or fifteen times a second,
the patterns are prevailingly orange and red. Green and blue make their
appearance when the rate exceeds fifteen flashes a second. After
eighteen or nineteen, the patterns become white and grey. Precisely why
we should see such patterns under the stroboscope is not known. The most
obvious explanation would be in terms of the interference of two or more
rhythms--the rhythm of the lamp and the various rhythms of the brain's
electrical activity. Such interferences may be translated by the visual
centre and optic nerves into something, of which the mind becomes
conscious as a coloured, moving pattern. Far more difficult to explain
is the fact, independently observed by several experimenters, that the
stroboscope tends to enrich and intensify the visions induced by
mescalin or lysergic acid. Here, for example, is a case communicated to
me by a medical friend. He had taken lysergic acid and was seeing, with
his eyes shut, only coloured, moving patterns. Then he sat down in front
of a stroboscope. The lamp was turned on and, immediately, abstract
geometry was transformed into what my friend described as 'Japanese
landscapes' of surpassing beauty. But how on earth can the interference
of two rhythms produce an arrangement of electrical impulses
interpretable as a living, self-modulating Japanese landscape unlike
anything the subject has ever seen, suffused with praeternatural light
and colour, and charged with praeternatural significance?

This mystery is merely a particular case of a larger, more comprehensive
mystery--the nature of the relations between visionary experience and
events on the cellular, chemical and electrical levels. By touching
certain areas of the brain with a very fine electrode, Penfield has been
able to induce the recall of a long chain of memories relating to some
past experience. This recall is not merely accurate on every perceptual
detail; it is also accompanied by all the emotions which were aroused by
the events when they originally occurred. The patient, who is under a
local anaesthetic, finds himself simultaneously in two times and
places--in the operating room, now, and in his childhood home, hundreds
of miles away and thousands of days in the past. Is there, one wonders,
some area in the brain from which the probing electrode could elicit
Blake's Cherubim, or Weir Mitchell's self-transforming Gothic tower
encrusted with living gems, or my friend's unspeakably lovely Japanese
landscapes? And if, as I myself believe, visionary experiences enter our
consciousness from somewhere 'out there' in the infinity of
Mind-at-Large, what sort of an _ad hoc_ neurological pattern is created
for them by the receiving and transmitting brain? And what happens to
this _ad hoc_ pattern, when the vision is over? Why do all visionaries
insist on the impossibility of recalling, in anything even faintly
resembling its original form and intensity, their transfiguring
experiences? How many questions--and, as yet, how few answers!




                             _Appendix II_


In the Western world visionaries and mystics are a good deal less common
than they used to be. There are two principal reasons for this state of
affairs--a philosophical reason and a chemical reason. In the currently
fashionable picture of the universe there is no place for valid
transcendental experience. Consequently those who have had what they
regard as valid transcendental experiences are looked upon with
suspicion, as being either lunatics or swindlers. To be a mystic or a
visionary is no longer creditable.

But it is not only our mental climate that is unfavourable to the
visionary and the mystic; it is also our chemical environment--an
environment profoundly different from that in which our forefathers
passed their lives.

The brain is chemically controlled, and experience has shown that it can
be made permeable to the (biologically speaking) superfluous aspects of
Mind-at-Large by modifying the (biologically speaking) normal chemistry
of the body.

For almost half of every year our ancestors ate no fruit, no green
vegetables and (since it was impossible for them to feed more than a few
oxen, cows, swine and poultry during the winter months) very little
butter or fresh meat, and very few eggs. By the beginning of each
successive spring, most of them were suffering, mildly or acutely, from
scurvy, due to lack of vitamin C, and pellagra, caused by a shortage in
their diet of the B complex. The distressing physical symptoms of these
diseases are associated with no less distressing psychological
symptoms.[11]

[11] See _The Biology of Human Starvation_, by A. Keys (University of
Minnesota Press 1950); also the recent (1955) reports of the work on the
role of vitamin deficiencies in mental disease carried out by Dr George
Watson and his associates in Southern California.

The nervous system is more vulnerable than the other tissues of the
body; consequently vitamin deficiencies tend to affect the state of mind
before they affect, at least in any very obvious way, the skin, bones,
mucous membranes, muscles and viscera. The first result of an inadequate
diet is a lowering of the efficiency of the brain as an instrument for
biological survival. The undernourished person tends to be afflicted by
anxiety, depression, hypochondria and feelings of anxiety. He is also
liable to see visions; for when the cerebral reducing valve has its
efficiency reduced, much (biologically speaking) useless material flows
into consciousness from 'out there,' in Mind-at-Large.

Much of what the earlier visionaries experienced was terrifying. To use
the language of Christian theology, the Devil revealed himself in their
visions and ecstasies a good deal more frequently than did God. In an
age when vitamins were deficient and a belief in Satan universal, this
was not surprising. The mental distress, associated with even mild cases
of pellagra and scurvy, was deepened by fears of damnation and a
conviction that the powers of evil were omnipresent. This distress was
apt to tinge with its own dark colouring the visionary material,
admitted to consciousness through a cerebral valve whose efficiency had
been impaired by underfeeding. But in spite of their preoccupations with
eternal punishment and in spite of their deficiency disease, spiritually
minded ascetics often saw heaven and might even be aware, occasionally,
of that divinely impartial One, in which the polar opposites are
reconciled. For a glimpse of beatitude, for a foretaste of unitive
knowledge, no price seemed too high. Mortification of the body may
produce a host of undesirable mental symptoms; but it may also open a
door into a transcendental world of Being, Knowledge and Bliss. That is
why, in spite of its obvious disadvantages, almost all aspirants to the
spiritual life have, in the past, undertaken regular courses of bodily
mortification.

So far as vitamins were concerned, every mediaeval winter was a long
involuntary fast, and this involuntary fast was followed, during Lent,
by forty days of voluntary abstinence. Holy Week found the faithful
marvellously well prepared, so far as their body chemistry was
concerned, for its tremendous incitements to grief and joy, for
seasonable remorse of conscience and a self-transcending identification
with the risen Christ. At this season of the highest religious
excitement and the lowest vitamin intake, ecstasies and visions were
almost a commonplace. It was only to be expected.

For cloistered contemplatives, there were several Lents in every year.
And even between fasts their diet was meagre in the extreme. Hence those
agonies of depression and scrupulosity described by so many spiritual
writers; hence their frightful temptations to despair and
self-slaughter. But hence too those 'gratuitous graces,' in the form of
heavenly visions and locutions, of prophetic insights, of telepathic
'discernments of spirits.' And hence, finally, their 'infused
contemplation,' their 'obscure knowledge' of the One in all.

Fasting was not the only form of physical mortification resorted to by
the earlier aspirants to spirituality. Most of them regularly used upon
themselves the whip of knotted leather or even of iron wire. These
beatings were the equivalent of fairly extensive surgery without
anaesthetics, and their effects on the body chemistry of the penitent
were considerable. Large quantities of histamine and adrenalin were
released while the whip was actually being plied; and when the resulting
wounds began to fester (as wounds practically always did before the age
of soap), various toxic substances, produced by the decomposition of
protein, found their way into the bloodstream. But histamine produces
shock, and shock affects the mind no less profoundly than the body.
Moreover, large quantities of adrenalin may cause hallucinations, and
some of the products of its decomposition are known to induce symptoms
resembling those of schizophrenia. As for toxins from wounds--these
upset the enzyme systems regulating the brain, and lower its efficiency
as an instrument for getting on in a world where the biologically
fittest survive. This may explain why the Curé d'Ars used to say that,
in the days when he was free to flagellate himself without mercy, God
would refuse him nothing. In other words, when remorse, self-loathing
and the fear of hell release adrenalin, when self-inflicted surgery
releases adrenalin and histamine and when infected wounds release
decomposed protein into the blood, the efficiency of the cerebral
reducing valve is lowered and unfamiliar aspects of Mind-at-Large
(including psi phenomena, visions and, if he is philosophically and
ethically prepared for it, mystical experiences) will flow into the
ascetic's consciousness.

Lent, as we have seen, followed a long period of involuntary fasting.
Analogously, the effects of self-flagellation were supplemented, in
earlier times, by much involuntary absorption of decomposed protein.
Dentistry was non-existent, surgeons were executioners and there were no
safe antiseptics. Most people, therefore, must have lived out their
lives with focal infections; and focal infections, though out of fashion
as the cause of _all_ the ills that flesh is heir to, can certainly
lower the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve.

And the moral of all this is--what? Exponents of a Nothing-But
philosophy will answer that, since changes in body chemistry can create
the conditions favourable to visionary and mystical experience,
visionary and mystical experience cannot be what they claim to be--what,
for those who have had them, they self-evidently are. But this, of
course, is a _non sequitur_.

A similar conclusion will be reached by those whose philosophy is unduly
'spiritual.' God, they will insist, is a spirit and is to be worshipped
in spirit. Therefore an experience which is chemically conditioned
cannot be an experience of the divine. But, in one way or another, _all_
our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some
of them are purely 'spiritual,' purely 'intellectual,' purely
'aesthetic,' it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate
the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence.
Furthermore, it is a matter of historical record that most
contemplatives worked systematically to modify their body chemistry,
with a view to creating the internal conditions favourable to spiritual
insight. When they were not starving themselves into low blood sugar and
a vitamin deficiency, or beating themselves into intoxication by
histamine, adrenalin and decomposed protein, they were cultivating
insomnia and praying for long periods in uncomfortable positions, in
order to create the psycho-physical symptoms of stress. In the intervals
they sang interminable psalms, thus increasing the amount of carbon
dioxide in the lungs and the bloodstream, or, if they were Orientals,
they did breathing exercises to accomplish the same purpose. Today we
know how to lower the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve by
direct chemical action, and without the risk of inflicting serious
damage on the psycho-physical organism. For an aspiring mystic to
revert, in the present state of knowledge, to prolonged fasting and
violent self-flagellation would be as senseless as it would be for an
aspiring cook to behave like Charles Lamb's Chinaman, who burned down
the house in order to roast a pig. Knowing as he does (or at least as he
can know, if he so desires) what are the chemical conditions of
transcendental experience, the aspiring mystic should turn for technical
help to the specialists--in pharmacology, in biochemistry, in physiology
and neurology, in psychology and psychiatry and parapsychology. And on
their part, of course, the specialists (if any of them aspire to be
genuine men of science and complete human beings) should turn, out of
their respective pigeon-holes, to the artist, the sibyl, the visionary,
the mystic--all those, in a word, who have had experience of the Other
World and who know, in their different ways, what to do with that
experience.




                             _Appendix III_


Vision-like effects and vision-inducing devices have played a greater
part in popular entertainment than in the fine arts. Fireworks,
pageantry, theatrical spectacle--these are essentially visionary arts.
Unfortunately they are also ephemeral arts, whose earlier masterpieces
are known to us only by report. Nothing remains of all the Roman
triumphs, the mediaeval tournaments, the Jacobean masques, the long
succession of state entries and coronations, of royal marriages and
solemn decapitations, of canonizations and the funerals of Popes. The
best that can be hoped for such magnificences is that they may 'live in
Settle's numbers one day more.'

An interesting feature of these popular visionary arts is their close
dependence upon contemporary technology. Fireworks, for example, were
once no more than bonfires (and to this day, I may add, a good bonfire
on a dark night remains one of the most magical and transporting of
spectacles. Looking at it, one can understand the mentality of the
Mexican peasant, who sets out to burn an acre of woodland in order to
plant his maize, but is delighted when, by a happy accident, a square
mile or two goes up in bright, apocalyptic flame). True pyrotechny began
(in Europe at least, if not in China) with the use of combustibles in
sieges and naval battles. From war it passed, in due course, to
entertainment. Imperial Rome had its firework displays, some of which,
even in its decline, were elaborate in the extreme. Here is Claudian's
description of the show put on by Manlius Theodorus in A.D. 399.

            _Mobile ponderibus descendat pegma reductis_
            _inque chori speciem spargentes ardua flammas_
            _scaena rotet varios, et fingat Mulciber orbis_
            _per tabulas impune vagos pictaeque citato_
            _ludant igne trabes, et non permissa morari_
            _fida per innocuas errent incendia turres._

'Let the counterweights be removed,' Mr Platnauer translates with a
straightforwardness of language that does less than justice to the
syntactical extravagances of the original, 'and let the mobile crane
descend, lowering on to the lofty stage men who, wheeling chorus-wise,
scatter flames. Let Vulcan forge balls of fire to roll innocuously
across the boards. Let the flames appear to play about the sham beams of
the scenery and a tame conflagration, never allowed to rest, wander
among the untouched towers.'

After the fall of Rome, pyrotechny became, once more, exclusively a
military art. Its greatest triumph was the invention by Callinicus,
about A.D. 650, of the famous Greek Fire--the secret weapon which
enabled a dwindling Byzantine Empire to hold out for so long against its
enemies.

During the Renaissance fireworks re-entered the world of popular
entertainment. With every advance in the science of chemistry, they
became more and more brilliant. By the middle of the nineteenth century
pyrotechny had reached a peak of technical perfection and was capable of
transporting vast multitudes of spectators towards the visionary
antipodes of minds which, consciously, were respectable Methodist,
Puseyites, Utilitarians, disciples of Mill or Marx, of Newman, or
Bradlaugh, or Samuel Smiles. In the Piazza del Popolo, at Ranelagh and
the Crystal Palace, on every Fourth and Fourteenth of July, the popular
subconscious was reminded by the crimson glare of strontium, by copper
blue and barium green and sodium yellow, of that Other World, down
under, in the psychological equivalent of Australia.

Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial,
as a political instrument. The gorgeous fancy dress worn by Kings, Popes
and their respective retainers, military and ecclesiastical, has a very
practical purpose--to impress the lower classes with a lively sense of
their masters' superhuman greatness. By means of fine clothes and solemn
ceremonies, _de facto_ domination is transformed into a rule not merely
_de jure_, but positively, _de jure divino_. The crowns and tiaras, the
assorted jewellery, the satins, silks and velvets, the gaudy uniforms
and vestments, the crosses and medals, the sword hilts and the croziers,
the plumes in the cocked hats and their clerical equivalents, those huge
feather fans which make every papal function look like a tableau from
_Aida_--all these are vision-inducing properties, designed to make all
too human gentlemen and ladies look like heroes, demigoddesses and
seraphs, and giving, in the process, a great deal of innocent pleasure
to all concerned, actors and spectators alike.

In the course of the last two hundred years the technology of artificial
lighting has made enormous progress, and this progress has contributed
very greatly to the effectiveness of pageantry and the closely related
art of theatrical spectacle. The first notable advance was made in the
eighteenth century, with the introduction of moulded spermaceti candles
in place of the older tallow dip and poured wax taper. Next came the
invention of Argand's tubular wick, with an air supply on the inner as
well as the outer surface of the flame. Glass chimneys speedily
followed, and it became possible, for the first time in history, to burn
oil with a bright and completely smokeless light. Coal gas was first
employed as an illuminant in the early years of the nineteenth century,
and in 1825 Thomas Drummond found a practical way of heating lime to
incandescence by means of an oxygen-hydrogen or oxygen-coal gas flame.
Meanwhile parabolic reflectors for concentrating light into a narrow
beam had come into use. (The first English lighthouse equipped with such
a reflector was built in 1790.)

The influence on pageantry and theatrical spectacle of these inventions
was profound. In earlier times civic and religious ceremonies could only
take place during the day (and days were as often cloudy as fine), or by
the light, after sunset, of smoky lamps and torches or the feeble
twinkling of candles. Argand and Drummond, gas, limelight and, forty
years later, electricity made it possible to evoke, from the boundless
chaos of night, rich island universes, in which the glitter of metal and
gems, the sumptuous glow of velvets and brocades were intensified to the
highest pitch of what may be called intrinsic significance. A recent
example of ancient pageantry, raised by twentieth-century lighting to a
higher magical power, was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In the
motion picture of the event, a ritual of transporting splendour was
saved from the oblivion which, up till now, has always been the fate of
such solemnities, and preserved it, blazing praeternaturally under the
floodlights, for the delight of a vast contemporary and future audience.

Two distinct and separate arts are practised in the theatre--the human
art of the drama, and the visionary, other-world art of spectacle.
Elements of the two arts may be combined in a single evening's
entertainment--the drama being interrupted (as so often happens in
elaborate productions of Shakespeare) to permit the audience to enjoy a
_tableau vivant_, in which the actors either remain still or, if they
move, move only in a non-dramatic way, ceremonially, processionally or
in a formal dance. Our concern here is not with drama; it is with
theatrical spectacle, which is simply pageantry without its political or
religious overtones.

In the minor visionary arts of the costumier and the designer of stage
jewellery our ancestors were consummate masters. Nor, for all their
dependence on unassisted muscle power, were they far behind us in the
building and working of stage machinery, the contrivance of 'special
effects.' In the masques of Elizabethan and early Stuart times, divine
descents and irruptions of demons from the cellarage were a commonplace;
so were apocalypses, so were the most amazing metamorphoses. Enormous
sums of money were lavished on these spectacles. The Inns of Court, for
example, put on a show for Charles I which cost more than twenty
thousand pounds--at a date when the purchasing power of the pound was
six or seven times what it is to-day.

'Carpentry,' said Ben Jonson sarcastically, 'is the soul of masque.' His
contempt was motivated by resentment. Inigo Jones was paid as much for
designing the scenery as was Ben for writing the libretto. The outraged
laureate had evidently failed to grasp the fact that masque is a
visionary art, and that visionary experience is beyond words (at any
rate beyond all but the most Shakespearean words) and is to be evoked by
direct, unmediated perceptions of things that remind the beholder of
what is going on at the unexplored antipodes of his own personal
consciousness. The soul of masque could never, in the very nature of
things, be a Jonsonian libretto; it _had_ to be carpentry. But even
carpentry could not be the masque's whole soul. When it comes to us from
within, visionary experience is always praeternaturally brilliant. But
the early set designers possessed no manageable illuminant brighter than
a candle. At close range a candle can create the most magical lights and
contrasting shadows. The visionary paintings of Rembrandt and Georges de
Latour are of things and persons seen by candlelight. Unfortunately
light obeys the law of the inverse squares. At a safe distance from an
actor in inflammable fancy dress, candles are hopelessly inadequate. At
ten feet, for example, it would take one hundred of the best wax tapers
to produce an effective illumination of one foot-candle. With such
miserable lighting only a fraction of the masque's visionary
potentialities could be made actual. Indeed, its visionary
potentialities were not fully realized until long after it had ceased,
in its original form, to exist. It was only in the nineteenth century,
when advancing technology had equipped the theatre with limelight and
parabolic reflectors, that the masque came fully into its own.
Victoria's reign was the heroic age of the so-called Christmas pantomime
and the fantastic spectacle. 'Ali Baba,' 'The King of the Peacocks,'
'The Golden Branch,' 'The Island of Jewels'--their very names are
magical. The soul of that theatrical magic was carpentry and
dressmaking; its indwelling spirit, its _scintilla animae_, was gas and
limelight and, after the 'eighties, electricity. For the first time in
the history of the stage, beams of brightest incandescence transfigured
the painted backdrops, the costumes, the glass and pinchbeck of
jewellery, so that they became capable of transporting the spectators
towards that Other World which lies at the back of every mind, however
perfect its adaptation to the exigencies of social life--even the social
life of Mid-Victorian England. Today we are in the fortunate position of
being able to squander half a million horsepower on the nightly
illumination of a metropolis. And yet, in spite of this devaluation of
artificial light, theatrical spectacle still retains its old compelling
magic. Embodied in ballets, revues and musical comedies, the soul of
masque goes marching along. Thousand-watt lamps and parabolic reflectors
project beams of praeternatural light, and praeternatural light evokes,
in everything it touches, praeternatural colour and praeternatural
significance. Even the silliest spectacle can be rather wonderful. It is
a case of a New World having been called in to redress the balance of
the Old--of visionary art making up for the deficiencies of all too
human drama.

Athanasius Kircher's invention--if his, indeed, it was--was christened
from the first _Lanterna Magica_. The name was everywhere adopted as
perfectly appropriate to a machine, whose raw material was light, and
whose finished product was a coloured image emerging from the darkness.
To make the original magic lantern show yet more magical, Kircher's
successors devised a number of methods for imparting life and movement
to the projected image. There were 'chromatropic' slides, in which two
painted glass discs could be made to revolve in opposite directions,
producing a crude but still effective imitation of those perpetually
changing three-dimensional patterns, which have been seen by virtually
everyone who has had a vision, whether spontaneous or induced by drugs,
fasting or the stroboscopic lamp. Then there were those 'dissolving
views,' which reminded the spectator of the metamorphoses going on
incessantly at the antipodes of his everyday consciousness. To make one
scene turn imperceptibly into another, two magic lanterns were used,
projecting coincident images on the screen. Each lantern was fitted with
a shutter, so arranged that the light of one could be progressively
dimmed, while the light of the other (originally completely obscured)
was progressively brightened. In this way the view projected by the
first lantern was insensibly replaced by the view by the second--to the
delight and astonishment of all beholders. Another device was the mobile
magic lantern, projecting its image on a semi-transparent screen, on the
further side of which sat the audience. When the lantern was wheeled
close to the screen, the projected image was very small. As it was
withdrawn, the image became progressively larger. An automatic focussing
device kept the changing images sharp and unblurred at all distances.
The word 'phantasmagoria' was coined in 1802 by the inventors of this
new kind of peepshow.

All these improvements in the technology of magic lanterns were
contemporary with the poets and painters of the Romantic Revival, and
may perhaps have exercised a certain influence on their choice of
subject-matter and their methods of treating it. _Queen Mab_ and _The
Revolt of Islam_, for example, are full of Dissolving Views and
Phantasmagorias. Keats's descriptions of scenes and persons, of
interiors and furniture and effects of light, have the intense beamy
quality of coloured images on a white sheet in a darkened room. John
Martin's representations of Satan and Belshazzar, of Hell and Babylon
and the Deluge, are manifestly inspired by lantern slides and _tableaux
vivants_ dramatically illuminated by limelight.

The twentieth-century equivalent of the magic lantern show is the
coloured movie. In the huge, expensive 'spectaculars,' the soul of
masque goes marching along--with a vengeance sometimes, but sometimes
also with taste and a real feeling for vision-inducing phantasy.
Moreover, thanks to advancing technology, the coloured documentary has
proved itself, in skilful hands, a notable new form of popular visionary
art. The immensely magnified cactus blossoms, into which, at the end of
Disney's _The Living Desert_, the spectator finds himself sinking, come
straight from the Other World. And then what transporting visions, in
the best of the nature films, of foliage in the wind, of the textures of
rock and sand, of the shadows and emerald lights in grass or among the
reeds, of birds and insects and four-footed creatures going about their
business in the underbrush or among the branches of forest trees! Here
are the magical close-up landscapes which fascinated the makers of
_mille-feuille_ tapestries, the mediaeval painters of gardens and
hunting scenes. Here are the enlarged and isolated details of living
nature out of which the artists of the Far East made some of the most
beautiful of their paintings.

And then there is what may be called the Distorted Documentary--a
strange new form of visionary art, admirably exemplified by Mr Francis
Thompson's film, 'NY, NY.' In this very strange and beautiful picture we
see the city of New York as it appears when photographed through
multiplying prisms, or reflected in the backs of spoons, polished hub
caps, spherical and parabolic mirrors. We still recognize houses,
people, shop fronts, taxi cabs, but recognize them as elements in one of
those living geometries which are so characteristic of the visionary
experience. The invention of this new cinematographic art seems to
presage (thank heaven!) the supersession and early demise of
non-representational painting. It used to be said by the
non-representationalists that coloured photography had reduced the
old-fashioned portrait and the old-fashioned landscape to the rank of
otiose absurdities. This, of course, is completely untrue. Coloured
photography merely records and preserves, in an easily reproducible
form, the raw materials with which portraitists and landscape painters
work. Used as Mr Thompson has used it, coloured cinematography does much
more than merely record and preserve the raw materials of
non-representational art; it actually turns out the finished product.
Looking at 'NY, NY,' I was amazed to see that virtually every pictorial
device invented by the Old Masters of non-representational art and
reproduced _ad nauseam_ by the academicians and mannerists of the
school, for the last forty years or more, makes its appearance, alive,
glowing, intensely significant, in the sequences of Mr Thompson's film.

Our ability to project a powerful beam of light has not only enabled us
to create new forms of visionary art; it has also endowed one of the
most ancient arts, the art of sculpture, with a new visionary quality
which it did not previously possess. I have spoken in an earlier
paragraph of the magical effects produced by the floodlighting of
ancient monuments and natural objects. Analogous effects are seen when
we turn the spotlights on to sculptured stone. Fuseli got the
inspiration for some of his best and wildest pictorial ideas by studying
the statues on Monte Cavallo by the light of the setting sun, or, better
still, when illuminated by lightning flashes at midnight. Today we
dispose of artificial sunsets and synthetic lightning. We can illuminate
our statues from whatever angle we choose, and with practically any
desired degree of intensity. Sculpture, in consequence, has revealed
fresh meanings and unsuspected beauties. Visit the Louvre one night,
when the Greek and Egyptian antiquities are floodlit. You will meet with
new gods, nymphs and Pharaohs, you will make the acquaintance, as one
spotlight goes out and another, in a different quarter of space, is lit
up, of a whole family of unfamiliar Victories of Samothrace.

The past is not something fixed and unalterable. Its facts are
re-discovered by every succeeding generation, its values re-assessed,
its meanings re-defined in the context of present tastes and
preoccupations. Out of the same documents and monuments and works of
art, every epoch invents its own Middle Ages, its private China, its
patented and copyrighted Hellas. Today, thanks to recent advances in the
technology of lighting, we can go one further than our predecessors. Not
only have we reinterpreted the great works of sculpture bequeathed to us
by the past; we have actually succeeded in altering the physical
appearance of these works. Greek statues, as we see them illuminated by
a light that never was on land or sea, and then photographed in a series
of fragmentary close-ups from the oddest angles, bear almost no
resemblance to the Greek statues seen by art critics and the general
public in the dim galleries and decorous engravings of the past. The aim
of the classical artist, in whatever period he may happen to live, is to
impart order to the chaos of experience, to present a comprehensible,
rational picture of reality in which all the parts are clearly seen and
coherently related, so that the beholder knows (or, to be more accurate,
imagines that he knows) precisely what's what. To us this ideal of
rational orderliness makes no appeal. Consequently, when we are
confronted by works of classical art, we use all the means in our power
to make them look like something which they are not, and were never
meant to be. From a work, whose whole point is its unity of conception,
we select a single feature, focus our searchlights upon it and so force
it, out of all context, upon the observer's consciousness Where a
contour seems to us too continuous, too obviously comprehensible, we
break it up by alternating impenetrable shadows with patches of glaring
brightness. When we photograph a sculptured figure or group, we use the
camera to isolate a part which we then exhibit in enigmatic independence
from the whole. By such means we can de-classicize the severest classic.
Subjected to the light treatment and photographed by an expert camera
man, a Pheidias becomes a piece of Gothic expressionism, a Praxiteles is
turned into a fascinating _surréaliste_ object dredged up from the
ooziest depths of the subconscious. This may be bad art history, but it
is certainly enormous fun.




                             _Appendix IV_


Painter in ordinary first to the Duke of his native Lorraine and later
to the King of France, Georges de Latour was treated, during his
lifetime, as the great artist he so manifestly was. With the accession
of Louis XIV and the rise, the deliberate cultivation, of a new Art of
Versailles, aristocratic in subject-matter and lucidly classical in
style, the reputation of this once famous man suffered an eclipse so
complete that, within a couple of generations, his very name had been
forgotten, and his surviving paintings came to be attributed to the Le
Nains, to Honthorst, to Zurbaran, to Murillo, even to Velasquez. The
rediscovery of Latour began in 1915 and was virtually complete by 1934,
when the Louvre organized a notable exhibition of 'The Painters of
Reality.' Ignored for nearly three hundred years, one of the greatest of
French painters had come back to claim his rights.

Georges de Latour was one of those extroverted visionaries, whose art
faithfully reflects certain aspects of the outer world, but reflects
them in a state of transfigurement, so that every meanest particular
becomes intrinsically significant, a manifestation of the absolute. Most
of his compositions are of figures seen by the light of a single candle.
A single candle, as Caravaggio and the Spaniards had shown, can give
rise to the most enormous theatrical effects. But Latour took no
interest in theatrical effects. There is nothing dramatic in his
pictures, nothing tragic or pathetic or grotesque, no representation of
action, no appeal to the sort of emotions which people go to the theatre
to have excited and then appeased. His personages are essentially
static. They never _do_ anything; they are simply _there_ in the same
way in which a granite Pharaoh is there, or a Bodhisattva from Khmer, or
one of Piero's flat-footed angels. And the single candle is used, in
every case, to stress this intense but unexcited, impersonal thereness.
By exhibiting common things in an uncommon light, its flame makes
manifest the living mystery and inexplicable marvel of mere existence.
There is so little religiosity in the paintings that in many cases it is
impossible to decide whether we are confronted by an illustration to the
Bible or a study of models by candlelight. Is the 'Nativity' at Rennes
_the_ nativity, or merely a nativity? Is the picture of an old man
asleep under the eyes of a young girl merely that? Or is it of St Peter
in prison being visited by the delivering angel? There is no way of
telling. But though Latour's art is wholly without religiosity, it
remains profoundly religious, in the sense that it reveals, with
unexampled intensity, the divine omnipresence.

It must be added that, as a man, this great painter of God's immanence
seems to have been proud, hard, intolerably overbearing and avaricious.
Which goes to show, yet once more, that there is never a one-to-one
correspondence between an artist's work and his character.




                              _Appendix V_


At the near-point Vuillard painted interiors for the most part, but
sometimes also gardens. In a few compositions he managed to combine the
magic of propinquity with the magic of remoteness by representing a
corner of a room, in which there stands or hangs one of his own, or
someone else's, representation of a distant view of trees, hills and
sky. It is an invitation to make the best of both worlds, the telescopic
and the microscopic, at a single glance.

For the rest, I can think of only a very few close-up landscapes by
modern European artists. There is a strange 'Thicket' by Van Gogh at the
Metropolitan. There is Constable's wonderful 'Dell in Helmingham Park'
at the Tate. There is a bad picture, Millais' 'Ophelia,' made magical,
in spite of everything, by its intricacies of summer greenery seen from
the point of view, very nearly, of a water rat. And I remember a
Delacroix, glimpsed long ago at some Loan Exhibition, of bark and leaves
and blossom at the closest range. There must, of course, be others; but
either I have forgotten, or have never seen them. In any case there is
nothing in the West comparable to the Chinese and Japanese renderings of
nature at the near-point. A spray of blossoming plum, eighteen inches of
a bamboo stem with its leaves, tits or finches seen at hardly more than
arm's length among the bushes, all kinds of flowers and foliage, of
birds and fish and small mammals. Each small life is represented as the
centre of its own universe, the purpose, in its own estimation, for
which this world and all that is in it were created; each issues its own
specific and individual declaration of independence from human
imperialism; each, by ironic implication, derides our absurd pretensions
to lay down merely human rules for the conduct of the cosmic game; each
mutely repeats the divine tautology: I am that I am.

Nature at the middle distance is familiar--so familiar that we are
deluded into believing that we really know what it is all about. Seen
very close at hand, or at a great distance, or from an odd angle, it
seems disquietingly strange, wonderful beyond all comprehension. The
close-up landscapes of China and Japan are so many illustrations of the
theme that Samsara and Nirvana are one, that the Absolute is manifest in
every appearance. These great metaphysical, and yet pragmatic, truths
were rendered by the Zen-inspired artists of the Far East in yet another
way. All the objects of their near-point scrutiny were represented in a
state of unrelatedness, against a blank of virgin silk or paper. Thus
isolated, these transient appearances take on a kind of absolute
Thing-in-Itselfhood. Western artists have used this device when painting
sacred figures, portraits and, sometimes, natural objects at a distance.
Rembrandt's 'Mill' and Van Gogh's 'Cypresses' are examples of long-range
landscapes, in which a single feature has been absolutized by isolation.
The magical power of many of Goya's etchings, drawings and paintings can
be accounted for by the fact that his compositions almost always take
the form of a few silhouettes, or even a single silhouette, seen against
a blank. These silhouetted shapes possess the visionary quality of
intrinsic significance, heightened by isolation and unrelatedness to
praeternatural intensity.

In nature, as in a work of art, the isolation of an object tends to
invest it with absoluteness, to endow it with that more-than-symbolic
meaning which is identical with being.

    _But there's a tree--of many_, one--
    _A_ single _field which I have looked upon_:
    _Both of them speak of something that is gone._

The something which Wordsworth could no longer see was 'the visionary
gleam.' That gleam, I remember, and that intrinsic significance were the
properties of a solitary oak that could be seen from the train, between
Reading and Oxford, growing from the summit of a little knoll in a wide
expanse of ploughland, and silhouetted against the pale northern sky.

The effects of isolation combined with proximity may be studied, in all
their magical strangeness, in an extraordinary painting by a
seventeenth-century Japanese artist, who was also a famous swordsman and
a student of Zen. It represents a butcher bird, perched on the very tip
of a naked branch, 'waiting without purpose, but in the state of highest
tension.' Beneath, above and all around is nothing. The bird emerges
from the Void, from that eternal namelessness and formlessness, which is
yet the very substance of the manifold, concrete and transient universe.
That shrike on its bare branch is first cousin to Hardy's wintry thrush.
But whereas the Victorian thrush insists on teaching us some kind of a
lesson, the Far Eastern butcher bird is content simply to exist, to be
intensely and absolutely _there_.




                             _Appendix VI_


Many schizophrenics pass most of their time neither on earth, nor in
heaven, nor even in hell, but in a grey, shadowy world of phantoms and
unrealities. What is true of these psychotics is true, to a lesser
extent, of certain neurotics afflicted by a milder form of mental
illness. Recently it has been found possible to induce this state of
ghostly existence by administering a small quantity of one of the
derivatives of adrenalin. For the living, the doors of heaven, hell and
limbo are opened, not by 'massy keys of metals twain,' but by the
presence in the blood of one set of chemical compounds and the absence
of another set. The shadow-world inhabited by some schizophrenics and
neurotics closely resembles the world of the dead, as described in some
of the earlier religious traditions. Like the wraiths in Sheol and in
Homer's Hades, these mentally disturbed persons have lost touch with
matter, language and their fellow beings. They have no purchase on life
and are condemned to ineffectiveness, solitude and a silence broken only
by the senseless squeak and gibber of ghosts.

The history of eschatological ideas marks a genuine progress--a progress
which can be described in theological terms as the passage from Hades to
Heaven, in chemical terms as the substitution of mescalin and lysergic
acid for adrenolutin, and in psychological terms as the advance from
catatonia and feelings of unreality to a sense of heightened reality in
vision and, finally, in mystical experience.




                             _Appendix VII_


Géricault was a negative visionary; for though his art was almost
obsessively true to nature, it was true to a nature that had been
magically transfigured, in his perceiving and rendering of it, for the
worse. 'I start to paint a woman,' he once said, 'but it always ends up
as a lion.' More often, indeed, it ended up as something a good deal
less amiable than a lion--as a corpse, for example, or as a demon. His
masterpiece, the prodigious 'Raft of the _Medusa_,' was painted not from
life but from dissolution and decay--from bits of cadavers supplied by
medical students, from the emaciated torso and jaundiced face of a
friend who was suffering from a disease of the liver. Even the waves on
which the raft is floating, even the overarching sky are
corpse-coloured. It is as though the entire universe had become a
dissecting room.

And then there are his demonic pictures. 'The Derby,' it is obvious, is
being run in hell, against a background fairly blazing with darkness
visible. 'The Horse startled by Lightning,' in the National Gallery, is
the revelation, in a single frozen instant, of the strangeness, the
sinister and even infernal otherness that hides in familiar things. In
the Metropolitan Museum there is a portrait of a child. And what a
child! In his luridly brilliant jacket the little darling is what
Baudelaire liked to call 'a budding Satan,' _un Satan en herbe_. And the
study of a naked man, also in the Metropolitan, is none other than the
budding Satan grown up.

From the accounts which his friends have left of him it is evident that
Géricault habitually saw the world about him as a succession of
visionary apocalypses. The prancing horse of his early _Officier de
Chasseurs_ was seen one morning, on the road to Saint-Cloud, in a dusty
glare of summer sunshine, rearing and plunging between the shafts of an
omnibus. The personages in the 'Raft of the _Medusa_' were painted in
finished detail, one by one, on the virgin canvas. There was no outline
drawing of the whole composition, no gradual building up of an over-all
harmony of tones and hues. Each particular revelation--of a body in
decay, of a sick man in the ghastly extremity of hepatitis--was fully
rendered as it was seen and artistically realized. By a miracle of
genius, every successive apocalypse was made to fit, prophetically, into
a harmonious composition which existed, when the first of the appalling
visions was transferred to canvas, only in the artist's imagination.




                            _Appendix VIII_


In _Sartor Resartus_ Carlyle has left what (in _Mr Carlyle, my Patient_)
his psycho-somatic biographer, Dr James Halliday, calls 'an amazing
description of a psychotic state of mind, largely depressive, but partly
schizophrenic.'

'The men and women around me,' writes Carlyle, 'even speaking with me,
were but Figures; I had practically forgotten that they were alive, that
they were not merely automata. Friendship was but an incredible
tradition. In the midst of their crowded streets and assemblages I
walked solitary; and (except that it was my own heart, not another's,
that I kept devouring) savage also as the tiger in the jungle. . . . To
me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of
Hostility; it was one huge, dead immeasurable steam-engine, rolling on
in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. . . . Having no
hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it of Man or of Devil. And
yet, strangely enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear,
tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what; it seemed as
if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath, would hurt me;
as if the Heavens and the Earth were but the boundless jaws of a
devouring Monster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured.' Renée
and the idolater of heroes are evidently describing the same experience.
Infinity is apprehended by both, but in the form of 'the System,' the
'immeasurable Steam-Engine.' To both, again, all is significant, but
negatively significant, so that every event is utterly pointless, every
object intensely unreal, every self-styled human being a clockwork
dummy, grotesquely going through the motions of work and play, of
loving, hating, thinking, of being eloquent, heroic, saintly, what you
will--the robots are nothing if not versatile.


[The end of _Heaven & Hell_ by Aldous Huxley]