Suppose you're shipwrecked on
an uninhabited island in the South Seas. The first thing you do is to take a
long look at the world around you, a world of sky and sea and earth and stars
and trees and hills. You see this world as objective, as something set over
against you and not yourself or related to you in any way. And you notice two
things about this objective world. In the first place, it doesn't have any
conversation. It's full of animals and plants and insects going on with their
own business, but there's nothing that responds to you: it has no morals and no
intelligence, or at least none that you can grasp. It may have a shape and a
meaning, but it doesn't seem to be a human shape or a human meaning. Even if
there's enough to eat and no dangerous animals, you feel lonely and frightened
and unwanted in such a world.
In the second place, you find
that looking at the world, as something set over against you, splits your mind
in two. You have an intellect that feels curious about it and wants to study
it, and you have feelings or emotions that see it as beautiful or austere or
terrible. You know that both these attitudes have some reality, at least for
you. If the ship you were wrecked in was a Western ship, you'd probably feel
that your intellect tells you more about what's really there in the outer
world, and that your emotions tell you more about what's going on inside you.
If your background were Oriental, you'd be more likely to reverse this and say
that the beauty or terror was what was really there, and that your instinct to
count and classify and measure and pull to pieces was what was inside your
mind. But whether your point of view is Western or Eastern, intellect and
emotion never get together in your mind as long as you're simply looking at the
world. They alternate, and keep you divided between them.
The language you use on this
level of the mind is the language of consciousness or awareness. It's largely a
language of nouns and adjectives. You have to have names for things, and you
need qualities like 'wet' or 'green' or 'beautiful' to describe how things seem
to you. This is the speculative or contemplative position of the mind, the
position in which the arts and sciences begin, although they don't stay there
very long. The sciences begin by accepting the facts and the evidence about an
outside world without trying to alter them. Science proceeds by accurate
measurement and description, and follows the demands of the reason rather than
the emotions. What it deals with is there, whether we like it or not. The
emotions are unreasonable: for them it's what they like and don't like that
comes first. We'd be naturally inclined to think that the arts follow the path
of emotion, in contrast to the sciences. Up to a point they do, but there's a
complicating factor.
That complicating factor is
the contrast between 'I like this' and 'I don't like this'. In this Robinson
Crusoe life I've assigned you, you may have moods of complete peacefulness and
joy, moods when you accept your island and everything around you. You wouldn't
have such moods very often, and when you had them, they'd be moods of
identification, when you felt that the island was a part of you and you a part
of it. That is not the feeling of consciousness or awareness, where you feel
split off from everything that's not your perceiving self. Your habitual state
of mind is the feeling of separation which goes with being conscious, and the
feeling 'this is not a part of me' soon becomes 'this is not what I want'....
So you soon realize that
there's a difference between the world you're living in and the world you want
to live in. The world you want to live in is a human world, not an objective
one: it's not an environment but a home; it's not the world you see but the
world you build out of what you see. You go to work to build a shelter or plant
a garden, and as soon as you start to work you've moved into a different level
of human life. You're not separating only yourself from nature now, but
constructing a human world and separating it from the rest of the world. Your
intellect and emotions are now both engaged in the same activity, so there's no
longer any real distinction between them. As soon as you plant a garden or a
crop, you develop the conception of a 'weed', the plant you don't want in
there. But you can't say that 'weed' is either an intellectual or an emotional
conception, because it's both at once. Further, you go to work because you feel
you have to, and because you want something at the end of the work. That means
that the important categories of your life are no longer the subject and the
object, the watcher and the things being watched: the important categories are
what you have to do and what you want to do — in other words, necessity and
freedom.
One person by himself is not a
complete human being, so I'll provide you with another shipwrecked refugee of
the opposite sex and an eventual family. Now you're a member of a human
society. This human society after a while will transform the island into
something with a human shape. What that human shape is, is revealed in the
shape of the work you do: the buildings, such as they are, the paths through
the woods, the planted crops fenced off against whatever animals want to eat
them. These things, these rudiments of city, highway, garden and farm, are the
human form of nature, or the form of human nature, whichever you like. This is
the area of the applied arts and sciences, and it appears in our society as
engineering and agriculture and medicine and architecture. In this area we can
never say clearly where the art stops and the science begins, or vice versa.
The language you use on this
level is the language of practical sense, a language of verbs or words of
action and movement. The practical world, however, is a world where actions
speak louder than words. In some ways it's a higher level of existence than the
speculative level, because it's doing something about the world instead of just
looking at it, but in itself it's a much more primitive level. It's the process
of adapting to the environment, or rather of transforming the environment in
the interests of one species, that goes on among animals and plants as well as
human beings. The animals have a good many of our practical skills: some
insects make pretty fair architects, and beavers know quite a lot about
engineering. In this island, probably, and certainly if you were alone, you'd
have about the ranking of a second-rate animal. What makes our practical life
really human is a third level of the mind, a level where consciousness and
practical skill come together.
This third level is a vision
or model in your mind of what you want to construct. There's that word 'want'
again. The actions of man are prompted by desire, and some of these desires are
needs, like food and warmth and shelter. One of these needs is sexual, the
desire to reproduce and bring more human beings into existence. But there's
also a desire to bring a social human form into existence: the form of cities
and gardens and farms that we call civilization. Many animals and insects have
this social form too, but man knows that he has it: he can compare what he does
with what he can imagine being done. So we begin to see where the imagination
belongs in the scheme of human affairs. It's the power of constructing possible
models of human experience. In the world of the imagination, anything goes
that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens. If it did happen, it
would move out of the world of imagination into the world of action.
We have three levels of the
mind now, and a language for each of them, which in English-speaking societies
means an English for each of them. There's the level of consciousness and
awareness, where the most important thing is the difference between me and
everything else. The English of this level is the English of ordinary
conversation, which is mostly monologue, as you'll soon realize if you do a bit
of eavesdropping, or listening to yourself. We can call it the language of
self-expression. Then there's the level of social participation, the working or
technological language of teachers and preachers and politicians and
advertisers and lawyers and journalists and scientists. We've already called
this the language of practical sense. Then there's the level of imagination, which
produces the literary language of poems and plays and novels. They're not
really different languages, of course, but three different reasons for using
words.
On this basis, perhaps, we can
distinguish the arts from the sciences. Science begins with the world we have
to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it
moves towards the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a
possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction,
the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of
the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the
other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It
starts with the imagination, and then works towards ordinary experience: that
is, it tries to make itself as convincing and recognizable as it can. You can
see why we tend to think of the sciences as intellectual and the arts as
emotional: one starts with the world as it is, the other with the world we want
to have. Up to a point it is true that science gives an intellectual view of
reality, and that the arts try to make the emotions as precise and disciplined
as sciences do the intellect. But of course it's nonsense to think of the scientist
as a cold unemotional reasoner and the artist as somebody who's in a perpetual
emotional tizzy. You can't distinguish the arts from the sciences by the mental
processes the people in them use: they both operate on a mixture of hunch and
common sense. A highly developed science and a highly developed art are very
close together, psychologically and otherwise.
Still, the fact that they
start from opposite ends, even if they do meet in the middle, makes for one
important difference between them. Science learns more and more about the world
as it goes on: it evolves and improves. A physicist today knows more physics
than Newton did, even if he's not as great a scientist. But literature begins
with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary
model we call the classic. Literature doesn't evolve or improve or progress. We
may have dramatists in the future who will write plays as good as King Lear,
though they'll be very different ones, but drama as a whole will never get
better than King Lear. King Lear is it, as far as drama is concerned; so is
Oedipus Rex, written two thousand years earlier than that, and both will be
models of dramatic writing as long as the human race endures. Social conditions
may improve: most of us would rather live in nineteenth-century United States
than in thirteenth-century Italy, and for most of us Whitman's celebration of
democracy makes a lot more sense than Dante's Inferno. But it doesn't follow
that Whitman is a better poet than Dante: literature won't line up with that
kind of improvement. So we find that everything that does improve, including
science, leaves the literary artist out in the cold. Writers don't seem to
benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions
of all kinds....
Literature belongs to the
world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his
environment. Literature's world is a concrete human world of immediate
experience. The poet uses images and objects and sensations much more than he
uses abstract ideas; the novelist is concerned with telling stories, not with
working out arguments. The world of literature is human in shape, a world where
the sun rises in the east and sets in the west over the edge of a flat earth in
three dimensions, where the primary realities are not atoms or electrons but
bodies, and the primary forces not energy or gravitation but love and death and
passion and joy. It's not surprising if writers are often rather simple people,
not always what we think of as intellectuals, and certainly not always any
freer of silliness or perversity than anyone else. What concerns us is what
they produce, not what they are, and poetry, according to Milton, who ought to
have known, is 'more simple, sensuous and passionate' than philosophy or
science....
At the level of ordinary
consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all
sides by what he isn't. At the level of practical sense, or civilization,
there's a human circumference, a little cultivated world with a human shape,
fenced off from the jungle and inside the sea and the sky. But in the
imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the
imagination is a totally human world. Here we recapture, in full consciousness,
that original lost sense of identity with our surroundings, where there is
nothing outside the mind of man, or something identical with the mind of man.
...
Outside literature, the main
motive for writing is to describe this world. But literature itself uses
language in a way which associates our minds with it. As soon as you use
associative language, you begin using figures of speech. If you say this talk
is dry and dull, you're using figures associating it with bread and
breadknives. There are two main kinds of association, analogy and identity, two
things that are like each other and two things that are each other.... One produces the figure of speech called the simile; the
other produces the figure called metaphor.
In descriptive writing you
have to be careful of associative language. You'll find that analogy, or
likeness to something else, is very tricky to handle in description, because
the differences are as important as the resemblances. As for metaphor, where
you're really saying 'this is that', you're turning your back on logic and
reason completely, because logically two things can never be the same thing and
still remain two things. The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive,
archaic forms of thought in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to
describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by
the human mind. So he produces what Baudelaire called a 'suggestive magic
including at the same time object and subject, the world outside the artist and
the artist himself.' The motive
for metaphor, according to Wallace Stevens, is a desire to associate, and
finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the
only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that
although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.
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