15
The role of images

Now another question had to be answered about the free drawings. For the fact that the ideas in them were obviously in part determined by the circumstance of a Freudian analysis did not, I thought, alter another fact; that was that they embodied a form of knowing that traditional education of the academic kind largely ignores, and one that I myself was unaware of using – until I began to study the drawings in detail. But when I had done this there had been no doubt that many of the drawings did represent thinking of some sort, reflections about the human situation, as well as experiences with a medium. So the question arose, why had it not been possible to think out such ideas directly in words? This raised the more general question of thinking in the private language of one’s own subjective images, as against thinking in the public language of words. It also brought to the fore the problem of the academic and over-linguistic bias of traditional education.

In order to achieve more understanding of this matter it was necessary to try to compare the relative advantages of thinking in words used logically versus thinking in non-logical imagery, whether in words used poetically or in quite non-verbal imagery such as in the free drawings.

The first advantage of the thinking in pictures was that it was apparently much quicker; many of the drawings which had taken me so many years to translate into logical terms had been made in ten or twenty minutes. The second advantage was that the statements in pictures were much more comprehensive than verbal statements, meanings that stretched back through the whole of one’s experience could be presented to a single glance of the eye. And not only did they bring so much of the past into a single moment of present experience, they also embraced a wider range of bodily experience than intellectual verbal statements can; by stimulating the sense of rhythm, balance, colour, movement, they seemed to give the sense of a solider, deeper-rooted kind of knowing than any purely logical statement ever did. And when, in fact, I had succeeded in backing up by logical analysis and reason the knowledge that had at first been obtained in this pictorial way of thinking, I then felt I had a much firmer hold upon it; knowledge not so rooted in a private store of images seemed to have an impermanent and unsubstantial quality, however much supported by rational argument.

All this might be summed up by saying that the drawings were intuitive rather than logical reflections about living, they were attempts to express the wholeness of certain attitudes and experiences which logic and science, by their very nature, can never do; since logic is bound to abstract from whole experience and eliminate the totality of the particular and the personal.

Some of the disadvantages of thinking in this way followed from the advantages. The statements about living contained in the drawings were certainly very private ones; they could not, as long as they were just drawings, be argued about and proved right or wrong. Only when they were translated into intellectual statements, as has been attempted in this book, could other people argue about them and agree or disagree. As long as they were presented only in visual imagery, no one could even know for certain that that was what I had meant; although other people could add meanings of their own to the drawings no one could prove that I had not had the ideas about the drawings that emerged in their stories. And neither could I prove that I had not attached the meanings to the drawings quite arbitrarily in order to establish a preconceived case. I might have wanted to prove something I had already thought out and used the drawings to bolster up my ideas; the whole thing might have been a put-up job, wittingly or unwittingly. Such objections, however, surely applied to all intuitively reached judgements and was one of the reasons why science and logic had ever been developed at all.

In the light of the dilemma of the Angry Parrot, I could now see something more of what the over-academic kind of education might be leaving out. It seemed to me that its defect was not only that it was so cut off from ordinary living; thus it was not enough to try to alter it only by more active contacts with ‘real’ life, as distinct from book-learning. It was also that there was too little recognition of the essential role of the bridge between lived experience and logical thought: that is, the role of the intuitive image. There was not enough recognition of the danger of that too early or too docile acceptance of the particular public reality that an intellectual statement is; the danger portrayed, for instance, in the Dodder-Clown drawing, with its mockery covering the fear of intellect that is cut off from the raw facts of lived experience.

As for the effects of the gap in orthodox education, through its failure to make sufficient allowance for the spontaneous image, it seemed possible that the growing demand for psycho-analysis might be in part one of the results. Thus the psycho-analyst has to undo the bias; by attending to the patient’s own intuitive reflections and making him attend to them himself, through looking at dreams and daydreams and undirected thinking (what at school is called ‘inattention’, ‘wandering thoughts’) the analyst in fact helps him to learn how to think, how to discover the proper balance between intuition and logic.

When one tried to compare the two, intellect and intuition, it was so clear that one did need both, the one reaching out to the whole of experience, ranging to the limits of the ‘wild surmise’, the other testing and sifting and organising the knowledge so obtained. But the difficulty was to allow these two differences to interact freely. In other words, here was another ineradicable conflict to be continually accepted as part of living, that between, on the one hand, desire for the wholeness of experience, and on the other the necessity to analyse and break it up into bits for the sake of com-municability and the growth of further wholes. And it looked as if the conflict might be increased by anxieties to do with wholes and bits. Thus it might be possible to come to over-value the intuitive approach and shrink from the effort of logical analysis because this analysis was too much associated with unadmitted destructive wishes and hostility. I had so often felt, when a thought was first experienced in terms of a glimpsed visual picture, that to try to turn it into words would be to lose something irreparably, that its wholeness and splendour would be for ever destroyed. It seemed now that I had been right in supposing that something would be lost, wrong in assuming that it would be forever, wrong in not realising that the acceptance of division, analysis, bits, acceptance of the partialness which was inevitable in logical communication, was necessary for the growth of new wholes.

The difference between the logical way of looking at the world and the other way seemed particularly illustrated by the difference between a statement in prose as compared with one in poetry. In poetry it seemed that there was not only a joining up of oneself and what one looked at, there was also a joining up of feeling and knowing. For instance:

I found it was impossible to say this to oneself and remain a detached observer, as one could with the prose statement about castaways set adrift in an empty sea. For in saying it one felt actually there oneself, the bodily sensations of the castaways became one’s own. And this seemed because of the way the consonants and vowels fitted into the rhythm of the words; for instance, in the phrase ‘cry to the sea’ the ‘t’ of ‘to’ cut short the thin high-pitched ‘y’ of ‘cry’ and one had the sensation of the wind whisking the cry from one’s very lips and drowning its small sound in the deep echoing vowels of ‘roar’. And just because of this, the feeling self and the body self, which had had to be separated from the knowing self in the detached prose description, were here joined up again, one was feeling what one knew. The poet, just because he was a poet, had had the art to bring bodily sensation into the experience of thinking about castaways, he had known how to play directly upon the rhythm of one’s breathing in speaking the words, how to use the lowness and highness and sensory texture of the vowels and consonants to convey his meaning. He had not been content with choosing his words according to their dictionary definitions and logical grammatical arrangements, but had chosen them and arranged them for their qualities in the ear and on the tongue and between the lips.

Having come, through the study of the free drawings, to make a comparison between intuitive and logical ways of thinking, I now found I had worked through to some sort of intellectual formulation of what to believe in in living, not a finished statement but a marking out of the directions of belief. And it was not science, I could not make science a religion, since science can never apprehend the wholeness of experience; and it was not art, at least certainly not art for art’s sake, since art and living are two different things. But it was to go on finding out about (by science) and experiencing (both in art and living) the rhythm between the two opposing ways of relating oneself to the other; the rhythm between the way of detachment, of analysis, of standing apart and acting according to a preconceived purpose; and the way of fusion, becoming one with what is seen, steeping oneself in it in a spontaneous acting together. It seemed to me that science and logic knew a lot about the first phase of the rhythm, the detached way of looking at life in which self and other are separate. But the second half was much less understood, because, in order to study it at first hand science had first to experience it, and that meant science denying itself and taking the plunge into a different way of being.