"Aldous Huxley - The Doors Of Perception" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huxley Aldous)

Hampstead and was shown one of the younger artist's sketches. In spite of his contempt for naturalistic
art, the old visionary knew a good thing when be saw it-except of course, when it was by Rubens. 'This
is not drawing," he cried, "this is inspiration!" "I had meant it to be drawing," was Constable's
characteristic answer. Both men were right. It was drawing, precise and veracious, and at the same time
it was inspiration - inspiration of an order at least as high as Blake's. The pine trees on the Heath had
actually been seen as identical with the Dharma-Body. The sketch was a rendering, necessarily
imperfect but still profoundly impressive, of what a cleansed perception had revealed to the open eyes
of a great painter. From a contemplation, in the tradition of Wordsworth and Whitman, of the Dharma-
Body as hedge, and from visions, such as Blake's, of the "wonderful originals" within the mind,
contemporary poets have retreated into an investigation of the personal, as opposed to the more than
personal, subconscious and to a rendering, in highly abstract terms, not of the given, objective fact, but
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of mere scientific and theological notions. And something similar has happened in the held of painting,
where we have witnessed a general retreat from landscape, the predominant art form of the nineteenth
century. This retreat from landscape has not been into that other, inner divine Datum, with which most of
the traditional schools of the past were concerned, that Archetypal World, where men have always
found the raw materials of myth and religion. No, it has been a retreat from the outward Datum into the
personal subconscious, into a mental world more squalid and more tightly closed than even the world of
conscious personality. These contraptions of tin and highly colored plastic - where had I seen them
before? In every picture gallery that exhibits the latest in nonrepresentational art. And now someone
produced a phonograph and put a record on the turntable. I listened with pleasure, but experienced
nothing comparable to my seen apocalypses of flowers or flannel. Would a naturally gifted musician hear
the revelations which, for me, had been exclusively visual? It would be interesting to make the
experiment. Meanwhile, though not transfigured, though retaining its normal quality and intensity, the
music contributed not a little to my understanding of what had happened to me and of the wider
problems which those happenings had raised.
Instrumental music, oddly enough, left me rather cold. Mozart's C-Minor Piano Concerto was
interrupted after the first movement, and a recording of some madrigals by Gesualdo took its place.
"These voices," I said appreciatively, "these voices - they're a kind of bridge back to the human
world." And a bridge they remained even while singing the most startlingly chromatic of the mad prince's
compositions. Through the uneven phrases of the madrigals, the music pursued its course, never sticking
to the same key for two bars together. In Gesualdo, that fantastic character out of a Webster
melodrama, psychological disintegration had exaggerated, had pushed to the extreme limit, a tendency
inherent in modal as opposed to fully tonal music. The resulting works sounded as though they might
have been written by the later Schoenberg.
"And yet," I felt myself constrained to say, as I listened to these strange products of a Counter-
Reformation psychosis working upon a late medieval art form, "and yet it does not matter that he's all in
bits. The whole is disorganized. But each individual fragment is in order, is a representative of a Higher
Order. The Highest Order prevails even in the disintegration. The totality is present even in the broken
pieces. More clearly present, perhaps, than in a completely coherent work. At least you aren't lulled into
a sense of false security by some merely human, merely fabricated order. You have to rely on your
immediate perception of the ultimate order. So in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages.
But of course it's dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you couldn't get back, out of the chaos ..."
From Gesualdo's madrigals we jumped, across a gulf of three centuries, to Alban Berg and the
Lyric Suire. "This" I announced in advance, "is going to be hell."
But, as it turned out, I was wrong. Actually the music sounded rather funny. Dredged up from the
personal subconscious, agony succeeded twelve-tone agony; but what struck me was only the essential
incongruity between a psychological disintegration even completer than Gesualdo's and the prodigious
resources, in talent and technique, employed in its expression.
"Isn't he sorry for himself!" I commented with a derisive lack of sympathy. And then, "Katzenmusik