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

certain mediums to whom the mescalin taker's brief revelation is a matter, during long periods, of daily
and hourly experience.
From this long but indispensable excursion into the realm of theory, we may now return to the
miraculous facts - four bamboo chair legs in the middle of a room. Like Wordsworth's daffodils, they
brought all manner of wealth - the gift, beyond price, of a new direct insight into the very Nature of
Things, together with a more modest treasure of understanding in the field, especially, of the arts. A rose
is a rose is a rose. But these chair legs were chair legs were St. Michael and all angels. Four or five
hours after the event, when the effects of a cerebral sugar shortage were wearing off, I was taken for a
little tour of the city, which included a visit, towards sundown, to what is modestly claimed to be the
World's Biggest Drug Store. At the back of the W.B.D.S., among the toys, the greeting cards and the
comics, stood a row, surprisingly enough, of art books. I picked up the first volume that came to hand.
It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened was "The Chair" - that astounding
portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render
on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair
Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen. But, though
incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more
than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact. The fact had been manifested Suchness; this was only
an emblem. Such emblems are sources of true knowledge about the Nature of Things, and this true
knowledge may serve to prepare the mind which accepts it for immediate insights on its own account.
But that is all. However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.
It would be interesting, in this context, to make a study of the works of art available to the great
knowers of Suchness. What sort of pictures did Eckhart look at? What sculptures and paintings played
a part in the religious experience of St. John of the Cross, of Hakuin, of Hui-neng, of William Law? The
questions are beyond my power to answer; but I strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of
Suchness paid very little attention to art - some refusing to have anything to do with it at all, others being
content with what a critical eye would regard as second-rate, or even, tenth-rate, works. (To a person
whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-
rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference.) Art, I suppose,
is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be
content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly
composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner. I returned the Van Gogh to its rack and picked up the volume
standing next to it. It was a book on Botticelli. I turned the pages. "The Birth of Venus"-never one of my
favorites. "Mars and Venus," that loveliness so passionately denounced by poor Ruskin at the height of
his long-drawn sexual tragedy. The marvelously rich and intricate "Calumny of Apelles." And then a
somewhat less familiar and not very good picture, "Judith." My attention was arrested and I gazed in
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fascination, not at the pale neurotic heroine or her attendant, not at the victim's hairy head or the vernal
landscape in the background, but at the purplish silk of Judith's pleated bodice and long wind-blown
skirts.
This was something I had seen before-seen that very morning, between the flowers and the
furniture, when I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own
crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers - what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the
texture of the gray flannel - how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again,
in Botticelli's picture.
Civilized human beings wear clothes, therefore there can be no portraiture, no mythological or
historical storytelling without representations of folded textiles. But though it may account for the origins,
mere tailoring can never explain the luxuriant development of drapery as a major theme of all the plastic
arts. Artists, it is obvious, have always loved drapery for its own sake - or, rather, for their own. When
you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical purposes, are non-
representational-the kind of unconditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition