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

like to let themselves go. In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly human, fully representational
element accounts for about ten per cent of the whole. All the rest consists of many colored variations on
the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen. And these non-representational nine-tenths of a
Madonna or an Apostle may be just as important qualitatively as they are in quantity. Very often they
set the tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they
express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the artist. Stoical serenity reveals itself in the
smooth surfaces, the broad untortured folds of Piero's draperies. Torn between fact and wish, between
cynicism and idealism, Bernini tempers the all but caricatural verisimilitude of his faces with enormous
sartorial abstractions, which are the embodiment, in stone or bronze, of the everlasting commonplaces
of rhetoric - the heroism, the holiness, the sublimity to which mankind perpetually aspires, for the most
part in vain. And here are El Greco's disquietingly visceral skirts and mantles; here are the sharp,
twisting, flame-like folds in which Cosimo Tura clothes his figures: in the first, traditional spirituality
breaks down into a nameless physiological yearning; in the second, there writhes an agonized sense of
the world's essential strangeness and hostility. Or consider Watteau; his men and women play lutes, get
ready for balls and harlequinades, embark, on velvet lawns and under noble trees, for the Cythera of
every lover's dream; their enormous melancholy and the flayed, excruciating sensibility of their creator
find expression, not in the actions recorded, not in the gestures and the faces portrayed, but in the relief
and texture of their taffeta skirts, their satin capes and doublets. Not an inch of smooth surface here, not
a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an
incessant modulation - inner uncertainty rendered with the perfect assurance of a master hand - of tone
into tone, of one indeterminate color into another. In life, man proposes, God disposes. In the plastic
arts the proposing is done by the subject matter; that which disposes is ultimately the artist's
temperament, proximately (at least in portraiture, history and genre) the carved or painted drapery.
Between them, these two may decree that a fete galante shall move to tears, that a crucifixion shall be
serene to the point of cheerfulness, that a stigmatization shall be almost intolerably sexy, that the likeness
of a prodigy of female brainlessness (I am thinking now of Ingres' incomparable Mme. Moitessier) shall
express the austerest, the most uncompromising intellectuality.
But this is not the whole story. Draperies, as I had now discovered, are much more than devices for
the introduction of non-representational forms into naturalistic paintings and sculptures. What the rest of
us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His
perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to
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Mind at Large oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness. It is a knowledge
of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living
hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being.
More even than the chair, though less perhaps than those wholly supernatural flowers, the folds of my
gray flannel trousers were charged with "is-ness." To what they owed this privileged status, I cannot say.
Is it, perhaps, because the forms of folded drapery are so strange and dramatic that they catch the eye
and in this way force the miraculous fact of sheer existence upon the attention? Who knows? What is
important is less the reason for the experience than the experience itself. Poring over Judith's skirts,
there in the World's Biggest Drug Store, I knew that Botticelli - and not Botticelli alone, but many others
too-had looked at draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as had been mine that
morning. They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to
render it in paint or stone. Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the wonder of
pure existence belong to another order, beyond the Power of even the highest art to express. But in
Judith's skirt I could clearly see what, if I had been a painter of genius, I might have made of my old
gray flannels. Not much, heaven knows, in comparison with the reality, but enough to delight generation
after generation of beholders, enough to make them understand at least a little of the true significance of
what, in our pathetic imbecility, we call "mere things" and disregard in favor of television.
"This is how one ought to see," I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers, or glanced at the