Chapter 8 Lecture 4: Easy to see

4. Visibility In Dante's Divine Comedy (Purgatorio, XVII. 25) there is this line: "And then it rained down into the heights of the imagination..." I will start this evening with this line: Imagine a place where rain falls. Let's start by looking at the context of this line in Purgatory.Here is the circle of wrath, where Dante is contemplating images that formed directly in his mind, depicting examples of canonical and biblical wrath punished.He realized that these images were raining down from heaven, that God sent them to him. In the circles of Purgatory, besides the details of the landscape and the vaults of the sky, besides Dante and the meeting of the soul of the penitent sinner with the supernatural, there are scenes that serve as quotations and manifestations of the paradigm of sin and virtue, first of all Like a low-relief sculpture, it appears that it is about to move and speak, and then it is projected to Dante's eyes like an image, and then reaches Dante's ear like a sound, and finally becomes a purely psychological image.In short, these images gradually move inward, and Dante seems to have realized that it is useless to invent a new form of derived expression every circle, and it is better to let these images go directly to the mind without passing through the senses.

But first a definition of imagination must be given; Dante says this in two trirhymes (XVII.13-18): O imagination, sometimes you let us far Break away from everything outside, even if the gongs and drums are loud, We must also turn a blind eye, turn a deaf ear, The senses contribute nothing to you, who moves you? It is the light formed in heaven that guides you. Or it is God's will that leads you to the underworld. It goes without saying that what is involved here is a "higher imagination": that is to say, a higher part of the imagination, as distinct from the concrete imagination as it presents chaotically in dreams.Let us keep this in mind and come to Dante's reasoning, which faithfully represents the philosophy of his time.Let me repeat the previous paragraph: O imagination, you are so powerful that you can influence our skills and wills, steal us away from this external tangible world, and bring us into an inner world, so that even thousands of times If the drums are beating, we will turn a deaf ear; if the visual information you receive is not formed from the feelings stored in memory, then what is the source of these information? "The light formed in heaven guides you," according to Dante—and also according to Thomas Aquinas, there is a source of light in heaven that transmits ideal images; Formed logically, or by the will of God: "in accordance with the will that leads it down into the underworld".

When Dante talks about the scenes in front of him (that is, Dante as an actor in the poem), it seems that these scenes are movies or TV images on the screen, which are quite different from the objective reality of his extraterrestrial travel.For Dante the poet, the whole journey of Dante the actor is of a similar quality to those scenes.The poet must imagine visually all that his actor sees and thinks he sees, all that he dreams, all that he remembers, all that appears to him, or all that he hears, as He has to imagine the same visual content of the metaphor he uses to facilitate this visual evoking process.What Dante seeks to define, then, is the role of the imagination in the Divine Comedy, especially the visual part of his imagination, since his imagination is prior to, or contemporaneous with, the imagination of words.

We can distinguish between these two imaginative processes: one begins with words and reaches visual images; the other starts with visual images and reaches verbal representations.The first process is generally seen when reading.For example, when we read a scene in a novel or a report on a certain event in a newspaper, we can “witness” that scene as if it happened right in front of our eyes, or at least watch it to selected fragments or details. The images we see on the cinema screen also go through the stage of text description, are "visualized" in the director's mind, and then reproduced on the spot.Finally fixed in the film.A film is thus the result of several stages, both material and immaterial, but throughout the process the image gradually acquires form.

In this process, the role of the "cinema in the mind" dominated by imagination is no less important than the actual production of sequence clips, and these clips have to be recorded by the camera and then connected and synthesized.This mental cinema has always been active in the imagination of each of us; even before the invention of cinema technology.Moreover, it is constantly projecting images before our mental eyes. Significantly, Ignatius of Loyola's Ejercicios espirituales also attached great importance to visual imagination.On the first page of the book, Loyola prescribes a "visual layout of the venue," which can be seen as a scenography for a stage performance: "In visual contemplation or meditation, especially since Christ our Lord is visible and In my observations of him, the point of this arrangement is to see imaginatively the actual place where the object I want to see can be found. By actual place I mean, for example, the monastery or hillside where Jesus Christ or Our Lady is ’” Loyola then hastened to explain that the observation of our sin must not be visual, or else (if I understand correctly) we would have to use some kind of metaphorical visual imagination (imprisoned in a corroded body soul).

Moving on, on the first day of the second week, the spiritual exercise unfolds with a vast visual scene and scenes with all kinds of beings: The first point: the first point is to see people, every kind of people; first of all, white and black people in all kinds of clothes and postures on the ground; some enjoy peace, some go to war, some cry, some laugh , Some are healthy, some are sick, some are being born, some are dying, all kinds of people. Second point: to see the Trinity on thrones or holy thrones, and see how they look down on every part of the face of the earth and all those who are so blind, how they die and go to hell.

The notion that Moses' God could not tolerate being represented as a visual image does not seem to have reached Ignatius Loyola.On the contrary, he may be said to be asserting for every Christian their right to those magnificent visual faculties of Dante or Michelangelo, even unreservedly assuming that Dante should make use of them when facing the celestial vistas of Paradise. his own visual imagination. In Loyola's next day's exercise (Second Meditation), the meditating person should put himself on the stage, playing the part of the actor in the imagined action: The first point is to see the people concerned, that is to say, to see the Virgin, Joseph, the handmaid and the newborn baby Jesus, while making myself a wretch, a lowly slave, looking at them, Observing them, serving their needs, and being respectful, as if present; and then thinking about myself for some benefit.

Of course, Counter-Reformation Catholicism had a fundamental means, and that was the ability to use visual means of communication: through the emotional stimulation of religious art, believers were supposed to grasp the meaning of the Church's written teachings.But this situation always starts with a given image, one proposed by the Church itself, not one "imagined" by believers.I think that Loyola's method, even in its contemporary form of reverence, is characterized by a transition from language to visual image as a means of acquiring knowledge of the deepest meaning.Here, the starting point and the ending point are established, but between the two, an infinitely wide field is opened up, and the personal imagination can be used to describe the characters, places and scenes of activities.Believers are called to paint frescoes full of figures on the walls of their own minds, and the starting point is that their visual imagination can successfully learn from a theological proposition or a succinct passage in the Gospels. stand out in the sentence.

Let us now return to the question of pure literature.Let us consider the birth of the imagination at a time when literature no longer regards a certain authority or a certain tradition as its source or goal, but instead seeks novelty, originality and invention.I think that in this case, the question of which priority is the visual image or the verbal expression (it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem) clearly favors the visual imagination side. Where do the images that rain down on our reveries come from?Dante certainly had reason to think highly of himself, and even had no qualms about declaring that his landscapes were directly divinely inspired.Writers who are nearer to us in time (with the rare exception of the prophetically called) are connected by means of temporal transmission; such as the collective unconscious or the individual unconscious; perceptible time reappearing from past generations; Or to "appear," that is, to pour into a certain place or a certain moment.In a word, these are processes; and even if these processes are not of heavenly origin, they must be beyond our will and our control, and, personally, form a certain sense of transcendence.

It is not only poets and novelists who have explored this question.Douglas Hofstadter, an expert on the nature of intelligence, made the same discussion in his famous book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (Gödel, Escher, Bach); The problem is to choose among the various images that spring up in the imagination: For example: Consider a writer who seeks to express certain ideas which are loaded in his intellectual images. How these images are arranged in his mind is not quite clear to him, so he makes various experiments, using a different Express things in a different way, and finally decide on a certain manuscript.But does he know where this manuscript came from?Just vaguely know.And most of the source, like icebergs, was underwater and invisible—he knew that. (1980, p. 713)

But perhaps we should first look at how this question has been asked in the past.The most exhaustive, comprehensive and clear history of the concept of imagination that I have found is an essay by Jean Starobinski, The Realm of the Imagination (into Relation of Criticism) [La relation critique], 1970).From the Neoplatonic changes of the Renaissance arose the idea of ​​the imagination, of communication with the souls of men; this idea was later reappeared in Romanticism and Surrealism.This idea is contrasted with the imagination as an instrument of knowledge; the instrumental theory of knowledge holds that imagination, while following a different path than scientific knowledge, coexists with it, and even supports it, and may in fact be an attempt by scientists to set their A stage that a hypothesis must go through.On the other hand, the theory that the imagination is a kind of repository of truths about the universe, though it may have something in common with a certain philosophy of nature or with a certain Theosophical knowledge, would, if we were unable to divide everything knowable into two ;Leaving the external world to science and confining imaginative knowledge to the inner self of the individual, then the above theories cannot be compared with scientific knowledge.Starobinski sees this second attitude as Freud's method of analysis, while Jung's method, while endowing archetypes and the collective unconscious with universal validity, is incompatible with the idea that imagination is a method of exploring the realities of the world. linked together. Here, there is a question I cannot avoid: In which of the two tendencies outlined by Starobinski should I place my own imaginative notions?In order to answer this question, I have to look back at my own experience as a writer, especially the part that involves "imagining" narrative writing.When I started writing fantasy stories, I didn't think about theory; I only knew that the source of all my stories was a visual image.There is an image of a human being split in two, each continuing to live independently.Another image shows a boy climbing up a tree and jumping from tree to tree without getting off the ground.Another is an empty suit of armor that walks and talks as if there were people inside. Therefore, the first thing that comes to my mind when composing a story is that, for some reason, I feel that a certain image has a certain meaning, even if I am not able to formulate it either inferentially or conceptually. meaning to come.Once the image became clear in my mind, I proceeded to develop it into a story; or, more precisely, the image itself fulfilled its inner potential, bringing out the story it contained. .Around each figure, others gradually emerge, thus forming a field of analogy, symmetry and confrontation.This material is no longer purely visual, but also conceptual; to its organization there is now added a certain order and meaning which I intend to give to the development of the story; The general design I make for the story, what doesn't fit, but always leaves some room for possible choices.At the same time, writing itself, and the finished product of the written word, grew in importance.I would like to say that from the moment I started writing, words are extremely important; words are firstly a search for the equivalent of visual images, and secondly, the coherent advancement of the original style tendency.Finally, the written word gradually dominates the field.From then on, writing will lead the story to the most appropriate language expression; visual imagination can only follow closely, and there is no other choice. In Cosmocomics (1965) the procedure is slightly different, since the starting point is a proposition taken from the language of science; from this conceptual proposition an independent drama of visual imagery must grow.My aim is to show that writing with images peculiar to mythology can be based on any soil, even languages ​​most distant from visual images, such as the language of science today.Even in reading the most rigorous scientific and technical works or the most abstract philosophical works, we can happen to encounter a phrase that suddenly stimulates the visual imagination.We are thus in a situation where an image is determined by a pre-existing written text (a page or, as I happened to encounter a sentence while reading), from which it is possible to begin a process of imagination; This process may either follow the spirit of the written word, or it may carve out a direction of its own. The first cosmic burlesque I wrote, "The Distance to the Moon," was quite possibly the most "surreal"; I mean, one that opened up to a dreamlike imaginary world inspired by the physics of gravity .In other cosmic burlesques, the plot is guided by ideas that are more scientifically sound, but always cloaked in imagination and emotion, with a voice or two speaking for them.In short, the goal of my program is to combine the situation of spontaneous generation of images with the purposiveness of speculative thinking.Even if a story begins with a visual imagination that allows its own internal logic to play out, sooner or later it finds itself caught in a web where reason and written expression have to impose their own logic.Still, the visual solution is the decisive factor, sometimes unexpectedly determining the scene; something that the conjecture of the mind and the means of language may not be able to achieve. One caveat about the anthropomorphism in The Cosmic Funny: While science interests me because of its dedication to escaping anthropomorphic knowledge, I remain convinced that our imaginations can only is anthropomorphic in nature.This is why I am anthropomorphic in a universe in which no human beings have ever lived; and I would add that it seems extremely unlikely that human beings could exist in such a universe either. Now I should come to answer the question I asked myself about Starobinski's two ways of thinking.These two ways are: Is imagination a tool of knowledge, or is it an identification with the soul of the world.Which one should I choose?Judging from what I have said above, I should be a firm supporter of the first tendency, because for me, a story is a combination of the spontaneous logic of the image and a plan based on rational purpose. .However, at the same time, I have been seeking in my imagination a way to acquire some kind of knowledge beyond the individual and beyond the subject.So in my case, the correct thing to do is to state bluntly: I am closer to the second view, namely: identification with human souls. There is another definition, which I find quite apt, and this is: the imagination is a storehouse of potential, hypothetical things that do not exist, have never existed and may never exist, but may exist Pass.This is brought to mind in Starobinski's discussion of the subject when he refers to Giordano Bruno.According to Bruno, the imaginative spirit is "the never-filling world or gap of form and image".That being the case, I believe that relying on the potentially diverse content of this gap is indispensable to any form of knowledge. The mind of the poet, and of some decisive scientists, works by a process of image association, which is the combination and integration of the possible and the impossible among an infinite number of forms. Select the fastest method.Imagination is an electronic machine that considers all possible combinations and selects those that are suitable for a particular purpose, or, to put it bluntly, those that are most interesting, pleasant, or fascinating . I would also like to explain what role the indirect imagination plays in this imaginary gap; I mean the images provided by culture, whether popular culture or any other kind of tradition.This also raises another question: what is the future of the individual imagination in what is commonly called the "civilization of images"?Will the power to elicit images of things that are not there continue to develop while humanity is increasingly inundated with a deluge of prefabricated images?There was a time when an individual's visual memory was confined to the heritage of his immediate experience, to a fixed range of images reflected in the culture.The opportunity to give some form to the individual myth derives from the way in which fragments of this memory are brought together in unexpected and meaningful combinations.Today, we are bombarded with so much image fatigue that we are no longer able to separate our direct experience from what we see on television for even a few seconds.Memories are filled with messy and fragmented image fragments, like a huge pile of rubbish, and it becomes increasingly impossible for any form to be realized among so many forms. If I included visibility on the list of values ​​to be salvaged, it was nothing more than a warning of the danger we were entering, the danger of losing a fundamental human capacity: to close The ability to focus the sight, to transform lines of black and white letters into shapes and colors, to actually use images to think.I thought of a pedagogy of imagination that might train us to control our inner visions so that they do not suffocate or dissolve into chaotic, fleeting daydreams, but crystallize images Become a well-formed, memorable, self-contained shape, the kind mentioned at the beginning of Chapter Three. This pedagogy we can of course only apply to ourselves, according to the steps designed for this purpose, the results are of course unpredictable.When I was young, I was already a child of "image civilization", although this civilization was still naive and far less colorful than today.Let's just say I was a product of the early days when books, color illustrations in weekly magazines, and toys were our childhood companions and meant a lot to us. I think that period of life left a deep imprint on my later development.The first thing that influenced my imaginary world were the illustrations in the Corriere dei piccoli (Corriere dei piccoli), the most popular monthly children's magazine at that time.I mean my life from the age of three to the age of thirteen, after which I was obsessed with movies, and I was obsessed throughout my teenage years.In fact, I am convinced that the most important period is between the ages of three and six; before I learn to read. In Italy in the 1920s, the Children's Post often published the most famous comic strips in America at the time: Jolly Villains, Mischievous Children, Felix the Cat, Maggie and Giggs; changed to an Italian name.There were also several Italian serial comics at that time; judging from the painting taste and style at that time, some of them were of good quality.In Italy, the use of circles around dialogue was not yet used (it was only after the introduction of Mickey Mouse in the 1930s). "Children's Post" adapted American cartoons, removed the circle lines, and added two or four lines of rhyme under each picture.Although I don't know how to read, I don't really need written explanations, because the pictures themselves are enough.I lived with these little pictorials; my mother had bought them, collected them, and bound them year after year before I was born.I used to go through each of the serialized stories in each issue for hours on end, while I was telling the stories in my head, interpreting the scenes in various ways; I was evolving the episodes, combining the individual episodes into a larger story, Think and pick out, then connect the events in each series, mix the series, invent new series; thus, minor characters become major characters. After I learned to read, I got very little benefit.The two-line verses, which lack substance, are not instructive; where I do not understand them, the verses do not understand.Although, the author of the verse does not understand the words in the circled lines of the original work, either because he does not understand English, or because the comics he has seen have been repeated without text explanation. Anyway, I didn't take those words into account at the time, but continued to daydream happily within the picture and its series.It is undeniable that this habit delayed the development of my ability to concentrate on reading, and I learned to concentrate on reading through hard work at a later stage.However, looking at paintings without text descriptions is definitely a kind of learning, learning to write stories, narrative styles and image creation.For example, Pat O'Sullivan is good at drawing backgrounds within the confines of a small square of comic paper, showing the black silhouette of Felix the cat as he looks lost in a field with a full moon hanging against a dark sky. out of the way.I think this representation has been ideal for me so far. The work I did in the following years was to draw stories from the mysterious figures on the cards, each time explaining the same character in a different way; the root of which, of course, lies in my childhood obsession with facing page after page of comics. think.What I wanted to describe in Il castello dei destini incrociati was an "iconology of the imagination" not only of playing cards but of great paintings.Indeed, my attempt to interpret the painting of Carpaccio in the monastery of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice, following the order of the group of St. George and St. Jerome, seems to be A story, a life, and to find out what my life has in common with this George Jerome. This imaginative iconology became my habitual way of expressing my love for drawing.I use a method to tell my own story from famous paintings in art history, or paintings that have influenced me. We can say this: In the formation of the visual part of the literary imagination, various factors merge: direct observation of the real world, visionary and dreamlike transformations, the figurative world of cultural transmission at various levels, and the perception of the sensuous. The process of abstraction, refinement and internalization of experience is of paramount importance for the visualization and expression of thoughts.All these characteristics are to some extent found in the writers whom I exemplify, especially in those ages which were particularly favorable to the visual imagination, namely, the literature of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Romantic periods.In an anthology of nineteenth-century fantasy tales that I edited, I have followed the pulse of vision and image that beats in the stories of the following authors: Hoffmann, Chamisso , Arnim, Eichendorff, Potocki, Gogol, Nerval, Gautier, Hawthorne, Poe, Dickens, Turgenev, Leskov, all the way to Stevenson, Kipling and Wells.At the same time, I follow another pulse that sometimes beats in the work of the same writer; this pulse makes the plot of the fantasy leap from the everyday - an inner, mental, invisible vision. Come out, at the pinnacle of Henry James' work. Is a literature of visions still possible in the twenty-first century with the proliferation of prefabricated images?Now it seems that there are two ways to go.One, we can recycle already used images and change their meaning in new contexts.Postmodernism can be seen as a tendency to use stock imagery in the mass media allegorically, or to infuse a taste for oddities inherited from literary traditions into narrative techniques that emphasize their alienation.Two, we can wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.Samuel Beckett achieves the most sublime results by minimizing the visual and verbal elements, as if in another world after the end of the world. Probably the first work in which all these questions appeared simultaneously was Balzac's Le chef doeuvre inconnu.It is no accident that what we call prophetic insight derives from Balzac, although he is at a point in the history of literature where there is a stimulus or experience that is sometimes visionary, sometimes real, and sometimes both, But he was evidently constantly drawn by various forces of nature, and at the same time was very aware of what he was doing. He wrote "Unknown Masterpiece" between 1831 and 1837. The original subtitle was "Conte Fantastique" (Conte Fantastique), and the final version was changed to "Philosophical Investigation" (etude philosophique).What happened within a few years, as Balzac said in another short story, was that literature killed fantasy.In the first edition of this work (published in the magazine in 1831), only a woman's foot emerges from the confusion of colors, from the unconscious mist in the perfect painting of the elderly painter Frenhofer. Emerging in the middle of the painting, it was understood and praised by two colleagues of the painter: Pourbus Poussin and Nicholas Poussin. "How many pleasant elements are contained in such a small canvas!" Although the model did not quite understand it, he also got a certain pleasant impression. A few additional dialogues added to the second edition of the 1831 monograph show the lack of understanding by Frenhofer's colleagues, who remained an inspired and enigmatic figure who lived for ideals, yet was destined to endure loneliness.The final draft (1837) added several pages of commentary on painting technique and an epilogue: Frenhofer was a madman, locked up with his supposed masterpiece, burned it, and committed suicide . "The Unsung Masterpiece" is often commented as an allegory about modern art.While reading the latest of these studies (Hubert Damisch: Fenetre jaune cadmium, 1984), I realized that this short story could also serve as To study the allegory of literature, which refers to the insurmountable gulf between verbal expression and perceptual experience, and the erraticity of visual imagination. The first edition of Balzac's novel contains the definition of the uncanny: "For all these wonderful things, the modern language has but one word: it was indefinable... a word just right. It sums up the literature of visions; it speaks of the limited feelings of our minds Everything beyond the grasp of power; just put the word before the reader's eyes, and he is catapulted into the space of the imagination." In later years Balzac turned away from the literature of vision, which had been for him the art of mystical knowledge of all things, to detailed descriptions of the world as it is; but he remained convinced that he was expressing the secrets of life.Just as Balzac himself was long uncertain whether he made Frenhofer a prophet or a madman, so his novel has always contained an ambiguity in which lies its deepest truth.The artist's imagination is a world of potentialities that no artistic creation can successfully unravel.We experience another world in our lives, adapting to other forms of order and chaos.The words accumulated layer by layer on the page are just like the layers of paint on the canvas. They are another world. Although they are not limited, they are easier to control and less laborious to plan.The connection of these three worlds is what Balzac called indecidable; or, I would like to call it undecidable.This is the paradox of an infinite whole that contains other infinite wholes. A writer—I mean a writer of infinite ambition, like Balzac—does the creative activity which involves either the infinity of his imagination or the infinity of contingencies which he may aspire to, or both, Its means is the infinity of language expression in writing.It might be countered that a person has access to only a limited amount of information over the course of his life, from birth to death.How can a personal stored image and personal experience transcend this boundary?However, I am convinced that such attempts to escape the vortex of complexity are futile.Giordano Bruno explains to us that the spiritus phantasticus, from which the writer's imagination draws bodies and characters, is a bottomless well; Comedie humaine’s starting point is to assume that the world of words is similar to not only today’s, but also yesterday’s or tomorrow’s living world. As a writer of visions, Balzac sought to grasp the soul of the world by a single symbol in an infinite number of imaginations; The referent is no longer a world outside itself, just like Frenhofer's colors and lines.When Balzac reached this point, he stopped and changed the whole plan: from intensive description to extensive description.The realist writer Balzac wants to embrace the infinitely vast space and time full of people, life and stories through writing. However, will the situation in Escher's picture be reproduced here? — Douglas Hofstadter commenting that the paintings are illustrations of Godel's cycle.In a gallery, a person is gazing at a cityscape, which expands to include the gallery and the person looking at the landscape.In the endless and inexhaustible Comedy of Human Beings, Balzac must also include the writer of illusions and his endless visions he is or was or was; The realist writer who wanted to capture the infinite real world in his "human comedy" (although perhaps it is the infinite inner world of the visionary writer Balzac that contains the inner world of the realist writer Balzac, Because the infinite illusion of the former coincides with the realistic infinity of "Human Comedy"...). However, the whole of "reality" and "illusion" can only be manifested through writing; in the process of writing, externality and internality, the world and I, experience and illusion are all obviously narrated from the same written material.Both the visual polymorphic landscape and the spirit are incorporated into the uniform lines of text consisting of lowercase and uppercase letters, periods, commas, and brackets, pages filled with symbols like grains of sand clinging tightly together ，在一个表面上再现着多姿多彩的世界景象，而这个表面是永远不变，却又变幻无穷的，正像沙漠旱风不断推移的沙丘一样。