a brain, the seat of reason, called in Hindu philosophy "the lotus of a thousand petals" because of its intricate connections with the nervous system (see Fig. 49, p. 105). The brain coordinates most of the responses of the senses, like a pilot station directing us from its cavity towards the vision afforded by the imagination or the release of the body-soul.
Man has fewer instincts than animals, but his instincts are vital. In man the earlier instincts and emotional patterns have come to be directed by a purposiveness deeply rooted, through years of evolution, in the very protoplasmic stuff of which he is made.
Some men are neither highly evolved nor highly self-evolving. Some are more sensitive than others, as their whole organism has been perfected by heredity, or by physical and mental exercise, to take in more than ordinary mortals. The philosophy of yoga suggests ways in which the dormant energies of the serpent power, stimulated by exercises, can be welded together and released through active contemplation.
And yet it is fascinating to see that even in ordinary ways the average human being far surpasses the animals, whose behaviour is often as precisely patterned as that of Pavlov's dogs. Man is invariably directed from inside, by powerful urges, desires, pulls, aspirations and longings, when he confronts the simplest outside experience or stimulus. He is no tabula rasa, on whom the environment is merely registered. The curiosity of the cells in him to look, to see, to absorb and to know is the drive to attain a singular goal of unity within the total organism.
Above all, man is inventive, working with his intuition and imagination on the dim tracings of what has happened before, through which he synthesises the new experience with the old, often without knowing how or why.
Walter Gropius, the architect and founder of the Bauhaus art school, has drawn attention to some of the subconscious reactions which influence man's outlook. He has also pointed out some ways in which objects, in their different relations to space, create optical illusions on the retina.5
The distortion of images is occasioned by the curvature of the retina, thus complicating the associations of our space-perceiving senses and creating optical illusions. The awareness of these optical illusions is always helpful to the artist. For instance, in modern abstract art the illusion of movement is often attained by the interplay of convex and concave forms.
6. Optical illusion: figure in horizontal-striped bathing suit looks slimmer.
7. Irradiation phenomenon: black figure looks smaller.
Gropius notes that stripes and the contrast between light and dark can produce very odd optical effects. "The girl in the bathing suit looks more slender in horizontal than vertical stripes" (Fig. 6). Another optical phenomenon is that called "irradiation": a bright figure on dark background looks bigger than a black figure on a bright background (Fig. 7).
Gropius suggests further that our eyes close automatically if a car coming from the opposite direction stirs up mud or slush, even when the windows of our car are up. If we look down from the balcony of a twenty-storey building, we feel giddy even if there is a railing to protect us from falling. But if the same railing is covered with cardboard or paper, and gives support to the eye, giddiness often disappears through the illusion of safety.
People often feel lost or Lonely in wide-open spaces. This feeling is identified as agoraphobia, the dread of open spaces, sometimes felt by sensitive people crossing a large open square.6 And the loss of the human sense of balance when one looks down from great heights is a familiar phenomenon, as attested, for example, by the visitors to India's Kutub Minar in Mehrauli, who want to descend immediately, once they look out from the top of this minaret. The dizzy height of the Kutub Minar makes one lose contact with the earth. The head often swirls and one may even feel bilious, as if in an airplane (Fig. 8). Gropius confirms this when he says that "people get lost in a space the size of which is not in keeping with the human scale."
If, however, in a vast area some vertical planes were created on that open space, like wings on a stage, such as shrubs or fences or walls, the illusion of safety would be reinstated, and the dread would disappear, for the eyes of the person groping in space could find a frame of reference to act as a psychological support. When the eyes hit a solid in the field of vision they register its outline just as radar does.7 This is confirmed by the experiments in the paintings of Irene Rice Pereira, who has also analysed the historical breakthrough of man from one-, two-and three-dimensional space areas to the expanding universe.8 And so our eyes, which are the instruments of our organism and our subconscious, deceive us in many ways. This happens at any time when the human being is not directing the personality with a deliberate will to concentrate in active contemplation, or to allow deeper awareness by relating to the inner life of a work of art.
The deceptive phenomena can be illustrated by a number of distortions easily created from the curvature of the retina, by delicate dissociations of the space-perceiving senses, if we twist and turn the basic stimuli received by the eye. In this way, abstraction, simplification and distortion can be understood as quite simple artistic means by which it becomes possible to express soul-body experiences beyond the habitual three-dimensional space areas of common sense.
Artists have frequently resorted to the clever interplay of various elements of structure to create the illusion of mobility. The Kailasa Temple in Ellora, south-central India, cut from the giant rock on three sides, has been given the appearance of a moving cloud (Fig. 9). The Cubists generated movement by superimposing multiple planes in their pictures.
The important considerations in all optical illusions are space-time relations, judged in terms of human scale. In all ancient civilisations, the human frame has served as a yardstick. Le Corbusier has rightly emphasised the Modulor as the basis of all architecture, since the human being symbolised in the Modulor is the measure of all structures, of where man lives and moves and has his being. The silhouettes of giant temples like Khajuraho, Puri, Konarak, Bhuvaneshvar (Fig. 10) and Mahabalipuram were obviously intended to communicate the majesty of the invisible power dominating the vast space, so that people seeing the huge hulk of such a temple would feel awe and reverence for the gods. The approach to the garbha griba, or the inner sanctum of the temple, is made intimate by the narrow doorway in the small room. The abundant carvings on the outer wall surfaces, as well as inside, direct the optical vision to seek the course of memory, sensation, hope, fear, purpose, which may have already risen to the surface through alliance with the grace of the curves, the excitement of the angles, the gestures of the chisel and the harmony of the composition.
An object painted in brown wax seems heavier than if it were coloured grey or white or yellow. A life-size sculpture
