Aesthetics of
Clarity
Let us recall
any of those musical compositions that barely introduce their theme,
only to plunge into a thicket of variations,teasing the ear with few
bars of the theme and running immediately into the labyrintine
escapes,digressive traps of over-talkative cadenzas. We are led
astray and when finally the theme reasserts itself the listener is
manipulated to experience the relief and gratifying sense of finding
lost gold watch or expensive dentures.
First example is
of clarity in prose,where progression of story goes as if each step
said "sequitur,sequitur...."
Plutarch in Dryden's translation
“.......It was a matter of general wonder, when people saw him joining Socrates in his meals and his exercises, living with him in the same tent, whilst he was reserved and rough to all others who made their addresses to him, and acted, indeed, with great insolence to some of them. As in particular to Anytus, the son of Anthemion, one who was very fond of him, and invited him to an entertainment which he had prepared for some strangers. Alcibiades refused the invitation; but, having drunk to excess at his own house with some of his companions, went thither with them to play some frolic; and, standing at the door of the room where the guests were enjoying themselves, and seeing the tables covered with gold and silver cups, he commanded his servants to take away the one-half of them, and carry them to his own house; and then, disdaining so much as to enter into the room himself, as soon as he had done this, went away. The company was indignant, and exclaimed at his rude and insulting conduct; Anytus, however, said, on the contrary, he had shown great consideration and tenderness in taking only a part when he might have taken all......”
And choice sample of crystalline clarity as if cut diamond in poetry:
A Broken Appointment
You did not come,And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness' sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
You did not come.
You love not me,
And love alone can lend you loyalty;
-I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me.
Thomas Hardy
Allure of obscurity
Just to make the stylistic division emphatic let's see example from a text at the opposite end of clarity:
"Speaking more generally,the theoretical hallucination of desire,with its defuse libidinal psychology,serves as a backdrop to that simulacrum of seduction which one now finds everywhere.Having replaced the world of surveillance,it characterize the vulnerability of both individuals and masses to soft injunctions. Distilled in homeopathic doses throughout all personal and social relation,the seductive shadow of this discourse hovers today over the desert of social relations,and of power itself."
from "Seduction" by Jean Baudrillard.Before any serious expedition in search for sense-making should be undertaken here , it would be right to accept that in this lunar use of concepts,connections,intellectual impressionism the term "theoretical hallucination" is explaining a lot.
Language has various sub-languages:
scientific,technical,poetical and above all the ordinary colloquial
language within that totality. Colloquial speech
is so dedicated to conveying meaning that it burns itself upon
completion of relaying the message. Poetical language refuses such
self-emmolation . It is made to outlast release of message and indeed
reaffirms its endurance. The better the poetry the more
indestructible is its language. Poet faces the opposition of tasks-to
communicate and to save his language from instant self-emmolation.To
use a whole arsenal of poetical devices,reaching into wild
associations,surprising analogies,convulsive grammatical
structures-all that carry a serious risk of losing the reader who
senses that the author is not interested in communicating.
Looking closely at
poetical text one senses that apart from what is well understood a
certain darker shadow of obscurity remains.It seems to want obstinately to remain inscrutable lest the poetical charm would
disappear.In poetry the balance of clarity and obscurity is tipped
toward the Clarity scale,but Obscurity is never empty.
Beyond the known and well-traveled land mass of language,far away,beyond Aleutian Islands
of communicating , there is „more”. There are wild
associations,obscurities that would burn holes in our brains,uses of
words so bizarre,so untamed and violent to logic that those who
reached there came back damaged,clinging to the land of Clarity ever
more.
As an example of alluring
obscurity is „City that does not sleep” by Federico Garcia Lorca
in R.Bly translation:
In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody. Nobody is asleep. The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins. The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream, and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the stars. Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody. Nobody is asleep. In a graveyard far off there is a corpse who has moaned for three years because of a dry countryside on his knee; and that boy they buried this morning cried so much it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet. Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful! We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead dahlias. But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist; flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths in a thicket of new veins, and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders. One day the horses will live in the saloons and the enraged ants will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the eyes of cows. Another day we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue. Careful! Be careful! Be careful! The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm, and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention of the bridge, or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe, we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes are waiting, where the bear’s teeth are waiting, where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting, and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder. Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody. Nobody is sleeping. If someone does close his eyes, a whip, boys, a whip! Let there be a landscape of open eyes and bitter wounds on fire. No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one. I have said it before. No one is sleeping. But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the night, open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.
Chiaroscuro
Why would clarity be appealing to an
artist? Are clearly,plainly ,un-obstructedly shown forms preferable ?
The answer is not as simple as "yes" because the clarity of
presentation has to have tension.It cannot simply peel itself of all
outer wrappings,skins and shades.Instead the artist wants to use
dynamic result of agon for the coming to
light.
Surely,someone might say-no,there is no
need for tension and great light may awash the content of an artwork
evenly abolishing any sense of darkness anywhere.True,but most successful paintings are build by dynamic tensions between
opposites.Cool colors contrast warm colors.Big volumes are placed
with small ones.Verticalities are
interwoven with horizontals. Billowy oblongs demand some jagged
angularities.Complexities need plain,un-interrupted saharas.The same
intuited need governs careful distribution of light and darkness.
One of the most primordial antinomies
is Darkness and Light,and Darkness is older,perhaps truly at
the irremovable"it"of existence.Light always happens as
breaking the darkness.Picture it as gloom and impenetrable magma at
the first orchestral part of Brahms's Violin Concerto and suddenly a
sharp ribbon of violin bursts like light ascending ever higher and
brighter.First Light of the
Universe.
What is darkness?Is it really just an
absence of light,or is there something more substantial there?Imagine
a more substantial darkness,more corpusculatory dark like falling
into a mine-shaft of
blackberries ,like black
ink so strong that even the daylight cannot wash away.
However,,after
reflection,maybe that we need to distinguish between darkness and
black color.In my experience darkness is not quite „black” in
color.It has more complex color.One name comes to mind: murk.Not
black.
When we read of black
object that it „absorbs” all the rays of light what happens to
those millions of photons?Are they trapped inside of black surface?
Are they somehow annihilated,turned to something else? Turned perhaps
to rust of light?Does nobody care what happens to all those
„absorbed” light rays ? Perhaps it is time to look for them;first
observe the place where photons hit the surface and then have some
clever combs to recover them in flurries of cascading liberation of
photons.
In visual arts the aesthetic taste for un-clarity could manifests itself as confusing
complexity,and at times by obscuring much or even most of the
presentation.Background is dark and dissolving details.Out of
the gloom a part comes to light .In dramatized chiaroscuro the
lighted part glows as if with its own,inner light.
Jean de la Hey and François-Emile Barraud give us examples of great clarity.
And for examples of obscurity or "un-clearness " Cornelius Bega
and Jan Gerritsz van Bronckhorst
