PARTISAN REVIEW
even in the twittering of a bird-is profound and cannot be called
anything but profound. And this picture of a world in which the
words of fools and the twittering of birds have a meaning that cannot
be expressed in the language of intelligence, has a depth of its own
which-as the Mr. Dick scenes in the film version of
David Copper–
field
amply show-is quite accessible to the film.
There are not only ..•.mifest forms of depth in art, there is also
a latent form: a hint of depth, which reveals only the gap where a
link in the chain is missing and there is meaning to be filled in; an
intimation of the breach in the edifice and the blind spot in our own
eye; an indirect representation of depth, or in other words: a circling
round the mystery, an admission of our incompetence even to inquire
into it (see Ernst Bloch's variations on this theme of
a
do eta ignorantia"
in his
Geist der Utopie
[Spirit of Utopia], 1923). Art possesses in
the symbol an instrument which in spite or perhaps indeed because
of its emphasis on the meaningless torso of things, conveys some sense
of its participation in another world, its bond with the original mystery.
And the more indirect, stammering, recalcitrant the form through
which art suggests the meaning beneath and destroys the surface
meaning, the closer it comes to the mystery of things. The strange,
inarticulate wisdom of the witches in
Macbeth,
the Mothers in
Goethe's
Faust,
Holderlin's flags that "clatter in the wind," the ghost
in Gogol's "The Overcoat," the eerie "1-piti-piti-ti-ti-ti" of the tele–
graph in Andrey Bolkonsky's delirious dream, are all such intrinsically
meaningless messages from the depths. Or the old legend related by
Tolstoy in his
Popular Tales:
Long, long ago there was a saintly her–
mit who lived on a desert island. One day some fishermen landed
near his hut, among them an old man who was so simple-minded
that he could barely talk and was unable to pray at all. Such ignorance
filled the hermit with consternation, and with great trouble and pains
he taught the old man the Lord's Prayer. The old man thanked him
kindly and left the island with the other fishermen. Some time later,
after the boat had vanished in the distance, the hermit suddenly saw
a human shape on the horizon, walking on the surface of the water
and approaching the island. Soon he recognized the old man, his
pupil, and when the old man set foot on the island, the hermit, silent
and abashed, came out to meet him. The old man stammered: "I
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