There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern or a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscapes of his dreams; the sort of world he would wish to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing that he likes to think about. –G.K. Chesterton
I have been searching for years for this story that’s been half-submerged in my memory, and I just found it in an old journal entry from June 8, 1985. It was cut out of a newspaper, but I have no idea which one, and I can’t find this exact version of the story anywhere:
One day Einstein was asked by a pesky reporter to describe his theory of relativity in a few simple words. He responded with the following story:
“A man was asked by a blind man to describe the color white. The man said, ‘White is the color of a swan.’ The blind man said, ‘What is a swan?’ The man said, ‘A swan is a bird with a crooked neck.’
“The blind man asked, ‘What is crooked?’ The man was becoming impatient. He grabbed the blind man’s arm, straightened it and said, ‘This is straight.’ Then he bent it and said, ‘And this is crooked.’
“Whereupon the blind man quickly said, ‘Yes, yes, thank you. Now I know what white is.’”
So there’s the first clue why I could never find this story online — I had thought it was one of John Cage’s zen stories, but it’s actually a story told by Einstein. This in itself is a good illustration of the fallibility of memory. Here is another version I just found, and this fits the pattern of all the references I found to this story:
Einstein and his blindfriend. This story shows how complex Einstein could be. Not long after his arrival in Princeton he was invited, by the wife of one of the professors of mathematics at Princeton, to be guest of honor at a tea.-Reluctantly, Einstein consented. After the tea had progressed for a time, the excited hostess, thrilled to have such an eminent guest of honor, fluttered out into the center of activity and with raised arms silenced the group. Bubbling out some words expressing her thrill and pleasure, she turned to Einstein and said: “I wonder, Dr. Einstein, if you would be so kind as to explain to my guests in a few words, just what is relativity theory ? ”
Without any hesitation Einstein rose to his feet and told a story. He said he was reminded of a walk he one day had with his blind friend. The day was hot and he turned to the blind friend and said, “I wish I had a glass of milk.”
“Glass,” replied the blind friend, “I know what that is. But what do you mean by milk?”
“Why, milk is a white fluid,” explained Einstein.
“Now fluid, I know what that is,” said the blind man. “but what is white ? ”
” Oh, white is the color of a swan’s feathers.”
” Feathers, now I know what they are, but what is a swan ? ”
“A swan is a bird with a crooked neck.”
” Neck, I know what that is, but what do you mean by crooked ? ”
At this point Einstein said he lost his patience. He seized his blind friend’s arm and pulled it straight. “There, now your arm is straight,” he said. Then he bent the blind friend’s arm at the elbow. “Now it is crooked.”
“Ah,” said the blind friend. “Now I know what milk is.”
And Einstein, at the tea, sat down.
Here is a similar version of the milk story, retold by one Omar Kureishi, with Einstein now completely out of the picture:
A blind man asks a young girl to describe milk. The young girl is astonished that someone can be so foolish that he doesn’t know what milk is. “Milk is white,” she tells him. The old man tells her that he is blind and doesn’t know what white means. The young girl tells him that this is very easy to explain and tells him that a swan is white. The old man tells her that a swan may be white, but he has never seen a swan. “It has a curved neck,” she tells him. The blind man says that he has no idea what ‘curved’ is. She lifts her arm, bends her wrists forward like a swan’s neck. “Feel it,” she says, “that’s curved.” The old man feels the girl’s arm, touches the girl’s wrist and exclaims joyfully: “Thank God. Now at last I know what milk is.”
What of this strange connection between the “white” things called “milk” and “swans”? Turns out that goes back to Hinduism and Sanskrit, according to the swan page on Wikipedia:
Swans are revered in Hinduism, and are compared to saintly persons whose chief characteristic is to be in the world without getting attached to it, just as a swan’s feather does not get wet although it is in water. The Sanskrit word for swan is hamsa or hansa, and it is the vehicle of many deities like the goddess Saraswati. It is mentioned several times in the Vedic literature, and persons who have attained great spiritual capabilities are sometimes called Paramahamsa (“Great Swan”) on account of their spiritual grace and ability to travel between various spiritual worlds. In the Vedas, swans are said to reside in the summer on Lake Manasarovar and migrate to Indian lakes for the winter. They’re believed to possess some powers such as the ability to eat pearls. They are also believed to be able to drink up the milk and leave the water from a saucer of milk adulterated with water. This is taken as a great quality, as shown by this Sanskrit verse:
Hamsah shwetah, bakah shwetah, kah bhedah hamsa bakayo?
Neeraksheera viveketu, Hamsah hamsah, bakah bakah!(The swan is white, the duck is white, so how to differentiate between both of them?
With the milk-water test, the swan is proven swan, the duck is proven duck!)
I guess the ancients required empirical evidence to distinguish a swan from a duck, a task the many modern humans can perform with relative ease.
Of all the versions of this story that might be floating around the universe, I like the original one I clipped from an unknown newspaper 25 years ago, because to me the idea of describing the color white to a blind person is much more abstract and interesting than describing what milk is, since milk, after all, is a substance that can be discerned by other senses. But how can you possibly describe “white” without referencing other things? Such is relativity.
“I soil the paper to prepare it for hallucinations. I reverse the day’s attempt to assassinate me.” –Matta [Via Clayton Eshleman]
Brian Eno: “possessions are a way of turning money into problems.” From a New York Times editorial, Five Scenes, One Theme: A True if Unlikely Story, by Bono, November 14, 2009.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
– Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut (1953-1994), computer scientist and educator. This has also been attributed to Yogi Berra.
The Centre Pompidou in Paris is currently showing an exhibit of the Czech photographer Miroslav Tichư. Here is the Pompidou’s introduction, illustrated with images I found online:
This is the first exhibition in France of the photographic work of the Czech artist Miroslav Tichư, now more than 80 years old. Only recently discovered, his work reveals the distinctive talent of a marginal and somewhat monomaniacal figure who steadfastly refused the social, political and personal values of the Communist period, form its beginning in 1948 to its end in the late 1980s.
Tichư took up photography in the mid-1950s, reinventing it as it were from scratch and building his own cameras and enlargers from shoe-boxes, tin cans, recycled glass and other waste materials.
His timeless and uncategorizable images, shot instinctively or carelessly on handmade cameras with makeshift optics, offer an extraordinary vision of a fantastical, eroticised reality, half real, half dream. Women on the TV screen : these are his single, obsessional subject.
Rescued from neglect by his neighbour, the film director Roman Buxbaum, in 1989, Tichư’s work was first shown at the Sevilla Biennale in 2004. This exhibition at the Centre Pompidou brings together a number of cameras and some hundred photographs, mostly from the Foundation Tichư Ocean.
Tichư made one of the all-time greatest comments about art (quoted here), which I’ve followed below with a photo of his that perfectly illustrates the idea:
Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you’re doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.
What a great line: If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you’re doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.
Tichư’s comment about “blurs, spots and errors” reminded me of The Smudge, as described by Rebecca West in her epic masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, recounting her travels through (then) Yugoslavia in the late 1930s. West writes of Manichaeism and the concept of The Smudge, an ideaư that has embraced stain-happy me for years. So I went and searched through BLGF and compiled all of the “smudge” (1) and “The Smudge” (3) references, interspersed below with more Tichư images:
Thereafter the snow was so thick on the wooded hills that the tree-trunks were mere lines and the branches were finer than any lines drawn by a human hand. No detail was visible in the houses of the villages at the base of the hills. They were blocks of soft black shadow edges with the pure white fur of the snow on the roofs. Above the hills there was a layer of mist that drew a dull white smudge between this pure black-and-white world and the dark-grey sky. (BLGF p. 71)
Manichaeism — for these heresies might as well be grouped together under the name of their parent — represents the natural reaction of the earnest mind to a religion that has aged and hardened and committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, which is to pretend that all is now known, and there can now be laid down a system of rules go guarantee salvation. In its origin it was a reaction against the extreme fatalism of Zoroastrianism, which held that man’s destiny was decided by the stars, and that his only duty was to accomplish it in decorum. Passionately Mani created a myth that would show the universe as a field for moral effort: inspired by Christianity as it had passed through the filter of many Oriental minds and by a cosmology invented by an Aramaic astronomer, he imagined that there had been in the beginning of time a kingdom of light and a kingdom of darkness. This was the origin of the present world, which Mani very aptly called The Smudge. It became the duty of all men who were on the side of the light, which was identified with virtue and reason, to recover the particles of light that have become imprisoned in the substance of darkness, which was identified with vice and brutishness. (BLGF p. 171-172)
When the kingdom of darkness was existing side by side with the kingdom of light without any commixture, then it was committing no offence. That attitude can be traced in Radovan’s faithful reproduction of life’s imperfect forms, in Dostoievsky’s choice of abnormality as a subject. And there is yet another resemblance which is particularly apparent in the work of Radovan. The columns he carved with the representations of The Smudge are borne on the shoulders of those who are wholly of the darkness, Jews and Turks and pagans. It is put forward solidly and without sense of any embarrassment that there are those who are predestined to pain, contrary to the principles of human justice. Calvin admitted this with agony, but there is none here; and Dostoievsky never complains against the God who created the disordered universe he describes. This is perhaps because the Manichaeans, like the Greeks, did not regard God as the Creator, but as the Arranger, or even as the Divine Substance which had to be arranged. (BLGF p. 176)
In the belvedere Marmont must have found it difficult to keep his mind on his cards. In the end, we know, he threw them in and pushed back his chair and strolled away, to leave Dalmatia for ever. There was fault in him too. He was man also, he was a fusion of good and evil, of light and darkness. Therefore he did not want with his wholeness that there should be a victory of light; he preferred that darkness should continue to exist, and this universe, The Smudge, should not pass away. The great men for whom humanity feels ecstatic love need not be good, nor even gifted; but they must display this fusion of light and darkness which is the essential human character; they must even promise, but a predominance of darkness, that the universe shall for ever persist in its imperfection. (BLGF p. 185)
I’m not really interested in the “good vs. evil” dichotomy, or religious interpretations of reality in general. My interest in smudges and stains is in their abject beauty, and in their being emblematic of uncertainty and things beyond our control. And not necessarily in a bad way, either, but often in a beautiful way, if we just retrain our perceptions to see the beauty in the unexpected, the translucent dream world between what we think we know and what we don’t know that we don’t know. Such is the zone that Tichư operates in.
Here are a group of my stain maps that wallow in and play with The Smudge in a non-dialectic way.
Sucked from the Wikiquote page for Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and re-bejumbled:
Guildenstern: Has it ever happened to you that all of a sudden and for no reason at all you haven’t the faintest idea how to spell the word – “wife” – or “house” – because when you write it down, you just can’t remember ever having seen those letters in that order before …?
Rosencrantz: Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn’t mean anything at all.
Guildenstern: The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody. Demolish.
Rosencrantz: Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?
The Player: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds – if it was a bet, you wouldn’t take it.
Guildenstern: Words. Words. They’re all we have to go on.
The Player: I congratulate you on the unambiguity of your situation.
Guildenstern: There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it.
“No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.”
- James Joyce (1882–1941) from a Dec. 7, 1906, letter to his brother, written from Rome in a state of disillusion. Letters of James Joyce, vol. 2 (1966).
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