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MANIFESTO OF VISIONARY ART
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realities?" - as Nietzsche asked.(96) Despite the unquestionable power of language - to name, to model - is not the majority of our seeing done 'without language'.
And, if this is the case, is it not possible that the only correspondence which exists between words and the world is one that we imagine? Meanwhile images may, perhaps, possess a direct way of seeing - one which is denied to words, indeed 'beyond words'. Huxley thought as much. Despite the fact that he was nearly blind, and made his living by writing words, under the influence of mescaline he pronounced, "We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half-opaque medium of concepts." (97) In fact, Huxley came to mistrust language profoundly, seeing its inherited, shared perception of the world as"a reducing valve" (98) for the otherwise substance-expanded mind.
The alternative: 'To see the world directly' - but how? In another passage, Huxley offers a clue. Under the effects of mescalin, "visual impressions are greatly intensified, and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocense of childhood," (99) he writes. The way a child sees the world, particularly a new-born baby, is - we must remember - without language. It is also a way of seeing without identity, perspective, space or time.
While painting his hundreds of flower pictures, Fuchs described how "slowly feeling my way, my mind's eye directed inwardly toward submerged forgotten images of youth, toward earliest childhood, I came sporadically to see that world again - a world having no purpose but to be marvellous. The objects, the characters, and the experiences had no names... I reminded myself
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that I too had no name, that I did not know who I was in those first days of discovery of this world. In that phase of childhood, without having developed the beginnings of a personality, the soul of a child relates unhindered to the wonder of the world."
And he went on to elaborate how "Experiences of that sort returned to my memory: my own stammering, shrieking and laughter - all sounds not yet words, waiting to be learned and ordered... At the threshold of my return to childhood, I saw those roses again. I returned - I crawled - under the high roof of the bower that my parents had built as a sign of beauty, unconsciously remembering their own childhood. And I found it again: the God-like child playing with his gifts, worshipped by holy kings - in this case gardeners, fathers, or uncles. I saw the child playing in the water, immersed in the crystalline sparkle of the liquid element. This recognition let me forget all the evil; no pain, no threat could reach the heavenly child. He reached toward the amazed eye of his mother, dug his fingers deep into her lip, and laughed over her exclamations of pain - reaching the world, touching the world, understanding it without words." (100)
THE ANCIENT IMAGE-LANGUAGE
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Here we have the beginnings of a purely visual language - the new-born's need for exploration, and the necessity for him to create. Visionary art explores the many possible ways we may combine images, in order to think further through them. It seeks to create new images, which will become part of our shared visual vocabulary. Combining cultural styles, juxtaposing symbols, re-picturing myths to ourselves - these give our visual language its
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