These Chair Legs

Happy Thanksgiving!

I have been thinking a lot lately about one of my favorite quotes, which actually is a reference to a Gertrude Stein (Gertrude Stein, Rose) poem. It is in an essay by Aldous Huxley, one of the literary greats of England, called The Doors of Perception (from which Jim Morrison derived his band's name). This paragraph speaks to the idea of human perception and the sentence about the rose gets me every time. How effectively poetry can push at those vague buttons in our heads, engaging our innermost questions with the language of emotion, the ecstatic, the language which the world of paint can speak as well. Anyway, eat, drink, laugh, cry, give thanks, and tell as many people as you can that you truly love them. Here, here to the only expectation-less holiday!

From The Doors of Perception, 1954:

From this long but indispensable excursion into the realm of theory, we may now return to the miraculous facts - four bamboo chair legs in the middle of a room. Like Wordsworth's daffodils, they brought all manner of wealth - the gift, beyond price, of a new direct insight into the very Nature of Things, together with a more modest treasure of understanding in the field, especially, of the arts. A rose is a rose is a rose. But these chair legs were chair legs were St. Michael and all angels. Four or five hours after the event, when the effects of a cerebral sugar shortage were wearing off, I was taken for a little tour of the city, which included a visit, towards sundown, to what is modestly claimed to be the World's Biggest Drug Store. At the back of the W.B.D.S., among the toys, the greeting cards and the comics, stood a row, surprisingly enough, of art books. I picked up the first volume that came to hand. It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened was "The Chair" - that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen. But, though incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact. The fact had been manifested Suchness; this was only an emblem. Such emblems are sources of true knowledge about the Nature of Things, and this true knowledge may serve to prepare the mind which accepts it for immediate insights on its own account. But that is all. However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.