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From: Greg Sandow <gsandow@prodigy.net>
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 1997 23:30:17 -0400
Fwd Date: Mon, 21 Jul 1997 12:07:26 -0400
Subject: Re: an alien face in Jung's UFO book

Nostrils or eyes?

>Date: Sun, 20 Jul 1997 20:03:21 -0700
>From: John Koopmans <john.koopmans@sympatico.ca>
>To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@globalserve.net>
>Subject: Re: UFO UpDate: an alien face in Jung's UFO book


> Greg:

> You've got a wonderful imagination, but you may be reading more into
> the > picture than what may be there. As described in the book, the
> "eyes" of the alien are actually nostrils. There is a very large face
> of an old man covering most of the sky, and includes eyes (white
> eyebrows).

> The face is quite obvious, and the "UFO" is actually the mouth, from
> which the light is spewing down towards the city.

> However, to the right of the nostrils, there does appear to be a face
> resembling that of an alien. Also, if you turn the picture upside-
> down, you will see a large face of an alien in the water. This alien,
> however, has small, beady, lizard-like eyes.

> John Koopmans

This is a wonderfully stylized painting, and the apparent alien face,
with attendant UFO and beams of light, is folded into a larger, human
face, in which, just as John says, the eyes funtion as nostrils. The
UFO indeed functions as the mouth.

However, if you look at the nostrils by themselves, you see them
enclosed in an oval shape, a perfect alien head. I don't mind John
putting on the brakes here, though, because another caution occurred
to me. Maybe the oval around the nostrils/eyes isn't as apparent in
my scan as it is in the plate in Jung's book....BUT maybe the plate
doesn't reveal fully what's in the original. In fact, it surely
doesn't, since it's in black and white, and I'd assume the painting
is in color. So we'd have to see the original to really know what to
make of what I think is an alien face.

Jung's view of the painting might be helpful here. He sees the what I
call a beam of light as a waterfall, and it might be, if we saw the
painting in color. But what he mostly calls attention to are the main
disc-like shapes, some of them eyes, two of them the nostrils that I
see as alien eyes. It's because of these round and oval shapes that
Jung brings this painting into a book about UFOs. He sees the circ
ular shape of reported UFOs as a symbol of wholeness, and finds this
painting overflowing with versions of these symbolic UFOs.

I mention this, to reinforce my own feeling that the darkened,
oval/circular shapes are a striking feature of the painting. Jung
certainly found them so. That then raises questions about the
artist's intentions. If this were a fully realistic painting, and the
ovals representing nostrils were the only shapes of their kind
visible, then they'd probably be nostrils and nothing more.

But this is a surrealistic picture (its title, which I neglected to
mention, is "The Fourth Dimension"), and the dark ovals and circles
are an important repeated motif. Before I go any further, I want to
stress that I'm talking art here, and not UFOs. I know very well from
my own work as a composer that structural motifs take on a life of
their own. You can find a perfect, and very familiar, example in the
first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. DA DA DA DUMMMMMMM!
That's how it starts, and it's safe to say that even people who don't
know classical music can recognize it. (They play it, for God's sake,
at Shea Stadium, whenever a Mets game gets tense.)

But as Beethoven uses that striking fragment of music, its rhythm
takes on a life of its own. It permeates the first and third
movements of the symphony. Other musical ideas, even melodies, take
their shape from it. That leads to a kind of chicken vs. egg
question, very familiar in musical analysis. When Beethoven unveils
the second big theme of his first movmennt, and it starts with the
same rhythm, what's he doing? Unfurling a complete new melody, in
which the rhythm is buried, or unveiling a new instance of the
rhythm, with the melody only its outer guise?

This is a roundabout way of asking the same question about the alien
eyes, aka nostrils. Given that the dark, repeated oval/circular
shapes are a striking motif of the painting, which came first, the
nostrils or the ovals? That is, did the painter set out to paint a
giant brooding face, and just happen to make the nostrils so
striking? Or did he have the dark ovals on his mind, and use the
giant face as yet another occasion to introduce them?

The proper answer (and in the Beethoven example, too) is probably
"both." The important thing to understand, in any case, is that the
nostrils have a life of their own in the painting. It can't be a
coincidence that they're echoed elsewhere. It's striking that some of
the echoes are eyes. And -- pending a lot at the original (wherever
it may be) -- I don't think I'm wrong to extract the nostrils and
some of the detail surrounding them as a separate image of their own.

Greg Sandow