The image that comes to mind when one reads the philosophers of the West is a Byzantine mosaic, rigid, symmetrical, made up of millions of little squares of some stony material and firmly cemented to the walls of a windowless basilica. It is thanks to an inflexible framework of bones that the girl is able to do her pirouettes, thanks to the same bones, grown a little rusty, that the grandmother is condemned to a wheelchair. The thing in whose absence we cannot possibly grow into a complete human being is, all too often, the thing that prevents us from growing. A century of research on the moksha -medicine has clearly shown that quite ordinary people are perfectly capable of having visionary or even fully liberating experiences. In this respect the men and women who make and enjoy high culture are no better off than the low brows.
High experience is perfectly compatible with low symbolic expression.
The expressive symbols created by Palanese artists are no better than the expressive symbols created by artists elsewhere. It is not to be judged by the accomplishments of a few gifted manipulators of artistic or philosophic symbols. No, it is to be judged by what all the members of the community, the ordinary as well as the extraordinary, can and do experience in every contingency and at each successive intersection of time and eternity. Dualism. . . Without it there can hardly be good literature.