Thomas Mann’s bizarre but mythic short story The Transposed Heads retells an Indian legend treating the intricately riddling questions of identity: who am I, who are you, who are we together? A young couple and a friend are on their way home (in more ways than one), and passing a temple in the countryside, one of them, “obeying an impulse of his heart,” wishes to stop and pay honor to the goddess whose shrine they have by chance (if chance there is) come upon. He makes his way alone to the temple while the others wait for him at the road:
It was a shrine no more important than the little mother-house by the secluded bathing-place on the river Goldfly; but its columns and ornamentation had been carved with infinite piety and care. The entrance seemed to crouch beneath the wild mountain itself, supported by columns flanked by snarling leopards.
Columns carved with infinite piety and care. Slow work, no doubt, for what else is there to rush off to when your heart is devoted to your love? Something more than intensity is being suggested by the adjective infinite, something to do with the source of that builder’s preoccupation in a place both near and far.
Mann’s story depicts the traditional world where artists, like those who built this Indian shrine, looked within to find the design and purpose of what they had to do. The British scholar Brian Keeble wrote a work entitled Every Man an Artist: Readings in the Traditional Philosophy of Art (2005), explaining this ancient devotion, and he also edited an anthology of essays on the same topic by the English sculptor and printmaker Eric Gill, entitled A Holy Tradition of Working: An Anthology of the Writings of Eric Gill (1983). The scholar Erich Heller wrote insightfully on both Thomas Mann (Thomas Mann: The Ironic German, 1958) and the artistic life (The Artist’s Journey into the Interior, 1965). We would be the poorer without any one of these writers to remind us that there are other ways to conceive of who we are in the world.
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