Learning to See Edition
How I stopped worrying and learned to trick my brain, the satire of Kawanabe Kyōsai, and the lengthening days of Eastertide.
This is my semi-regular roundup of what I’m reading and working on. If you’re new, catch up on what this substack is about here. I also post occasional poetry and prose. Subscribe if you like to get updates from the hermitage in your mailbox.
Otherwise, welcome friend, and read on.
Home news.
This month’s edition marks a year of newsletters. Thank you to all those who read, comment, email, and share. As I said in my introductory post, I strive not to treat anyone’s attention lightly, and I hope you have each found something, maybe a few things, that delight you, motivate you, send you down rabbit warrens, consternate you, or otherwise make it worth your time.
While your favorite ornamental hermit has some ideas on how this little cul-de-sac of intellectual life might evolve over the next year, if we make it that far, any specific plans, whose existence, again, cannot be confirmed nor denied, will be left as a surprise for the reader.
Learning to see. Partway through his book on the virtues of manual labor, writer and mechanic Matthew Crawford describes how an encounter with a malfunctioning valve stem opened his eyes to the often treacherous nature of perception:
Pursuing one hypothesis, Chas looked for mushrooming at the tips of the valve stems, which bear on the cam lobes via rocker arms, push rods, and lifters. Sure enough, some of the valve stems were slightly bulged out at their tips. Previously, as we were cleaning parts, I had held one of these valves in my hand and examined it naively, but had not noticed the mushrooming. Now I saw it. Countless times since that day, a more experienced mechanic has pointed out to me something that was right in front of my face, but which I lacked the knowledge to see. It is an uncanny experience; the raw sensual data reaching my eye before and after are the same, but without the pertinent framework of meaning, the features in question are invisible. Once they have been pointed out, it seems impossible that I should not have seen them before.1
“But which I lacked the knowledge to see.” This startling phrase gets at something deep about the way we take in the world, something denied by our workaday mental model of sight as the straightforward transfer of visual information. Crime scene investigators will tell you that witnesses almost always see different versions of the same event. They routinely see what is not there, or, hyperfocused on one aspect, miss obvious things that are.
Artists will tell you something similar. The biggest challenge is to draw or paint what you actually see—the actual shapes and colors, which are always surprising if not seemingly bizarre—not what your brain is telling you you should be seeing. Sight is a primarily a process of mental construction, one that only secondarily uses the messages being received by your retinas to fill in the gaps. It’s just like how you can easily read jumbled words as long as the first and last letters are right. You’re not reading words in a literal sense, your brain is making the most efficient possible use of visual cues as a shortcut to call up the forms of words that you have stored in your working memory.
Beginner draftsmen, whether young or old, get confused, then frustrated, then infuriated by their inability to “make it look real.” This is not really about lack of manual dexterity or skill. They can’t draw it, simply enough, because they aren’t really seeing it. Like someone in a movie once said, their eyes have never been used. Crawford makes this connection, too, after attending a life drawing class. When the instructor poses the model at an odd angle to force better observation (a common exercise; another is to draw the model upside down) his mental gears grind to a halt, and he encounters a bewildering wall of internal resistance. As so many aspiring artists before him, he is feeling the real weight of the ego-death it requires to let go of long-established internal frameworks and begin to see the world as it is. It’s hard, sweaty, scrabbling work. Usually humiliating, too, which is a problem for a field that attracts us egomaniacs.
Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.
—Iris Murdoch2
So, all sorts of tricks have been developed down the ages for dealing with this. A great resource is Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain, which I recommend to anyone interested in art, or even just interested in building up skills of observation which can apply in many domains of life. One “trick” is to measure everything precisely and follow the measurement even when it can’t possibly be right—but it will be right! This sucks, though, because it is hard work. Another is the aforementioned upside down drawing. Another is to draw not the thing itself but the negative spaces around the thing—since these are meaningless abstract shapes, your brain will put up less interference until, suddenly, the thing you want to draw has emerged better than you could have ever expected.
I can attest these are all very helpful. But it will never cease to fascinate me that you have to trick your brain at all. It is a hyper-powered meaning-making structure-imposing machine, and it will not go gently into the uncertain, vague, inky darkness of un-pre-constituted direct experience. This is not just a metaphor about drawing.
When I lived in New York, I spent a lot of time wandering the magnificent halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, alone, engrossed in my sketching. I would usually go Friday evenings, when the museum stays open late, until 9pm. Until about 7pm the galleries buzzed with the pre-dinner crowd, but after that came the most gloriously solitary two hours one could ever hope to enjoy in such a place. This was good, because I was often in the frustrated headspace I described above, maddened by the infinite distances between me and Manet. On one page of my sketchbook, dated to August 2017, disgust with my graceless rendition of an Attilio Piccirilli marble led to manic scribblings on the margins:
Sight: more powerful and more misleading than you think. That first glance tells you, proud, that it knows everything, has encompassed all. But what it recognizes for you, as your ego's emissary, is what it assumes from its knowledge of the forms you carry with you, rightly or wrongly. These cannot encompass the Particular, in fact they shut out, override, dismiss the inconvenient reality of her particular existence. Your map is not the territory. For good and ill. Over and over, even when you think you are wise, that you have learned the way your mind works, you must continually fight the battle to see. As if a child. That is, an artist. That is, someone who struggles to approach and participate in the shocking, overwhelming multiplicity that God goes on making, because it pleases Him, because it is Good. This is the faith we must, somehow, possess—we, who know the alternative.
Maybe for other people the alternative to creativity is not despair. Maybe this is just a compulsion that I and others like me dress up as a calling. Maybe so. But either way, the discipline required to see, the integration of mind and body that the physical arts demand, is what leads Crawford to argue they are not “just” crafts or skills, but, properly employed, a school of virtue. It is a small practice of kenosis, of self-emptying, which can point to and prepare us for the greater one that is the true object of our lives.
Other reading.
Kawanabe Kyōsai, dubbed by a contemporary “the demon of painting,” often clashed with Japan’s imperial authorities over his satirical takes: “In 1870 Kawanabe Kyōsai enjoyed a night out so raucous that its final stop was a Tokyo jail cell. Unlike most whose evenings ended in this way, his offence was not drunkenness, violence or theft. He had painted a picture.”
Alan Jacobs on the growing reappraisal of Auden’s American second act: “All the themes of Auden’s later verse converge on a rejection of the heroic and triumphal modes, and the substitution of a different register, that of the repeated and the mundane.”
B.D. McClay uses one man’s bad Twitter day to offer up some lovely reflections on the search for a legacy and the impermanence of art. “I suppose another way of putting this position is that excellence requires a mix of arrogance and humility; arrogance as to your capabilities, humility toward the work.”
Houellebecq reflects on how reading made him. “I now know that I’ll read until the end of my days—maybe I’ll stop smoking, obviously I’ll stop making love, and the conversation of men will gradually lose its interest for me; but I can’t imagine myself without a book.”
A new Winslow Homer exhibition at the Met shows the far-traveled side of the painter usually considered synonymous with New England. Reviewing the show for The Atlantic, Susan Tallman writes that “the most salient quality of [Homer’s] art was never straightforwardness; it is his knack for using visual precision to demonstrate the limits of vision.”
Sadeq Hedayat, Iran’s misunderstood modernist.
“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity…that was a quality God’s image carried with it…when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate.”
—Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (h/t Michael Sacasas)
Listening.
Those who know me know I was a big RHCP fan, and while I still enjoy cranking up Californication on a summer’s drive, in recent decades I’ve become much more of a John Frusciante fan specifically. His foray into experimental forms and electronica at first offended the post-punk purist within me, and then ultimately carried me along, happily, to new vistas.
Anyway, John has rejoined the band (for the third time), and I recommend this conversation with him by longtime producer Rick Rubin. Interesting ruminations on creativity, beginner’s mind, relationships ruined and renewed, and the nature of artistic collaboration:
Poetry.
On a mid-December day,
frying sausages
for myself, I abruptly
felt under fingers
thirty years younger the rim
of a steering wheel,
on my cheek the parching wind
of an August noon,
as passenger beside me
You as then you were.
Slap across a veg-growing
alluvial plain
we raced in clouds of white dust,
and geese fled screaming
as we missed them by inches,
making a bee-line
for mountains gradually
enlarging eastward,
joyfully certain nightfall
would occasion joy.
It did. In a flagged kitchen
we were served boiled trout
and a rank cheese: for a while
we talked by the fire,
then, carrying candles, climbed
steep stairs. Love was made
then and there: so halcyoned,
soon we fell asleep
to the sound of a river
swabbling through a gorge.
Since then, other enchantments
have blazed and faded,
enemies changed their address,
and War made ugly
an uncountable number
of unknown neighbors,
precious as us to themselves:
but round your image
there is no fog, and the Earth
can still astonish.
Of what, then, should I complain,
pottering about
a neat suburban kitchen?
Solitude? Rubbish!
It’s social enough with real
faces and landscapes
for whose friendly countenance
I at least can learn
to live with obesity
and a little fame.
—W.H. Auden, “Since” (1965)
The liturgical life.
It is Easter! Rejoice! Easter is not a day but a season—or, maybe, a Day unfolding itself across a season, a seed of Eternity planted in our timebound lives. In Lent we spend forty days in the desert, in imitation of Christ’s forty days and the Israelites’ forty years. Easter Day, however, with its fifty days, overstretches and engulfs the time appointed for sorrows, as Christ’s passover enters but then overtakes Death. Pain is not forgotten—Thomas’ doubting fingers still find the wounds—but it is transformed.
You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you have taken away my sackcloth
and clothed me with joy.3
Eastertide lasts until the feast of Pentecost, on June 5 this year. May the awakening earth warm your bones and bring good cheer.
As ever,
J
Shop Class as Soulcraft, pp 90-91.
The Sovereignty of Good, p. 84.
Got me thinking about Seijun Suzuki… Even without English subtitles, this film about the poet-painter Yumeji Takehisa is a visual delight: https://youtu.be/XYKkBtpciF0