The Art of Seeing

The quietness, the greyness, the naturalness, and the slowness of the world at Pt. Roberts has taught me a great deal about what it means to see things. In the city, I worked at not seeing things because there are just too many things, they lack coherence and balance, are too vivid, have too much contrast, are in short too man-made and feel more like chaos than like the world.

Here, I have the time to see things and things can be seen to change slowly over time. For example, 10 days ago, I cut a branch of forsythia that looked dead, and put it in a vase of water on the dining room table. Since then, the bark has filled out slightly, and its color has changed from grey to a brownish color, and its tiny, dead-looking buds have begun to swell minimally, to change color infinitesimally day by day by day. Right now, the buds are perhaps 1/16th of an inch long and have gone from dead grey to crisp brown to a very pale and satiny yellow-green. In another week, those green buds will have separated themselves slightly, formed into petals and changed to a somewhat yellower color. They will open eventually to display their bright yellow four-petalled flower and tiny green leaves will arise to surround them. They will last for weeks before they begin their equally slow decline. But it is only if you have the time and the inclination to watch the process that you begin to see them as something complex, as something more than an object for your momentary admiration as they reach their peak bloom. Similarly, tulips, when they come to us for picking will last for weeks in the house, as they move through the process of bud swelling through various shades of green, of petal-opening and opening even more as the color flows slowly up into each petal, each day more vividly. And then, those petals open and ever so slowly open to a disk, and then amazingly turn themselves inside out, each day taking on a new and exotic shape. They gently decline this way, their color fades back to a dull shade of their original, and then they lose all color to a dusty beige. Eventually they finish their performance by letting loose those reformed petals, dropping them at the foot of their vase. It is like watching a virtuoso ballet performance.

This week in New York, a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ opened. I wish I were seeing it, but I am always seeing it. The NYT’s reviewer said this about it: “The great gift of this production, first staged in London two years ago, is its quiet insistence that looking is the art by which all people shape their lives.” (theater2.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/theater/reviews/22geor.html)

Many years ago, Sondheim wrote the music for a TV drama called ‘Evening Primrose.’ It is about a group of people who have been imprisoned in a department store for many years. (I recently asked a grandchild what he might like for a birthday gift and he reported his desire for ‘a Leggo Jedi Starfighter Hyperdrive Booster Ring.’ (You can see it here: http://shop.lego.com/Product/?p=7661) From this I conclude that the practice of locking people in department stores for years at a time is not an uncommon event.) The heroine of ‘Evening Primrose’ has two songs that foreshadow 'Sunday in the Park’: ‘Take Me To the World,’ and “I Remember Trees.’ In the latter, she sings, ‘I remember trees, or at least I think I do.’

Before I came here, that was pretty much a song I could have sung. From 1970-75, I lived in a house in the woods and began to see trees. But I was still young, with young children and employment and many thoughts that captured my attention far more than the trees did. Last night, I was listening to a CBC radio lecture in which some professor was talking about the original meaning of the term common sense. It wasn’t ‘common’ as ‘ordinary.’ It was ‘common’ in the sense that it was the sense that took the information from the other senses and put that information together into a unified whole. That was before we had science to make our unified whole. We are deeply lacking in common sense nowadays, I suspect. Which reminds me of a poem by William Carlos Williams about the death of his English Grandmother. He is riding with this elderly, very sick woman in an ambulance, heading for a hospital against her wishes. ‘What is that out the window?’ she asks. ‘Trees? Well, I’m tired of them.’

I’m not tired of trees. But should I become so, I will know that like those tulips and forsythia, I have reached the end of a long process. For now, however, I am happy to have been taken to the world.