Why a Book of Seeing?
I should know all about seeing since I have been involved with it for many decades, but it remains a form of experience I can’t take for granted or feel that I’ve fathomed it. There is a famous comment by Henri Matisse: ‘The artist… has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time’. And Francis Crick, a scientist who won the Nobel Prize as one of the first to visualise the double helix pattern of DNA, wrote: ‘It is difficult to explain to a layman that there is a problem in how we see things. It seems so effortless. Yet the more we study the process, the more complex and unexpected we find it. Of one thing we can be sure: we do not see things in the way common sense says we should’. While I am still part of the visible world I want better to understand it, and that led me to write A Book of Seeing.
I started with a personal account of how I thought my seeing had changed as my life had changed – as a teenager becoming involved in the arts, then working, travelling, getting married, having children, weathering illness. There is a history to everyone’s seeing and to the world as it offers itself to our eyes. I have lived most of my life in New Zealand/Aotearoa, yet this country has gone through a rapid series of new identities, the result of upheavals such as ‘the sixties’, Britain ditching its colony to join Europe, neo-liberalism, feminism, biculturalism, the digital revolution, the pandemic…. Those social changes not only transformed our environment but subtly influenced our seeing.
To take just one political example, the climate emergency is a threat to the entire earth, a problem so large in scale and so slow in its unfolding that most human beings failed to see it coming. Now each night’s news brings images of droughts and cracking earth, forests engulfed in wildfire, or houses disappearing under a torrent of mud and water. The natural world looks more vulnerable, and many aspects of our way of life have taken on an air of complicity—plastic objects and wrappings, aerosol sprays, cars, planes, rubbish dumps, factory chimneys, even the countryside with its livestock and polluted rivers. Species of insects, fish and animals are disappearing. Meanwhile there are politicians and business leaders who suffer from a complete blindness to the emergency because they are blinkered by religious or political priorities or their own self-interest.
My book explores the process of seeing from many starting points—the arts, science, philosophy, religion, and politics, along with a range of everyday experiences. To juxtapose perspectives is to raise questions and create tensions. I have always liked idiosyncratic books that are not afraid to overflow their categories, intellectually curious without being academic. They are usually prose, though the spirit of poetry is often present. The encounters and surprises en routeare more important than any destination. While some readers may be vexed by this voracious approach, vision is a process that always leads from one mystery to another.
I also respect the scientific principle of Occam’s Razor, derived from the Medieval friar William of Occam. Albert Einstein’s version was that ‘Everything should be kept as simple as possible. but not simpler’. The qualifying phrase is important since the challenge is to avoid either over-complicating or over-simplifying. I don’t think my wish to delay closure conflicts with the effort to be as clear as possible. One of the works which shaped my liking for clear texture was Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Pound could be guilty of crude political views, but the best of his poetry combined precise fragments with a rich, overall complexity.
The fact that I began this article by quoting a scientist (Crick) and an artist (Matisse) indicates my sense that these two fields are complementary, the former seeking to understand ‘seeing’ in physical terms and the latter in subjective terms. While art continues to be my first port of call, I think science has become increasingly important for writers and artists today thanks to the dramatic discoveries in fields like neuroscience, genetics, cosmology, quantum physics and sub-atomic particles—the power of seeing extended by the telescope or the microscope (or the Hadron Collider). Artificial intelligence (AI) has also made startling advances. Over recent decades, science has offered intellectual surprises comparable to the excitement of late 20th century European theory.
I don’t mean to ignore the ugly aspects of commercialised, applied science, or the fact that some scientists fail to understand the complementary nature of the arts. They attempt to deny the special nature of consciousness and fail to acknowledge that even with the amazing advances in brain scanning and AI they are not able adequately to explain or describe subjective experience. That area remains the domain of the arts. Fortunately there are artists and scientists who do take an interest in each other’s field. Eclecticism is nothing new – art and science were linked for many centuries – but I think that aided by the internet the arts today are developing an increasingly omnivorous approach.
I don’t want to make my book sound too solemn. To write a book about seeing without talking about sex would be to ignore an important source of visual energy. My book discusses the conventions of visual modesty in various cultures. Then there is the remarkable history of the censorship of films and paintings in New Zealand. When I was one of the organisers of the Auckland International Film Festival in the 1970s, I could see exactly what the Censor had removed from our films because we would receive a number of small cans containing his celluloid cuttings of nudity and drugs (though fortunately there were limits to what he recognised). Today, there are striking cases of political censorship in countries such as China. For example, a CNN report describes both the thoroughness of the Chinese censorship and the attempts to circumvent it by visual methods: ‘Practically any image that so much as gestures at the famed photograph of a man in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square risks deletion from the country’s closely monitored web. Recreations showing a line of books approaching a cigarette package, a swan before an oncoming truck and a grasshopper in front of a tire have all been removed’. When pictures of Winnie the Pooh were used to satirise Xi Jinping, a total ban was imposed on A. A. Milne’s character. Those seeking to convey a political message still find that images have a better chance than words of eluding the computerised watchdogs. For example, someone managed to get a photo of the Hong Kong protests onto WeChat by flipping it sideways and adding brushstrokes.
Some sections of my book begin with everyday experiences, such as a walk through my neighbourhood, thinking about aspects such as pattern, texture, and colour. The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty discusses colour as a strange dialogue between inner and outer:
[Paul Claudel] has a phrase saying that a certain blue of the sea is so
blue that only blood would be more red…. A certain red is also a fossil
drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds. If we took all these
participations [associations] into account, we would recognise that a
naked colour…is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being,
offered all naked to a vision…, but is rather a sort of straits between
exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something
that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the coloured
or visible world resound….
Colours can be measured according to the amount of energy present at each spectral wavelength but there can be striking variations in how we experience them. Susan Denham Wade in A History of Seeing in Eleven Inventions describes a nationwide debate in Britain in 2015 in response to the photograph of a particular dress purchased for a wedding. Some saw the dress as ‘blue and black’, some as ‘white and gold’. People were confident of their perceptions and fiercely disagreed. The debate attracted eleven million tweets, then spread to the United States and was featured on the Ellen Degeneres chat show where the views of the audience were also split.
There are many other curious aspects of colour. For example, fascinated by black, artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Serra have made abstract paintings that are densely black, and there has been competition to produce the ultimate shade. In 2016 Anish Kapoor bought sole rights to Vantablack, the deepest black ever created. Artists were angry about Kapoor’s attempt at exclusivity and at once began looking for an even blacker black.
Colour symbolism is extremely varied. To mention a few examples, the colour of mourning is black in Europe but white in China, red in South Africa, and blue in Iran. In the United States when political parties adopt signature colours, red is associated with right-wing (Republican) politics and blue with left-wing (Democrat) politics; but in our country the colours are reversed, with red for left-wing (Labour) and blue for right-wing (National). I also note the debate over what can be considered the country’s signature colour. Doris de Pont, director of the New Zealand Fashion Museum, writes: ‘Returning home after a period away, you are immediately aware of the pervasiveness of the colour black in the way we dress. It feels strikingly incongruous in a country that thinks of itself as a bright and natural paradise that we clothe ourselves in this dark and colourless hue’. But for many New Zealanders, green is clearly the national colour. In 1938 A.R.D. Fairburn described his ambivalent feelings on ‘returning home to New Zealand’ from England in colour terms:
He who comes back returns
to no ruin of gold nor riot of buds…
home-coming returns only
to the dull green, hider of bones….
The colonist farmers were quick to replace the native tussock with different shades of green by importing species of grass from England (such as Ryegrass, Cocksfoot, Tall Fescue, Timothy, and Yorkshire Fog). Green reminds me of the extent to which that colour was disliked by Wassily Kandinsky, the pioneer of abstract art, who found it boring:
Green is the most restful colour that exists. On exhausted men
this restfulness has a beneficial effect, but after a time it
becomes wearisome. Pictures painted in shades of green are
passive…. [It] contrasts with the active warmth of yellow or the
active coolness of blue. In the hierarchy of colours green is the
‘bourgeoisie’ – self-satisfied, immovable, arrow.
Obviously there are many ways of understanding the relationship between seeing and art. To mention one commentator, Ludwig Wittgenstein kept a notebook during the years he spent in the trenches during the First World War. He wrote: ‘The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis…. The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, [but] the view sub specie aeternitatis [is] from outside’. (Incidentally, the first complete English version of this notebook, translated by Marjorie Perloff, has just been published. Wittgenstein had written alternate pages of the notebook in code because they also covered private matters such as his sexual feelings.) His later writings continued to reflect his curiosity about seeing. In Philosophical Investigations he remarked: ‘We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough’. Wittgenstein’s posthumous books are another example of how clear fragments can coexist with a respect for overall complexity.
Religion has its own perspectives. In writing a book about vision, I am naturally intrigued by the fact that so many people shape their lives according to the instructions of a god or gods they have never seen. Meanwhile ‘The eyes of the Lord arein every place, beholding the evil and the good’ (Proverbs 15:3). And in the Qur’an: ‘Allah knows all that is in the heavens and on earth: He has full knowledge of all things’ (Verse 49:16). That notion of God’s vision can create problems for a non-believer who does not understand how God can see all the illness and suffering in the world and yet still choose not to intervene. Nevertheless, there are many images of His all-seeing eye, often set within a triangle to symbolise the Trinity. That image was included in 1782 as part of the Great Seal of the United States and it has since been featured on every American one-dollar bill.
While exploring seeing, my book also acknowledges the creative lives and experiences of those who are blind, such as the writers Jorge Luis Borges, John Hull, and Mark Maurer, and the neuroscientist Zoltan Torey. The readers of remake will be well aware of the poetry of Michele Leggott, who remarked in a 2014 Radio NZ interview: ‘I’m fond of saying to people “I am a totally visual person. I just can’t see. My physical eyesight has gone but I’m all to do with space and spatial imagination. And I have a reservoir of visual images I can draw on…. I won’t give up on the visual. I can’t see but my mind’s eye is still active”‘.
Science alerts us to the fact that there is plenty that we cannot see – not only countless particles in the air that are passing through our bodies, but the mystery of dark matter. According to CERN, dark matter seems to outweigh matter by roughly six times. We know it is there because of its gravitational effects, but we don’t know what it is and we can’t perceive it. This means that we live in a world most of which we still cannot see or understand.
My book was completed in April 2020 but I needed to added a section on the Pandemic. The key to the coronavirus is its invisibility, which helped it to extinguish so many visible signs of social life. Assessing risk and safety has always been a basic task of seeing, but the current enemy is totally camouflaged. Even if people cannot sight the virus, it is crucial for them to believe in it. Aware that it could promptly end my own seven decades of seeing, I was a ready believer.
In choosing images for my book, there were some necessary themes to cover, such as Renaissance perspective, a sample of Surrealism. a view of the earth from space, and a piece of braille sculpture. Also, thanks to the artists’ generosity, I was able to select 14 New Zealand paintings which offered an interesting perspective on seeing. On the front cover, a tiger is staring the reader straight in the eye, from a 1968 painting by Rick Killeen.
A Book of Seeing will be launched at the 2022 Auckland Writers Festival.
Note
RogerHorrocks will give a talk about his new book Culture in a Small Country, at the 2022 Auckland Writers Festival on Tuesday August 23rd at the Aotea Centre (Heartland Bank Room) at 5.45 to 6.30 pm. That will be followed by the launch of that book in the foyer together with the launch of A Book of Seeing, also published by Atuanui Press.
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