Chapter 2: Seeing
Reading at Finca El Zapote, on April 2013.
“It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.”
Nature is very much like now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t affair. It is as well now-you-don’t-see-it, now-you-do. It’s a matter of keeping your eyes open.
Steward Edward White: “I have always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could see the wind – the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris fleeing high in the air.”
Donald E. Carr points out that only one-celled animals can perceive the universe as it is, because they have no editing in the brain. This implies that some living creature has the “capacity” to see the universe as it is or i.e. the objective truth. Of course, I don’t agree with this point.
How much can you see in the dark? The stars, planets, animals…
It is interesting that those who are blind from birth have no real conception of height of distance. “In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color patches… The mental effort involved in these reasoning’s proves overwhelming for many patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable.”
“Form is condemned to an eternal danse macabre with meaning: I couldn’t unpeach the peaches. Nor can I remember ever having seen without understanding; the color-patches of infancy are lost… I live now in a world of shadows that shape and distance color, a world where space makes a kind of terrible sense.”
“Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.”
There is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. It’s like walking with and without a camera. When you walk without a camera, you have to open your own shutter. You are now above all an unscrupulous observer.
“When I see this way I see truly. As Thoreau ways, I return to my senses… But I can’t go out and try to see this way. I’ll fail, I’ll go mad.”
You have to become one with the nature, to allow a flow, as in a dialogue, to go between you two in order to form one. That way you are truly seeing.
“Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it… It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power… The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.”