Another memorable insight from Thomas Merton by way of Louie Louie:
To look too directly at anything is to see something else because we force it to submit to the impertinence of our preconceptions.
The difference between seeing and looking. The disconnectedness of habitual viewing. Impertinence is the perfect word to describe how we can be lazy, slackish and dishonorable in our encounters with the visual world beyond our own skin.
To look too directly at a text is to read it for quotations that reinforce our pre-existing point of view. To look glancingly at it is to do the same, in a desultory fashion. Is it different when we look at a work of art? Perhaps we came to it because we felt sure of what we would find there, or, it caught our eye because we recognized in passing something familiar and therefore re-inforcing about it.
How do we regain the radical innocence that renders this impertinence irrelevant? Scientists try to do so by looking not for what they think they’ll find, but for what is truly before them. I’m not sure this “bias against bias” would ever work for reading literature or looking at art, for we would need to seek confrontation with an utterly foreign language for which there was no translator and no Rosetta Stone, or with an uncompromising yet impenetrable art.
Maybe this can happen by accident. I recall a film about the small community that lived in adjacence to the Easter Island sculptures, the incomplete heirs to that almost vanished civilization. The elders had a ritual game of (only apparently) cat’s cradle, with chant, passing it on by showing the heirs how to do what they did — how to hold in their hands the cosmogony of the ancestors, how to sing and weave it back into being. The elders were the first to say that much had been lost, that more would be lost, over time. Yet they kept on with the ritual, knowing it was not more right than they could get it.
Is it possible to look at this in innocence? We don’t know what we’re looking at, after all. The keys to the kingdom are well and truly lost, for all we can see by looking hard, by looking impertinently. What remains to us is to be moved, precisely because our preconceptions are shattered, not reinforced.
Does the Zen concept of “beginner’s mind’ (and by extrapolation, “beginner’s eyes”) offer another way of looking at what Merton is saying?
I watch my 6 month old grand-daughter as she pokily observes her surroundings. She glances, lingers for a moment, looks at something else, then her seeing flutters and flits about like a butterfly, alighting here and there. “Beginner’s eyes” seem to be like this butterfly!
On one of our trips, we came upon a campsite in the 4-corners region of the Southwest. Many Navajo artists, photographers, printmakers, potters.
A tall, dignified man who was selling his drawings asked me if I was a “teacher”, to which I answered simply “Yes”. We had a conversation, where we introduced ourselves. He gave his Anglo name, and then “Baha’h’zhonie”( he transalated to “Happy Person”)
(sic) which was his birth name. He gave us very good advice – “don’t stare at people, don’t point at people, listen”. This is advice to remember!