When I was about 17 years old, I took a coach trip to Glasgow to visit the University with my high school. Memory shows me an image of myself on the bus with no-one in the chair next to me, though whether this is accurate or not I cannot know.
At 17 and about to leave home, I must have been thinking about what I could bring to this city as an independent agent in the world. Thinking, as adolescents do, about who and what I might be and what value ‘I’ might carry in the marketplace of selves and identities. I seemed to feel lonely and small in the city’s expanse. As the bus trundled along Great Western Road I looked out at the tenement buildings, at the rows and rows of windows, little entry points into lives that the height of the bus afforded me to witness.
And I thought to myself ‘I have this. I have the ability to see’.
Strange that I remember this thought; this self-valuation. I didn’t mean the ability to visually see. I was landing on the small interior value of noticing. I probably knew that this quality was unlikely to carry much of social currency. But I knew that it was precious to me, and comforting. There is so much to notice.
Mark Cousins film, ‘The Story of Looking’ reflects on the visual world and its meaning for him as he approaches a surgery which may permanently impair his eyesight. I watch it, in part because I too have a love of visual culture and because I too have experienced the fragility of seeing. Three years ago, I experienced a sudden abrasion of my cornea, which left my eye nerves torn and vulnerable to recurrent breakage and seizures. I woke countless times in the night with a searing pain. I spent days with my left eye swollen, half-closed, punctured. I took to using a bottle cap to jam the skin of my upper eyelid up and off from the nerves of my eyeball. Blinking and sleeping became dangerous activities. I wore an eye-patch and noticed the strange disorientation and nausea of the brain adjusting to one-sided sight. I sat in the garden looking at the trees in Spring and tried to make peace with the possibility of loosing sight in one eye. I felt the preciousness of seeing.
Meditation talks of ‘attention’ and uses the language of looking. Thay was always directing our eyes; towards the colours of the bare earth, towards the long horizons of the French countryside; towards birds and flowers and the faces of our children. “Look!” he always seemed to be saying, “All this is available if only you would see it!”
If you have the time, please watch The History of Looking (it is on amazon prime to rent) and, if you like it, you might watch the documentaries of the artist Andy Goldsworthy (Time and Tides, and Leaning into the Wind) as companion pieces.
Mark Cousins’ film elicits tears. All those images of a Scotland I know. I have seen the snow on those vast hills, I know the solid forms of that city, and the verdant greens of that dripping, shimmering landscape. These films are sermons to looking.
When the camera looks, it guides our attention and it holds our gaze: watching, watching, watching.... The longer you look, the more there is to see. At first glance, the mind tries to capture the image and file it: ‘seaweed under water’. But by continual looking, the image cannot be so easily discarded. It mutates, revealing new forms. This slow attention draws up feeling. The image engages my history of seeing, merging with my inner world. The camera is not distracted, it holds my looking in place. I cannot look away. By noticing, I am continually touched by the world of things.
If like me, you are a lover of films, you might have experienced this ‘guided meditation’ of film. The long stare of Tarkovsky looking at water, Kieslowsky’s Veronique watching the puppets perform before her and then the movements and face of the puppeteer. Or the gaze of the teenage film-maker in Sam Mende’s American Beauty who’s camera captures the dance of an empty paper bag. Such films are preoccupied with the act of looking. And after I watch them, my eyes become still like cameras. And I watch the echo of waterfalls in the tap water running over my fingers and I see the soft landscape of the blanket with its milky tactility. I pay attention to the accompaniment of image and sound. Right now, I am watching my pale fingers dance across the little black tiles of the keyboard with the tiny click-clack of tap-dancing shoes. Film reminds me that life – ordinary life – is animate. Everything – everything – is worthy of looking.
What is this if it is not meditation?
Cousins narration tells us “neuroscience has found that, when we look, twice as many electrical signals move from the back of our brains to the front, than from the front of the brain to the back.” Our looking, or rather our way of seeing, is fundamentally shaped by what we have seen before. These impressions cluster into perceptions. In truth, we rarely ‘ just look’ because our eyes are not innocent. As Cousins says, “we are projecting when we look, we see what we know, from the past”. Our seeing can say more about ourselves than the external world.
Last weekend I went to an exhibition of the textile sculptures of Louise Bourgeois. Sculpture manipulates the whole visual field: it is not passive in two dimensions, but rather occupies space. Her work is concerned with memory, with trauma, with the sexual and power dynamics of families. The sculptures suggest early visual expressions of the psychodrama of family constellations therapy. Late in her life, frustrated with the way that museums arranged her objects, Bourgeois began to create installation scenes within enclosures: vitrines, cages, glass-paned doors. The feeling of standing close to them calls up the feeling of a child looking: covert, tremulous, small, privy to worlds that are powerfully felt but little understood. Standing next to her sculpture ‘Spider (Cell) 1997’, I felt my own longing for the absent figure in the empty tapestry chair, but I could also feel the pervasive and ominous shadow of the maternal spider in my eye’s peripheral view. Looking has dimensionality, and the organisation of space carries feeling: the history of an emotional relationship to presences and absences.
This also helps me to understand that ‘looking’ is empathy. After two hours in the Hayward Gallery I had lived inside of Louise Bourgeois’ seeing and thereby inhabited her emotional world. Art is the very act of ‘looking with another’s eyes’. I aspire to look into the worlds of the beloved people in my life with the same attention, the same curiosity and open-ness as I look at art. Perhaps then I might relieve them of the contamination of all the me-ness in my seeing, and experience more of them.
There’s a section in Cousin’s film, where he reads a twitter comment that says, “Forget mindfulness, just look”.
Why forget mindfulness? Because the ‘idea’ of mindfulness can cloud looking. Dropping the idea of meditation, of mindfulness, of ‘doing something special’, returns to me the innocence of looking. Looking the way that I looked at the sequins of light on the sea as a child. Looking from strange angles, lying star-shaped on the grass at the movement of shadows from the canopy of trees. Looking at the strip of moonlight as it falls in zigzags across the bedroom dresser.
Looking, because there is nothing else to do but look.
Looking because, in looking, the world enters me. So that there is less ‘me’ and more world.
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