Writings by Pat Hartman.
My main claim to fame is the zine Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics, 25 issues published from 1988 to 1998. My book, Call Someplace Paradise, can be found here.
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Thursday, October 31, 2002
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Topic: Vision 7
Category: Vision
Observation itself changes things. In Craig Vetter's words, "to observe any of this subatomic business you have to bombard the parts of the atom with rays that change what's going on, the way a flashlight beam changes the behavior of a roach work gang, so that you can't ever know what they were doing before you started looking."
Sometimes it's a matter of where you stand. My kitchen door has four panes of glass in its top half. From a certain spot, the wooden crossbar completely blocks out the street and the cars parked along it. When I stand there, I see nothing but grass in the bottom two panes and trees in the top two. All I have to do is hit my mark, as they say in the theatre, and the reward is a peaceful country scene.
When things go wrong, our first impulse is always to change the world, the people and things around us, which effort is usually doomed to futility. But sometimes it's only a matter of changing where we stand. Stance, foundation, platform, posture, attitude - all these concepts are related, and to know their secret is to know some potent voodoo.
Yet another problem of vision is the obstacle, that which obstructs the view, whether inner or outer. The obstacle may be other people: as Henry Van Dyke says, "Those who would see wonderful things must often be ready to travel alone." And even that may not be enough to ensure clear sight, given man's capacity for getting in his own way. "The artist doesn't see things, he sees himself." (William Rotsler).
And then you've got your Visionaries. When I think of Vision I think of William Butler Yeats and Maude Gonne, those Irish radicals and, it goes without saying, visionaries. Utne Reader recently listed 100 contemporary examples, some quite surprising. They are absolutely correct in naming Michael Ventura a major visionary. Colin Wilson in Religion and the Rebel reports that someone asked Arnold Toynbee how to become a visionary. The answer, said the great man, is to study history.
posted by Pat on 1:32 AM |
Tuesday, October 29, 2002
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Topic: Vision 6
Category: Vision
Time is another possible subjective variable. A sight can enter the eyes, yet not really be seen until years later. Frank Conroy's memoir of a shoeshine stand in a New York subway tunnel is a perfect example. The men who worked there never seemed to focus on anything in the immediate environment. They shined the customers' shoes by feel, while gazing over their shoulders into what would have been the far distance, had they not been underground. Conroy, sixteen at the time, was impressionable enough to almost believe "that these men could see through walls, through girders, and around corners to whatever hyperspace it was where whoever it was they were waiting and watching for would finally emerge." Now he realizes that the footwear maintenance personnel had mastered the art of mind over matter. They had learned to transcend the reality of workdays spent in a dark, filthy, smelly, noisy place, doing a humble task. "They were powerful magic dancers, sorcerers almost, and thirty-five years later I can still feel the presence of their spell."
An additional variable can be provided by seeing something at one remove - in other words, it is sometimes possible to react to a sight as if one had seen it oneself, when actually one is reacting to another's description of the event. Michael Ventura writes about just such an echo in the mind's eye in the tale of. Uncle Hugo, who often described an action performed by Ventura's grandfather ("a saint") which showed his reverence for life and the creator's gifts. "Over and over again, to see Uncle Hugo would be to see my grandfather..walking in East Harlem, where they lived, seeing pieces of bread on the concrete....picking up the bread, kissing it, and carrying it until he passed a garbage can. The gesture grew enormous in my heart, as Hugo intended." Maybe Uncle Hugo only saw the grandfather do this once, and it made such an indelible mark on his psyche that he mythologized it into a frequent occurrence. Maybe Ventura only saw Uncle Hugo imitate the action once, and yet it reverberated strongly because of its compelling archetypal ring of truth. It doesn't matter, only the end result matters.
posted by Pat on 7:54 PM |
Wednesday, October 23, 2002
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Topic: Vision 5
Category: Vision
Most people, if given the opportunity, will misidentify suspects, as has been proven in innumerable college psychology experiments. One reason for this is general reluctance to be different from the herd, which leads to a willingness to change one's story after hearing what the other witnesses have said. But in the words of S.I. Hayakawa, "If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it."
The human eye and mind work together to disillusion you. You see something happen, so you try to put the two of them together. Nine times out of ten the camera makes a liar out of you. The mind can see things only so far as our eyes will let it. ( R. Wayne Anderson)
The eyes can see things only so far as the mind lets them, and sometimes this truth appears in astonishing ways. The eminent chanteuse Edith Piaf suffered for many years from hysterical blindness because of abuse. Many Cambodian women who have escaped to the United States are blind. Their characteristics don't match up with the personality profiles typical of hysterical blindness. Nor are they overbred neurasthenic fainting violet types. They are sturdy peasants. Yet they are undoubtedly blind because of what they have seen in their homeland.
Depth, degree, and direction of vision are other subjective variables. Trained seers see more, as Virginia Woolf implies in stating that the poets and novelists are the only people from whom we cannot hide. Tom Robbins defines poetry as "nothing more than an intensification or illumination of common objects and everyday events until they shine with their singular nature, until we can experience their power...."
"We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon." (Konrad Adenauer). We are all lying in the gutter, one of the French poets said, but some of us are looking at the stars. Carl Sagan points out that from the point of view of a mayfly, "human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously...."
posted by Pat on 11:33 AM |
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Topic: Vision 4
Category: Vision
Relativity is both literal and metaphorical. "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful," says Emerson, "we must carry it with us or we find it not." There is the whole question of the eye of the beholder: - who is doing the seeing, with an individual and particular way of looking? From what angle, and through what filters or fogs? Subjectivity is partly a function of predisposition: in general, we see what we expect to see. One person sees a weed, while another sees a plant whose uses haven't been discovered yet. Some people see ghosts or demons. Most people see stuff when looking at a clear sky - cells and strings of cells. Wilhelm Reich thought of them as orgone energy. Yoga students see them a lot when they do breathing exercises, and consider them benign. Yet cocaine addicts see them as aggressive insects.
Late at night, I have wondered aloud, to one person or another, what it really means to say that we see a color. We may both look at something and both identify it as being red, but how do we know that we're actually seeing the same color? Maybe what you habitually identify as "red" is actually what I habitually identify as "blue". There is no way we can ever know. This line of speculation sometimes elicits blank incomprehension, and never meets with agreement. Usually the other person brings up color-blindness tests. That's totally irrelevant to what I mean, but I never can seem to frame the objection correctly.
Joel Achenbach (again!) in his syndicated column Why Things Are puts it this way: "Is redness an artifact of the brain, varying from person to person, or does everyone see the very same red?......There's no guarantee that people are 'seeing' in their minds the same color when they talk about, say, 'red' or 'green'."
It cheers me to know that I'm not the only one who considers this a valid question, and that a professional science writer has travelled some way on this particular train of thought. He points out that any definition of color is necessarily tautologous. And science is on our side. "After all, red is nothing more than light (photons) moving at a specific wavelength," says Achenbach. "Photons aren't red! Nor is a wavelength red."
People are attuned to different things. I like to think I have a pretty good eye for detail, texture, color, and so forth. When out in nature I drink in the sights. Every vein on a leaf becomes precious. But have a friend who always picks out animals from the landscape. Any kind of little creature, no matter how protectively colored or how still it's sitting, he spots it. I don't really think that on an ophthalmologist's chart I would necessarily test any worse for eyesight than my friend - we just see differently.
posted by Pat on 3:33 AM |
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