There isn’t any pure notion — of a flower, of a mountain, of an individual. In all the things we take a look at, we see partly a mirrored image of ourselves — a projection of an inner mannequin looking for to approximate the reality. If we’re aware sufficient and unafraid sufficient of being shocked, we’ll preserve testing the mannequin towards actuality, incrementally ceding the imagined to the precise. One measure of affection — maybe the deepest measure — is the willingness to take away the projection with the intention to understand what is really there. There’s each sorrow and comfort in understanding that though we will solely ever glimpse components of the totality past us, we will preserve making an attempt to see extra clearly with the intention to love extra deeply.
I’m reminded of a passage from The Residing Mountain (public library) — that unusual masterpiece of consideration and affection by the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd (February 11, 1893–February 23, 1981) — illustrating this paradox of notion.
Up within the Scottish Highlands, Shepherd discovers how the illusions of notion rely upon one’s place, bodily as a lot as psychic. She writes:
A scatter of white flowers in grass, checked out via half-closed eyes, blaze out with a pointy readability as if they’d really risen up out of their background. Such illusions, relying on how the attention is positioned and used, drive house the reality that our routine imaginative and prescient of issues isn’t essentially proper: it is just certainly one of an infinite quantity, and to glimpse an unfamiliar one, even for a second, unmakes us, however steadies us once more.
This overwhelming infinity of potential perceptions is what consideration advanced to guard us from — that “intentional, unapologetic discriminator,” deciding on a handful of components out of the totality with the intention to assemble the projected picture.
With no aware clearing of the lens, the attention sees what the thoughts has already imagined.
As her imaginative and prescient encounters the myriad tessellated realities of the mountain, Shepherd considers what it takes to “look creatively” with the intention to see extra clearly:
How can I quantity the worlds to which the attention offers me entry? — the world of sunshine, of color, of form, of shadow: of mathematical precision within the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm within the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, ought to so profoundly tranquillise the thoughts I have no idea. Maybe the attention imposes its personal rhythm on what is just a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as greater than jag and pinnacle — as magnificence… A sure form of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of magnificence. But the kinds have to be there for the attention to see. And types of a sure distinction: mere dollops received’t do it. It’s, as with all creation, matter impregnated with thoughts: however the resultant concern is a dwelling spirit, a glow within the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is lifeless. It’s one thing snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us repeatedly and may be held off by steady artistic act. So, merely to look on something, akin to a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the area of being within the vastness of non-being. Man has no different motive for his existence.
In the meantime on one other landmass, Frida Kahlo was confronting the problem of absolutely understanding one other, writing to the sophisticated love of her life that “just one mountain can know the core of one other mountain” — a poetic reminder that attending to know each other’s depths would be the supreme “steady artistic act,” the good triumph of notion over projection.
Complement with Oliver Sacks on the need of our illusions and Iain McGilchrist on how we render actuality with consideration as an instrument of affection, then revisit the younger Charles Darwin’s encounter with God within the mountains and the surrealist French poet and thinker René Daumal on the mountain and the which means of life.
