‘We inhabit, we are part of a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small,’ writes Marilynne Robinson. Our conscious ratiocinative will is only a small part of us. To define Homo sapiens as a consciously thinking creature is hardly more satisfactory than defining Canis lupus familiaris as a tail-wagging creature. It is a part of what we do, but by no means the largest part, and is in no way separate from our other faculties. ‘There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us,’ as Thomas Browne says exultingly. The most interesting thoughts that appear in my brain, like the beating of my heart, the transmutation of food into energy, and the intricacies of my nervous system – all these processes which occur in what I think of as ‘me’ and yet over which I am aware of having no control, seem miraculous to me and certainly deserving of daily praise. And if I’m not certain who or what deserves the credit, I can be sure it isn’t me. I am, by some distance, the least remarkable thing about me.
All creatures have their own perspectives and see only partially. I can, I am told, register less than one ten-trillionth of the light wavelength: the rest of it passes through my body but I don’t have the equipment to pick it up. I’m not complaining – I have found these magical cangiante colours in the autumn woods and gardens, and that’s enough.
Suppose we see a message that reads ‘ Hello, there! ’. We think we have come across something comprehensible. When we see ‘ ;{p(m;sdPJ*],-=;;≥Oh#&' '
we think either that it may be meaningless or that the pattern of marks may contain an encrypted message that we can eventually tease out and understand as clearly as we understood ‘Hello, there!’. But suppose both messages are equally (in)comprehensible. Suppose it is not the patterns which carry the meaning, but the infinitesimal (and to our eyes and instruments illegible and indistinguishable) variations in the pressure of the pen on the paper. No tricks have been played – the message is as clear as day. It is simply that the limits of our perspective leave us blind to it.
On a page torn from his sketchbook, on the back of an Allegory of the Republic, Cézanne drew a man and a woman. As his biographer Alex Danchev dryly notes, ‘experts are divided on whether [it] represents Saint Anthony keeping temptation at bay by repelling a woman, or a libertine beckoning one on.’ Our senses are limited and our interpretations of what we do sense are never wholly impartial. ‘For now we (clams included) see through a glass darkly…’ Humility is advisable.
‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language … Man has to awaken to wonder,’ writes Wittgenstein. ‘Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.’ We should beware all priesthoods, whether in the pay of religion or science, who claim an exclusive knowledge of objective universal truths which everyone else must accept. Scripture and science are both equally sincere attempts to explain the world, just as this book on Giorgione by my desk is an attempt to explain his paintings. They may all be helpful at times, but one could no more reconstruct a recognizable experience of the world from scripture or science, than one could paint a Giorgione from the critical description. T.S. Eliot laments ‘the acquisition of impersonal ideas which obscure what we really think and feel.’ The ideas are not the reality that is waiting out there to be encountered. We must ‘doubt wisely’. It is only by our vigilant alertness that we can experience the real world rather than a ‘novelisation’ of the world co-written by all the self-appointed authorities. We should walk through the world as though it were a film we have never seen before, alert to each changing scene and mood, uncertain what might happen next. Wondering.
Sir Nathaniel Bacon, Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit (Tate)
This alertness is, after all, the state in which the rest of nature lives. Hares, sheep, pipits and buzzards are all aware of my presence as I walk across the hills – they are constantly alert to the weather, to food and water, to predators, to their families, who knows what else too. ‘The joy in life of these animals … is very great. You may see it in every motion – in the lissom bound of the hare, the playful leap of the rabbit, the song that the larks and the finches must sing; the soft, loving coo of the dove in the hawthorn, the blackbird ruffling its feathers on a rail. The sense of living – the consciousness of seeing and feeling – is manifestly intense in them all … Their appetites seem ever fresh: they rush to the banquet opened by Mother Earth with a gusto that Lucullus never knew,’ writes the Victorian wonderer Richard Jefferies. [Footnote: this is not how we write these days. ‘Joy’ and ‘loving’ are certainly inadmissible; ‘joy in life’ might more soberly become ‘intensity’ (or ‘plenary experience’ or ‘intense haecceity’ if you’re not worried about the prose) but, for all his anthropomorphism, Jefferies, in his rapt absorption, is truer to the life he describes than a scientific monograph.] This vibrant intensity of experience is our birthright too. Why do we see and feel so little?
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