Ways of Seeing

April in the northern latitudes is a time when people get the hell out of the house. Cabin fever makes even a fifty-degree day an opportunity to parade in the yard with just a t-shirt on.

Reading a book outside is about the most perfect of our pastimes. We find it in literature, we find it in history. Jane Austen regularly showed her heroines setting by a stream or pond, reading a novel or a book of poetry. And who among we readers can forget Wordsworth or Keats writing about reading (and writing) in the gardens and near the shore of their home-county lake.

This month, Ways of Seeing reviews three books that are either based on being out of doors or perfect reads to do in a chair or at the park, soaking up the sun as Spring gives us the best days of the years.

No Man’s Lands takes us on an epic journey, retracing of the path by which Odysseus made his way home—by windblown seas, held captive by nymphs for years, attacked and scratched out of deadly situations by his wits—to Ithaca. Author Scott Huler undertook this journey—done in six months, while his wife was nearing the delivery of their first child—on his own dare, after being induced to finally read The Odyssey, a book he had only recently proclaimed he would never read. Huler has a purpose: to stand in the places where Odysseus stood on each of the fourteen spots around the Mediterranean which he washed up on his ten-year passage home.

Detective Story brings for the first time to the English language Imre Kertész’s existential story of false redemption, false hope, and state-sponsored retribution. This Hungarian writer survived a death sentence in Nazi concentration camps, and made his oeuvre a reflection of life in and under totalitarian regimes. Yet this story takes place in an unnamed Latin American country, in a contemporary setting, revealing that government does not change from generation to generation unless the people take control.

Refresh Refresh collects ten short stories focused on the small town life of blue collar Oregonian men and young men. Benjamin Percy teaches writing in Wisconsin, but his mind seems never to have left Oregon — as well that it should not, given the plethora of emotions, events, memories, and problems his home state has yielded for his fecund imagination and close inspection. The stories are at once brilliantly conceived and simple in their effective rendering of a life most of us know, on some level.

Tags: Featured Reviews, Seeing in Progress by mark
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This month features Spanish author Javier Marías, whose novel Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me was translated into English in 2001. I had never read Marías before, so the book is brand new to me. I’m going out to the bookshop this week to buy all his other works that have been translated. I only wish I could read Spanish, I think the beauty of his sentences would be that much more powerful.

The second feature is a long-forgotten collection of some great conversations. This 1948 gem is the product of deep research by a real bibliophile, though editor Louis Biancolli was a music critic by profession. In The Book of Great Conversations, you’ll read Goethe being questioned about love, Napoleon wondering aloud how he can escape recapture after Waterloo, Stalin debating communism with H.G. Wells, and Socrates berating his friends and students for crying after he drinks from a cup of hemlock. Not to worry: many copies of this book are available through the internet’s wonderfully long arms at nationwide used book stores.

Tags: Featured Reviews, Seeing in Progress by mark
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Dr. Samuel Johnson once explained to James Boswell his mind on conversation:

There must, in the first place, be knowledge, there must be materials; in the second place, there must be a command of words; in the third place, there must be imagination, to place things in such views as they are not commonly seen in; and in the fourth place, there must be presence of mind, and a resolution that is not to be overcome by failures; this last is an essential requisite; for want of it many people do not excel in conversation.

As much as we cannot intellectualize all subjects, we do find a need to challenge our friends, acquaintances, and ourselves. We are social animals, and the need for interaction demands the need for conversation. “Never is there more a need for reasonable conversation than in today’s society, wherever people live.” Do you know where this quote comes from? It is familiar, isn’t it? It comes from no one famous, in fact, because I just wrote it. Yet we have all heard something like it spoken or written somewhere. And, it cannot be more wrong.

Today is no more important, and likely less so, than the dark days of WWII; the blighted years of politically and socially banned books (pick your favorite century); 1,200 years of Catholic Inquisition combating “heresy”; or all of history’s oppression of women. There has been, historically, a distinct lack of social conversation available to people where it could affect change. Much of the “good” conversation reserved itself inside senatorial houses, philosopher’s academies, monarchical courts, and private chambers of the social elite.

Since the advent of the printing press, and, later, parliamentary and democratic societies, people worked at making conversation a vital structure of society’s machinery. Perhaps governments failed too often at debate and compromise, but at least educated people demonstrated ample enthusiasm to conversation’s benefits.

In Parisian parlors of the 17th and 18th centuries, conversation came into its own. A whole coterie of parlor groups met, sometimes in secret, to discuss issues of the day, including politics, male-female relationships, sex (without the potty talk), and art of all kinds. For a time, most of those who met were women (of high means). The French were known already for their manners, their dress, their codes of honor (among both sexes). The women, it has been argue (The Age of Conversation) took it upon themselves to improve society (and their own positions within) by improving the manners and conversation of the French males. Success, on that smallish level, was great. Many of these parlor members kept diaries, recording conversations after a night of talk. Some have been published, but either have not been translated into English, or wallow away somewhere in a long-since out-of-print copy on a library shelf.

Over in England, in the middle half of the 18th century, Dr. Samuel Johnson had elevated conversation to somewhat of an art form. He had become famous for his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), and for writing twice-weekly essays under the title The Rambler. What Johnson might have lacked in compromise, he made up for in breadth of subjects he was willing and able to discuss. He particularly liked questions of liberty, and arguing against changing one’s religion. Regardless of subject matter, Johnson demanded people bring knowledge to a conversation. Force of character and demonstrative positioning meant nothing if an argument did not come with humanist logic.

I ran across a used book a few years ago, a real gem. The Book of Great Conversations collects a few dozen “recorded talk” between some famous people throughout history: Socrates, Michelangelo, Goethe, Napoleon. People from all walks of life, both powerful and sublime. Its pub date is 1948. Though long out of print, you can still find copies online for cheap. This book is not an oddity, but a chronicle, and notebook, of how people spoke, what arguments they used, how they got on with or pissed off people, their words, and their simple motivations for seeking out people with whom they could talk.

Today’s high-speed media environment could learn a lot from Dr. Johnson. The term “news cycle” has broken any attempt at sustained speech, or conversation. Sure, we have political and social talk shows presented through the media, but too often they flounder in the sea of entertainment channels. And the American mind suffers from this.

While “24” and “American Idol” achieve high viewer ratings that turn advertising into gold dust, can we say they do something for conversation? Perhaps. And what is the difference between those entertainment programs and “60 Minutes” newsmagazine to the initiate of conversation? The tense psycho-political drama brings up important issues, just as long as people see it as drama and not reality. An amateur-hour program can induce people to talk about what vocal art is … and is not. Exploring hot news topics or celebrity can engage social discussion or reminiscences. But do they in fact do this? If one looks at blogs, we find 4-5 sentence “posts” that often quote other sources (some spurious), or else link to an article written by—surprise!—a professional with a byline at a national newspaper or magazine. These posts are likely followed by shorter comments. Both resemble a nature that is difficult to define as conversation. Repetitive banter may more aptly describe their character.

If there is yet conversation among us, and I think there is, it should get into the daily diet of all thinking people. I’m not talking about mulling the “dialogues” of Larry King, Oprah, or Katie Couric. I’m suggesting that people, if they are not doing so, get into the habit of conversing on subjects that come up in their minds—varied subjects—and not necessarily those in the news. What thing of beauty have you seen today? How can you talk about a book you are reading as art? Engagement with society is not a spectator sport, but something, I think, of intrinsic importance to our individual lives.

Tags: Conversation, Literature, Seeing in Progress by mark
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Composition in photograph has been on my mind. What’s going to be in this shot? At which angle will I get my best view at the scene? Who can be inside the frame? What should be left out? Some say digital photography lets composition take a back seat when the photographer is out shooting, because she can take so many more photos and “see what’s there” later. “Crop” seems to be the buzzword of digital manipulation. I think this notion travels contrary to the artistic vision, however. I think this way because I’ve tried many times the machine-gun “shooting” technique and have seldom found inspiring compositions within the set.

To compare those rapid-fire photos with what I remembered of the place, and scene, left me wanting: “I should have got that sign in”; “This would be great if I had not cut that person in half”; “The reflection off the water would have been perfect if I had just waited!” I shoot often for travel writing gigs, but am constantly on the prowl for dramatic “art” shots—of people, architecture, wildlife, cityscapes. Travel seldom allows me to go back the next day to reset the shot that I missed. In retrospect, I know this to be true: all of my best shots have come after I’ve consciously set the shot by understanding what is in the frame and how best I can capture my intentions of its use.

There are no shortcuts to good photography, or any art. I find now that I want to study the scene (and always be prepared to start shooting) before taking shots. Perhaps this comes from my writing background. I need to understand before writing what is involved in a scene, who is there, why they are there, what objects occupy the place, and how everything there “looks” and “sounds” to the reader. I have brought those sensibilities to museum galleries to see how masters have built a painting, constructed a sculpture … and to see how I might bring those techniques into my writing.

The transference between one art form technique to another can be an exhilarating experience, and inspirational. Ezra Pound taught this to Ernest Hemingway when he walked him through the Louvre. Mozart set operatic music to great poetry. Look at Matthew Brady’s American Civil War photographs. These are seldom mere “war is hell” pictures. They develop what I like to call the beauty of the grotesque, something found in every classical art form.

A photograph likewise tells so much more when you want it to do so, and when you use techniques from all our sensory capabilities. We are visual creatures, firstly, but we listen, we touch, we taste, we feel movement. A snow-covered mountaintop is beautiful, but it is just a beautiful mountaintop; on a windy day you can capture a stream of white blowing from the cornice, and then you create for the viewer motion, and sound … and drama. A bicyclist in a park is all movement, but let your shutter speed leave a blur in the wheel, or run off the back of rider, and you’ve demanded from the viewer his understanding of speed’s dimension to the visual frame, and perhaps create a story in the composition.

Our “why?” of art is individual as fingerprints or shades in a sketch. How we come from the why to the how that makes art beautiful and dynamic instead of turgid and stale is the state of our understanding of the process of art. Rembrandt van Rijn created thousands of etchings, but not one came from magic. He studied his subjects, understood his environment, and knew how to tell a story through simple, beautiful images.

Tags: Photography, Seeing in Progress, Visual Arts by mark
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I often write & talk about metaphorical ways of seeing. Ostensibly metaphor includes one’s senses, but I don’t often focus on the senses. Actually, those very senses help we writers create metaphor: smell, taste, heard sounds, the visual antidote to basic life—these all generate associations that get us to use one thing to describe another.

Do any of us focus on our senses who have use of each? Perhaps not often, anyway. We take for granted their at-the-ready use-ness they provide. I certainly do too often, as I yet have full use of each. This is not the case for the blind, deaf, and I suppose mute … even those mildly so. I can’t comment on their experiences, only my subtle renditions of those afflictions when I walk around in the dark, or my ear gets plugged with water, and perhaps also when I’m set speechless at the sight of something that boggles the mind.

When I go to sleep each night, I place a glass of water on a side table for that middle-of-the-night thirst that attacks. I turn off the lights, and there disappears one sense. Or does it fully disappear? Ray Charles spoke of remembering colors, mostly, before he went blind at age four or five. He told also how his boyhood home had a wood chopping block, a washtub in the yard, and pine trees. These are memories, of course, but they are also seeing. Seeing in the mind, a way we recall or remember the past, but also how we can invent story as well. In fact, without seeing in the mind, we often could not perform everyday tasks.

That glass of water on my night stand. In the middle of the night, with darkness around me, I reach out to grasp the glass, but not sure of distance, I have to feel for the night stand edge, and in that movement, I see in my mind its shape, approximate distance from my already reaching hand, and where on its surface I placed the glass. The memory of putting that glass on the table before sleep and turning out the light was enough, I suppose, to link the thought with the action.

This seems almost too obvious to care about, but think of a seeing in the mind act you perform often, even daily. Let’s stay with the idea of a darkened room. With the lights off, you need to get across the room, maneuver through furniture, find a light switch or doorknob, just to get to the bathroom, or the refrigerator. So you make your way through the room, knowing somewhat where your couch is in relation to your body, how many steps to the end of the couch, the turn through the space between couch and table, then across a stretch of carpet or floor (onto a rug?), close now to the light switch, feel the wall at the edge, the correct height, and click, you’ve got lighted vision again. Easy, right? Sure.

Now think about that one time where you needed to walk in the dark, but through a completely unfamiliar room. You step like a baby, your arms stretched out, feeling, groping for a chair or sofa back, something that’s familiar in shape anyway; you knock things over, stub a toe, walk into the wall, even. Here lie the differences between seeing in the mind without promptings or memory, and what we experience every day in our own homes.

Most people call this, I guess, “visualization.” What does that really mean, though? “I ‘visualized’ it.” Huh? No. We say “I see” when someone is explaining an event, telling a story, or working through a thought. Seeing is the word; seeing in the mind the concept behind the words. This phrase is at our fingertips, and it was used in the methodology within the writing program at Columbia College Chicago, where I earned my MFA and also taught for several years. It is the way writers write, painters paint, and even how photographers “see” a shot (or set it up in their minds) before finding the moment to release the shutter. Perhaps, even, seeing in the mind is one way musicians put together a tune. Well…can they only hear the notes in their heads? Guitarists, pianists, flutists, violinists, all must place their fingers on the instrument before anything auditory happens.

Perhaps then, seeing in the mind is our way to structure the world. Our first world, of course, is our minds. All those thoughts bring so many sights that we have to somehow organize them, even as one quickly jumps (or melds) into another.

Memory. Seeing. Speech. Aroma. Associative elements. Metaphor. They play integral roles in many the creative minds’ lives. Philosophers have spoken about one from another. And as a last thought, I’d like to say something to the legacy of that famous philosopher who asked the question, “When I leave a room where a chair sits, is that chair still in the room?” Here’s my answer: If you leave the room, you no longer see the chair, and therefore cannot prove that the chair exists. Well then, if you turn out the lights, you have just as much ability to question the chair’s existence. So turn out the lights, walk across the room, and when you kick that chair and fracture a toe, your scream will tell you the truth about that chair’s existence.

Tags: Literature, Seeing in Progress, Visual Arts by mark
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