There isn’t a pure notion — of a flower, of a mountain, of an individual. In all the things we have a look at, we see partly a mirrored image of ourselves — a projection of an inside mannequin looking for to approximate the reality. If we’re acutely 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 a purpose to understand what is really there. There’s each sorrow and comfort in understanding that though we are able to solely ever glimpse elements of the totality past us, we are able to preserve making an attempt to see extra clearly with a purpose to love extra deeply.
I’m reminded of a passage from The Living Mountain (public library) — that uncommon masterpiece of attention 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 depend upon one’s place, bodily as a lot as psychic. She writes:
A scatter of white flowers in grass, checked out by way of half-closed eyes, blaze out with a pointy readability as if they’d truly risen up out of their background. Such illusions, relying on how the attention is positioned and used, drive dwelling the reality that our ordinary imaginative and prescient of issues will not be essentially proper: it’s only one in every 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 developed to guard us from — that “intentional, unapologetic discriminator,” choosing a handful of elements out of the totality with a purpose to assemble the projected picture.
And not using a acutely 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 a purpose to see extra clearly:
How can I quantity the worlds to which the attention provides 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 simply a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as greater than jag and pinnacle — as magnificence… A sure sort 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 subject is a dwelling spirit, a glow within the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is useless. It’s one thing snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us constantly and could be held off by steady inventive act. So, merely to look on something, reminiscent of 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 totally understanding one other, writing to the difficult 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 stands out as the supreme “steady inventive act,” the good triumph of notion over projection.
Complement with Oliver Sacks on the necessity of our illusions and Iain McGilchrist on how we render reality with attention as an instrument of love, then revisit the younger Charles Darwin’s encounter with God in the mountains and the surrealist French poet and thinker René Daumal on the mountain and the meaning of life.
