Seeing beauty

SEEING begins for us when an integrated, modulated and physiologically adjusted flow of nerve signals reaches the part of our brain called the visual cortex.

Here, signals from millions of tiny cells in our two eyes are incorporated to become “sight”. The cells in our eyes — “rods” that sift signals from the shadows, and “cones” that fill in the colours — are triggered by electromagnetic energy focused onto them by a flexible lens at the front of each of our eyes. But, even at the level of the retina, our cells suppress or amplify each others’ responses, helping us, for example, to see edges more clearly and switch our attention to things that are in motion.

Almost all of the light we see originates in the broad, sustaining stream of energy that pours from the Sun, taking about eight minutes and 20 seconds to get here. It’s rich mix, ranging from gamma rays, with a wavelength of down to one one-hundredth of a nanometre, to radiowaves with wavelengths of up to 30 kilometres.

It is only a sliver of this rich flood of sustaining energy — the bit with wavelengths of 390 to 750 nanometres (billionths of a metre) — that light up our eyes. It’s our “visible window”. Fire and light-bulbs also emit some of their energy in this little band of wavelengths.

The energy that arrives at our eyes has ricocheted off the things we “see” in different ways and, depending on the wavelengths that are absorbed, scattered or reflected by their surfaces, we experience colours. Some colours are “pure” — produced by a narrow wavelengths band; others depend on several bands overlapping. But they only turn into “colour” inside our heads. Having two eyes helps us judge distances because, even though we only occasionally see double, the views from both eyes get “compared” in the brain. And in our dreams, we “see” without any incoming light at all.

Visual impairment can happen anywhere along the pathways that process the signals but the system is remarkably robust and adaptive. It learns, for example, to stifle a constant, continuous stimulus because it seems to lack meaning. This makes us susceptible to “white-outs”. And we get fooled by illusions.

But our visual system’s capacities to adapt and learn mean that we can train ourselves past most of the problems we run into. If you start wearing lenses that turn your visual world upside down, for example, you’ll “see” things “the right way up” again after a few days. And, when you take the lenses off, things will look inverted at first but, in only a couple of days, they’ll turn “right-side-up” again.

That is because the whole visual system is entangled in various, adaptive ways with all of our other sensory systems, our memories and emotions. And the whole network is managed by an “attentive” system that’s part reflexive and part conscious and deliberate. Just as colours are known to affect things ranging from our “mood” to the way we taste foods, our attitudes and values can manage the dimensions of experience we attend to.

All of our senses interact with each other — sight, sound, smell, motion, balance and orientation, taste, temperature, time, appetite and touch — as well as with our memories and emotions and sense of self so that we move through the world on a sort of personalised, multi-dimensional, sensory magic carpet… we are physiologically “wired” to respond to and live by these meaningful, multi-channel symphonies of discovery.

It’s pure nonsense to say that “beauty’s in the eye of the beholder”: the fossil record amply assures us that beauty was all around the Earth long before anyone evolved to apprehend it: we are physiologically “wired” for aesthetic sensitivity.

And it’s reasonable to assume that aesthetic sensivity has a role to play in sustaining our good health. We can certainly make our experience of life a whole lot better — or worse — by the way we attune ourselves to some of the sensory symphonies that surround us.

We don’t NEED, for example, to create urban public spaces that are chunked too closely about with drab, threatening architecture then fill them with grime and deranging cacophonies of sound that jar our senses and mock our humanity. And they don’t need to stink. “Pollution” is NOT just about toxic chemicals, industrial emissions and carbon dioxide; it’s not just carcinogens in the groundwater. It includes the jarring, judgement-impairing psychic assault of unnecessary ugliness, noise and interminable bright lights.

We don’t NEED the sensory devastation of exploitative entertainment, tedious food, pornography and loud noise — stimuli like these have military uses, for heaven’s sake: as torture techniques. We don’t NEED to drown out as much of our sensory capacity as possible in order to stay reasonably sane in the midst of environments that most wildlife sensibly flees.

The need to level out from stresses like these is a health issue. The symptoms are physiological. But the problem is cultural. And the solution is cultural.

It is as easy as giving beauty free access to our sensory systems, our emotional lives and our memories. You and I… we all are “wired” to receive it. We have learned, or been taught, to suppress it.

We need to be able to see stars occasionally, we need to hear flowing streams and bird song. We need quiet and we need beauty. We need balance.

The beauty of even a single blade of grass or a passing cloud is accessible to us. We just have to take the time… and look.

The smells of a rose, of baking bread, of the sea, of freshly-picked basil, of autumn leaves and lavender and the soil after rain… these can rush through the conduits of our senses to radiate joy within our emotional marrow.

There are musical phrases, voices, the sounds of wind in the trees, of waves on a shore, the calls of birds and coyotes, and rhythms of water on stone or hooves on grass… that charge our energies and clear our minds. And silence will speak to us, if we can find it.

There are textures — the cool smoothness of a wet river stone, the give of creaking sand, the softness of a flower-head, the airy flex of a feather, the crispness of a tree-fresh apple, the moist, warm pliability of summer soil, the tickling brittleness of autumn leaves — that yearn to wrap us up in delight. Windy waves across fields of grain, towering mounds of summer cloud, the flight of a bird, the muttering dance of raindrops,  … countless fleeting experiences are all about us, waiting to catch our glance.

As we make a point of going to places that enchant us, and take the time to let them blossom in our memories, they reach into our moral and intellectual selves and begin smoothing out the tangles bedevilling our present.

As we will change, the world around us will change: the “world”, after all, is a welter of energies, of which we can directly experience only a few slender samplings.

We are wired to choose well… to make our energies into harmonies, and turn our world into wonder.

…and there’s my thought for this Canada’s Thanksgiving Weekend.

See you...

PAPUA - New Guinea — about 463,000 square kilometers of rugged tropical rainforest that stretches from tsunami-prone coastal communities to the steeply rising valleys of the interior — is home to more than 850 languages and 1,000 distinct traditional cultures: a richness of diversity that’s the result of more than 50,000 years of relatively undisturbed habitation.

I have a lovely book from there called Birds of my Kalam Country by an anthropologist, the late Ralph Bulmer, and Ian Saem Majnep, a Kalam native New Guinea Highlander from the remote fastnesses of the Kaironk Valley.

The book outlines the Kalam classification system — a “taxonomy” — for the birds that live in the Kaironk Valley. They’re an intimate part of the lives of the Kalam people, as food, yes, but they also turn up in dreams, wisdom traditions and ritual. And the classification system gathers in all of this so that it adds up to a succinct but graphic account of the birds’ habits and habitat, their forms and colours, their uses, their roles in ritual and their relationships with the Kalam people. The book includes some essential folk tales about birds and people.  It gives the birds meaning.

This Kalam way is very different from the Latin-using taxonomic system devised by the 18th century Swedish biologist Carolus Linnaeus that prevailed in the 1970s when this book was compiled, as well as from the new genes-based “cladistic” system that’s replacing the physiology-based Linnaean system.

But it’s only the Kalam system that would actually help you to survive in the Kaironk Valley.

Language is like that: a kind of wide-ranging taxonomic system with extras. It’s a way of dividing and grouping varieties of experience that enables us to communicate with each other.

Having a language means narrowing our eyes a bit; it’s a trade-off of total perceptual freedom for a bit of company.

So, in the conventions of English, we see objects or people doing stuff to each other: a “subject” acts on an “object”. That’s the basic, core English sentence: things and actions, nouns and verbs. It’s the basis of our ability to tell a story. And that’s the way we tend to go around looking at the world: cause and effect, objects in action.

We are less likely to see everything, for example, as itself an activity (a chair, for example, as several substances — each with its own story — coming together to be a chair for a while), or as patterns of relationship (a tree, for example, being the particular, dynamic interaction of soil, seed, wind, sun and air). We see THINGS: distinct categories of objects and creatures.

We see them act on each other, and react. But we miss a lot of life’s essential dynamism and uncertainty, the unstoppable flow. This makes it easier for “us” to set ourselves “goals” to “achieve” without feeling any great need to reflect, for example, on the way pursuit of the goal will immerse us in new relationships and transform our lives: what might “we” necessarily become by the time we get there. Will “that” goal (as a kind of object) please the person we will have become… or will we need to make a new “goal”? When do we get to be happy again?

Nor do we think very much about the mutabilities of whatever we have determined the “goal” to be. The changing world and society we live in means that pursuing a goal is very much like getting on a bus without knowing where it’s going; we might have seen pictures or been told it’s “good” there, but we have no way of knowing whether we’ll find it “better”, or even “good” for us. Still, our categories give us the courage to get us on the bus. After that, everything’s an adventure.

The trade-off English gives us is that we get to plan our actions in exchange for an understanding of the possibilities. Risk assessments don’t deliver; only life delivers. While we may say, “everything is connected” very few of us live that way, contentedly focused on maturing healthily within the contexts we inhabit, wherever that may lead us. Life is often more about ignoring connections, and our English language helps us to do that.

LANGUAGE is an amazing facility and the distinguishing badge of a culture. It gives us illusions of intimacy with a historical and collective consciousness, one that’s not uniquely our own. It makes us feel part of something greater than ourselves and, without it, we’d feel very much more lonely than we do.

From within his or her own language, a person of any culture can be misled into believing that he or she lives in THE “real” world and, with others, has a secure power over it. In fact, of course, it’s just conceptual scenery, helping to fill out and shape the imaginations of those who live in its midst. But by naming and articulating them, a language makes some ideas easier to hang onto than others —more “real” — and it seems to help steer a culture and its members in some directions more assuredly than in others.

And all of that will be different for someone whose world is embodied in and nurtured by some different language and some other culture.

And, as we grow up, all that we understand ourselves to be and all of our experience tends to become embedded in a culture and a language. Language is what makes it possible to share aspects of our own consciousness with others. And consciousness is the lens through which everything comes to us: our mother’s cautioning look, our baby’s gurgling grin… ugliness, beauty, interest, love, dreams, hope, ideas, inspirations and insights … even the police.

These filters vary from person to person but far more markedly between cultures. Too often, the worlds shaped and inhabited by other cultures do not interest us greatly and so they remain closed to us.

That’s a very great pity because reality is like ice-cream: it comes in more flavours that you can think of. And each flavour adds to our appreciation of ice-cream.

Cultural diversity has long been humanity’s richest and most stimulating treasury of thought and insight but, in the West’s rush to “develop” and “civilise” rather a lot of it has been discarded, deliberately extinguished, wasted: lost forever.

And — because exploring other cultures opens to us to a colours-filled kaleidoscopic view of the universe, a garden of delights, almost a second life — that’s an assault against us all, whether we realise it yet or not.