by Guy Claxton
Returning home from a day in the country, people commonly feel calmer, more whole, more balanced. We may not have understood anything, not arrived at any insights or answers, yet we may feel somehow transformed, as if something healing or important has been intimated, but not revealed. In some moods it is possible to gain glimpses of what seems to be knowledge or truth of a sort – of a rather deep sort, perhaps – which is nor an answer to a consciously held question; and which cannot be articulated clearly, literally, without losing precisely that quality which seems to make it most valuable. There is a kind of knowing which is essentially indirect, sideways, allusive and symbolic; which hints and evokes, touches and moves, in ways that resist explication. And it is accessed not through earnest manipulation of abstraction, but through leisurely contemplation of the particular.
When we lose ourselves in the present, we do just that: lose our selves. As the linguist and philosopher Ernst Cassirer put it, the mind ‘comes to rest in the immediate experience; the sensible present is so great that everything else dwindles before it. For a person whose apprehension is under the spell of this attitude, the immediate context commands his interest so completely that nothing else can exist beside and apart from it. The ego is spending all its energy in this single object, lives in it, loses itself in it.’13 One slips away from self-concern and preoccupation into the sheer presence of the thing, the scene, the sound itself, until, as Keats said:
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity . . .
The ego, or the ‘self’, is essentially a network of preoccupations: a set of priorities that must be attended to in the interests of our survival, our wellbeing, or even our comfort. When the ego is in control of the mind, we act, perceive and think as if a wide variety of things – reputation, status, style, knowledgeability – mattered vitally, and as if their antitheses – unpopularity, ignorance and so on – constituted dire threats. When we are lost in the present, these conditioned longings fall away, and anxious striving may be replaced by a refreshing sense of peaceful belonging. Unskewed by hope or fear, perception is free simply to register what is there. As Hermann Hesse wrote in his essay ‘Concerning the soul’ in 1917: ‘The eye of desire dirties and distorts. Only when we desire nothing, only when our gaze becomes pure contemplation, does the soul of things (which is beauty) open itself to us.’
By its very nature, this more dispassionate, yet more intimate, way of knowing cannot be brought about by an effort of will. It arises, if it does at all, spontaneously. The experience is like that of seeing the three-dimensional form in a ‘Magic Eye’ image. If you look intently at such an image with the normal high-focus gaze, scanning it for its ‘meaning’, all you will see, for as long as you look, is a flat field of squiggly shapes. You see plenty of detail, but it does not cohere. However, if you give up ‘trying to see what’s there’, relax your eyes so that they gaze softly through the image, and stay for a while in this state of patient incomprehension, then the details begin to dissolve and melt into one another, and a new kind of seeing spontaneously emerges, one which reveals the ‘hidden depths’ in the picture. There is no doubt when this revelation has occurred: it has a visceral impact which cannot be forced or feigned – just as the ‘getting’ of a joke is a spontaneous, bodily occurrence that cannot be engineered. Someone who ‘thinks’ they see the image, like someone who ‘understands’ a joke, simply has not got it.
Though poetic sensibility cannot be commanded, it can, as with the three-dimensional visual image, be encouraged. One can make oneself prone to it by cultivating the ability to wait – to remain attentive in the face of incomprehension – which Keats famously referred to as ‘negative capability’: ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ To wait in this way requires a kind of inner security; the confidence that one may lose clarity and control without losing one’s self. Keats’s description of negative capability came in a letter to his brothers, following an evening spent in discussion with his friend Charles Dilke – a man who, as Keats put it, could not ‘feel he had a personal identity unless he had made up his mind about everything’; and who would ‘never come at a truth so long as he lives; because he is always trying at it’.14
The domination of culture and education by d-mode seems to have created a whole society of Charles Dilkes: to have estranged people from a way of knowing that is, perhaps, part of their cognitive and aesthetic birthright. It certainly appears as if children may have more ready access to poetic sensibility than adults. Young children have been found to be very ‘poetic’ in their way of knowing in at least one respect: they are much better than older children and adults at producing and using metaphors. Psychologists Howard Gardner and Ellen Winner have found that three- and four-year-old children produce many more appropriate metaphors for a situation than do seven- and eleven-year-olds, and all children are much more fluent users and creators of spontaneous metaphor than college students.15 And Wordsworth, in his ‘Ode to Immortality’, famously bemoans the loss of his childhood ways of knowing.
There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore; –
Turn whereso’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
It may well have been the child’s ability to be lost in the present that prompted the following exchange:
‘Come along!’ the nurse said to Félicité de la Mennais, eight years old, ‘you have looked long enough at those waves and everyone is going away’. The answer: ‘ils regardent ce que je regarde, mais ils ne voient pas ce que je vois’, was no brag, but merely a plea to stay on.16
Though it is often lost by the time one reaches adulthood, the knack of absorption can be recaptured. One can cultivate the requisite attitude of receptivity, of allowing oneself to become quietly immersed in things – and then to wait and see. As Jacques Maritain, author of the monumental Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, has said of ‘poetic intuition’:
It cannot be improved in itself; it demands only to be listened to. But the poet can make himself better prepared for or available to it by removing obstacles and noise. He can guard and protect it, and thus foster the spontaneous progress of its strength and purity in him. He can educate himself to it by never betraying it.17
Many writers and artists have commented on the quality of knowing that emerges from patient absorption. Kafka, in his ‘Reflections’, says: ‘You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.’18 T. S. Eliot in ‘East Coker’ enjoins us to ‘be still, and wait without hope/for hope would be hope for the wrong thing’.19 Martin Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking puts it very clearly.
Normally when we wait we wait for something which interests us, or can provide us with what we want. When we wait in this human way, waiting involves our desires, goals and needs. But waiting need not be so definitely coloured by our nature. There is a sense in which we can wait without knowing for what we wait. We may wait, in this sense, without waiting for anything; for anything, that is, which could be grasped and expressed in subjective human terms. In this sense we simply wait, and waiting may come to have a reference beyond [ourselves].20
Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, has this advice for his self-appointed poetic apprentice:
If you hold to Nature, to the simplicity that is in her, to the small detail that scarcely one man sees, which can so unexpectedly grow into something great and boundless; if you have this love for insignificant things and seek, simp
ly as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems to be poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the understanding, which lags wondering behind, but in your innermost consciousness, wakefulness and knowing.21
Poetic sensibility is available to everyone. It is not the special preserve of Poets with a capital P: people who deliberately create those forms of words called ‘poems’. To be a Poet it is necessary to see ‘poetically’: necessary, but not sufficient. In addition, the Poet must be able to use language in such a way that the reader of the poem is invited not just into the Poet’s world, but into the same mental mode, the same slow, poetic way of knowing, that gave rise to the poem in the first place. When we look at things in their own right, without referring them immediately to our own self-interest – which is what the poet invites us to do – then we are in a mode of sensing, knowing and learning that can reveal to us aspects of the world that lie outside the perimeter of our intentions and desires. In fact it can give us self-knowledge by situating our concerns within a wider context that is normally obscured. By allowing the poem to suck us in, we are drawn into a mode of perception that is situated upstream of our usual habits of conceptualization and self-reference. Simultaneously we know the world, and we know ourselves, differently. A poem, viewed thus, is a device for inducing a specific kind of sensibility in the reader. In Paul Valéry’s terms, a poem is ‘a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words’.
The Poet achieves her effect by doing two things at once. She paints a picture that invites our interest, our engagement, and our identification. And she does this with language that hampers our habitual ways of construing. We cannot see through our own system of categories and concerns without grossly violating the poet’s words and thus we hang motionless for a moment in the presence of something made strange and new. George Whalley, writing about the ‘teaching’ of poetry in school, emphasises the vital necessity of ‘experiencing’ the poem, by which he means ‘paying attention to it as though it were not primarily a mental abstraction, but as though it were designed to be grasped directly by the senses, inviting us to function in the perceptual mode’.22 If we present a poem, especially to young minds, as something to be ‘interpreted’ and ‘explained’, as a kind of mental problem to be solved, like an extended crossword puzzle, we have missed the point. Reading poetry is an exercise in ‘holding cognitive activity in the perceptual mode’. One must not search for meaning, but marinate oneself in the poem, so to speak, and let meaning come. If one does not treat the poem respectfully, as if it had a life and an integrity of its own, one ends up constructing a surrogate poem as a plausible substitute for the real one: one that disconcerts you less, and merely gives you back your own familiar code of conduct and comprehension.
A poem that is grasped intellectually generates a certain cerebral satisfaction. But a poem with which one is really engaged creates a bodily frisson of undisclosed import; a visceral and aesthetic response, and not just a mental one. Just as with the process of focusing, the body feels something that the mind may not understand. A. E. Housman illustrates the physicality of poetry, as we might expect, with power and humour:
Poetry indeed seems to me more physical than intellectual. A year or two ago I received from America, in common with others, a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier could define a rat, but that I thought we both recognise the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us . . . Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine. There is another which consists in a constriction of the throat, and a precipitation of water to the eyes. And there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keat’s last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, ‘everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.’23
Benedetto Croce, writing in the early years of this century, attempts in his Aesthetic to make the response in terms of beauty the linchpin of his approach to intuition.24 For Croce, beauty is not a property of objects or of nature, but of an intuitive response. For the viewer of a painting or a sculpture or a dance, as much as for the reader of a poem, the aesthetic response is the felt manifestation of a certain way of seeing, or knowing, which that object has succeeded in inducing. That which is seen just as it is, fully attended to, not subsumed by categories or reduced to labels, is beautiful. One must learn to recognise, tolerate, enjoy and eventually value this intrinsic ambiguity and impenetrability; in Louis MacNeice’s phrase, ‘the drunkenness of things being various’.25 Poetic sensibility and intuition are richer, fuller and subtler than everyday language. There are forms of knowledge that defy articulation. Impressions speak and resonate as vibrant wholes, undismembered. In this way of knowing, beauty, truth and ineffability come together. Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, for example, adumbrating some of the natural ‘attractors’ of the poetic mode of mind, suggests that:
Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belaboured by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should have missed, or are about to say something: this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.26 (Emphasis added)
Exquisite though the poetic way of knowing may be, we should not be seduced into desiring it as a permanent replacement for mundane reason. It remains one mental mode among many, and to be trapped in the poetic mode would be as disastrous as to be trapped in d-mode. Neurologist Oliver Sacks, in The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, recounts the moving story of one of his patients who was in just this position.27 Rebecca, at nineteen, was unable to find her way around the block, could not confidently use a key to open a door and sometimes put her clothes on back to front. She had difficulty understanding straightforward sentences and instructions and could not perform the simplest calculations. Yet she loved stories and especially poetry, and seemed to have little difficulty following the metaphors and symbols of even quite complex poems. ‘The language of feeling, of the concrete, of image and symbol formed a world she loved and, to a remarkable extent, could enter.’ She performed appallingly on standard neurological tests, which are, as Sacks perceptively notes, specifically designed to deconstruct the whole person into a stack of ‘abilities’. And just because of this, the tests gave no inkling of ‘her ability to perceive the real world – the world of nature, and perhaps of the imagination – as a coherent, intelligible, poetic whole’. In the domain of conscious, deliberate intelligence she was severely handicapped. In the pre-conceptual, unreflective world, she was healthy, happy and competent.
At first, Sacks suggested she should attend classes to try to improve some of her basic ‘skills’, but they were of no use as they inevitably fragmented her. As Rebecca herself said: ‘They do nothing for me. They do nothing to bring me together . . . I’m like a sort of living carpet. I need a pattern, a design, like you have on that carpet. I come apart, I unravel, unless there’s a design.’ And indeed, when she was spontaneously absorbed in an activity that engaged all of her, she was a different person. She was moved from the ‘remedial classes’ to a theatre workshop – which she loved and where she blossomed. She became composed, complete, and played her roles with poise, sensitivity and style. Sacks concludes his account: ‘Now, if one sees Rebecca on stage, for theatre soon became her life, one would never even guess that she was mentally defective.’ Lost in the particular, Rebecca became fluent and complete. In the world of the abstract, she was shattered and lost.
Skimping on perception runs two risks. Not only may one overlook aspects of the inner and outer world that are informative or even inspiring; one may inadvertently stir into perception as it develops assumptions and beliefs that are not justified or required. What is fin
ally served up to consciousness may be simultaneously impoverished and elaborated, even adulterated. The mind in a hurry tends to see what it expects to see, or wants to see, or what it usually sees. One of the problems with the name ‘Guy’ is that I am forever reacting to calls that were not meant for me. People shouting ‘Hi!’ or ‘Bye!’ in crowded streets are likely to find me looking at them expectantly – before I detect and correct my perceptual mistake. Leaping to conclusions in this way is a gamble. By setting the threshold for the recognition of my name on a hair trigger, I make sure I react quickly – but I also make a lot of ‘false positive’ errors. By assuming that what usually happens is what did happen, I save processing time, but at the cost of misdiagnosing the situation when it is unusual. The fourth manner of paying attention which I want to describe in this chapter is a way of seeing through one’s own perceptual assumptions. It is called mindfulness.
The extent to which the world-as-perceived is a mirror of our preconceptions and our preoccupations (and therefore the extent to which our subsequent thoughts, feelings and reactions are assimilated by these assumptions) is easy to underestimate. It takes an effort to see what is happening, because our beliefs are dissolved in the very organs which we use to sense. Take, as a trivial example, saliva. Be aware, for a moment, of the saliva in your mouth. Collect a little and roll it around. Feel how it lubricates your tongue as it slides over your teeth. Now get a clean glass, spit some of this saliva into it – and drink it. Notice how your perception of, and attitude towards, the same substance has miraculously changed. What was ‘clean’ and ‘natural’ has, through its brief excursion beyond the body, turned into something ‘dirty’ and ‘distasteful’. The spit has not changed; only the interpretation.
