The Art of Seeing Things
"Do they see anything they did not come out to see?" John Burroughs wonders about those who discourse pleasantly about birds and flowers. He posits that an increased awareness and willingness to see the natural world-curiosity inspired by love-leads one to perceive subtleties missed by inferior expectations. He attests that anyone might develop extraordinary sensibilities by blending "contemplation and absorption" with "investigation and classification." The book of nature is a palimpsest so blotted with marginalia that it takes childlike dreaming or open-hearted determination to search for revelations suppressed by its mottled complexity.
Striving toward heightened perception reveals a world of pensive rewards and experiences enriched by enchantment and clarity. But there's something troublesome in the line of thinking as Burroughs conceived it in 1908 and as it manifests today: humans are divorced from nature-we are exempt from purpose in an ecosystem, and must venture out to the untamed wilderness to enjoy it. The key thing is it, nature, no matter how much we love it and are able to decipher the hieroglyphics in its book, it is still an impersonal it. Let me explain.
We are encouraged by Burroughs and his contemplative successors to immerse oneself in unsought delights, harvest minutia for reflective appreciation, but do so by leaving the civilized world of normalcy to confront details and psychically conquer an unfamiliar realm where we might enter/intrude/exploit at our leisure, with no concern of consequence. We compartmentalize our understanding into me/us and it/them.
The reason: our culture's conviction in entitlement for resources. We cannot take something from ourselves-we must take it from others, far enough removed that we don't sense a relationship to feel the sting of loss. We take forests from squirrels, no matter how attuned we are to the way in which their paws are positioned as they climb trees. We take streams from salamanders by introducing effluents, and so on. Beyond citing a demonstrative litany of non-human things claimed for or by our consumption, we take the lives and well-being of humans across the globe who manufacture our products or who are participants or bystanders in imperialistic wars. (When we take the lives of our own, we engrave their names on monuments and salute their sacrifices for our way of life on Memorial Day. Or we blame heart disease or cancer and chalk our losses up to bad luck, not poor nutrition resulting from corporate food production or carcinogens snowballing up the food chain or volatile organic compounds abrading and offgassing from our disposable commodities.)
In making the distinction between me/us and it/them, we perceive distance based on a lack of relationship. The art of seeing things begins with absorption, and it starts in our rectilinear dwellings and workplaces; the stretching skin of painted drywall and the cement foundations on which their skeletons of lumber rest; the glass windows with wooden, steel, and vinyl sashes; the aluminum gutters and flashing and asphalt shingles; the plastic insulation on our copper and aluminum electrical wiring; the roads we travel with accompanying power lines skipping along every street and the ecosystems displaced by our paved communities-details so commonplace we accept them without reservation, bold errata in the book of nature that fortifies our thinking that we are separate from book itself, and might, with some practice, realize hitherto unperceived truths about a world we imagine so distant that it no longer feels like home.
Striving toward heightened perception reveals a world of pensive rewards and experiences enriched by enchantment and clarity. But there's something troublesome in the line of thinking as Burroughs conceived it in 1908 and as it manifests today: humans are divorced from nature-we are exempt from purpose in an ecosystem, and must venture out to the untamed wilderness to enjoy it. The key thing is it, nature, no matter how much we love it and are able to decipher the hieroglyphics in its book, it is still an impersonal it. Let me explain.
We are encouraged by Burroughs and his contemplative successors to immerse oneself in unsought delights, harvest minutia for reflective appreciation, but do so by leaving the civilized world of normalcy to confront details and psychically conquer an unfamiliar realm where we might enter/intrude/exploit at our leisure, with no concern of consequence. We compartmentalize our understanding into me/us and it/them.
The reason: our culture's conviction in entitlement for resources. We cannot take something from ourselves-we must take it from others, far enough removed that we don't sense a relationship to feel the sting of loss. We take forests from squirrels, no matter how attuned we are to the way in which their paws are positioned as they climb trees. We take streams from salamanders by introducing effluents, and so on. Beyond citing a demonstrative litany of non-human things claimed for or by our consumption, we take the lives and well-being of humans across the globe who manufacture our products or who are participants or bystanders in imperialistic wars. (When we take the lives of our own, we engrave their names on monuments and salute their sacrifices for our way of life on Memorial Day. Or we blame heart disease or cancer and chalk our losses up to bad luck, not poor nutrition resulting from corporate food production or carcinogens snowballing up the food chain or volatile organic compounds abrading and offgassing from our disposable commodities.)
In making the distinction between me/us and it/them, we perceive distance based on a lack of relationship. The art of seeing things begins with absorption, and it starts in our rectilinear dwellings and workplaces; the stretching skin of painted drywall and the cement foundations on which their skeletons of lumber rest; the glass windows with wooden, steel, and vinyl sashes; the aluminum gutters and flashing and asphalt shingles; the plastic insulation on our copper and aluminum electrical wiring; the roads we travel with accompanying power lines skipping along every street and the ecosystems displaced by our paved communities-details so commonplace we accept them without reservation, bold errata in the book of nature that fortifies our thinking that we are separate from book itself, and might, with some practice, realize hitherto unperceived truths about a world we imagine so distant that it no longer feels like home.