Seeing the World in Two Ways

"At one time I was interested in birdwatching, and I noticed that when I saw a bird for the first time I couldn't really see it, because I had no formal arrangement, no sense of pattern, for it.  I couldn't remember it clearly, either.  But once I identified the bird, the drawings in bird books and my own sense of order arranged the image and made it clearer to me, and I never forgot it.  From then on I could see the bird in two ways-- as the fresh, unpatterned vision and the patterned one.  Well, seeing death nearby is very like the first way of seeing."

Harold Brodkey , This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

a quote from a book I did not read which came to me via

Johnathan Rosen's The Life of the Skies 

 

This idea of seeing the bird in two ways has been powerful for me as I extrapolate it out into my life. For me, it is the idea of seeing the actual physical bird, it's beautiful feathers, grace of movement, and its way of life in front of you. It is seeing this while knowing the bird's life history and how it's tied to the world around it, understanding the reasons for its behavior, and seeing the underlying qualities that make it what it is. It means knowing something as much as we are able to both in heart and mind. In this way we can understand it as another form of life in the world and thereby understand something of ourselves and our connection to the wilderness.

We can expand this idea out into the wider world as well. Seeing this little snowflower we can know that its brilliant inflorescence belies not only a larger life under the soil but also the fungus that it leeches from and the root systems that live in tandem with that fungus, together holding and keeping healthy the soil. Daydreaming to the patterns in the clouds, we can understand them as the patterns of ice crystals shaped by winds high above us-- a seeming randomness out of which comes such diverse beauty. As we look at a hawk and it looks back we can imagine how it sees us with its acute and  tetrachromatic vision.  We can make sure to keep the heart asking as many questions as the mind. What icy wind has blown across this mountain face, what cool rivulets and rushing streams, what beating sun and slow trembling of earth?

In thinking of how trees grow and the workings of apical buds, distance between limbs, proximity of trees and so on, we can know something of the life of individual trees. We may not be able to tell what cracked this crown or limb, when this gall was formed, how long since lightning struck this tree but we can see them in a similar way to how we see the faces of others. A face wrinkled with lines from laughter and joy, kind eyes with dark circles around them, smiles with an undercurrent of sadness, old scars and twinkling eyes. When we know a person's life, these things become visual cues that connect our knowledge with our emotions, that prompt us to sympathy and empathy. This is how understanding leads us to kindness, compassion and love. To understand at least part of what something is in the world must be the only way towards a deep love for it whether we're talking about a person or a creature, or the land itself. I can look at your face and say that it's beautiful as easily as taking a snap shot at a vista point around a beautiful bay. But, when I know what your life has been and I have shared some of it with you, then I am able to see these things in your face-- what the weather and the world have done to you and for you, where you were born, the places where you were broken down and the happiness and peace you knew in your calm weather. With humans and pets we call this friendship, love, kinship, family and a thousand things besides. With the wilderness we are more subdued and call it knowing Natural History, going for a walk, and keeping our eyes well open. 

Blue

Steller's Jay- Cyanocitta stelleri

       At Explore Tahoe, I am currently working on some sheets to complement a childrens' “Discovery Table” and both add some dimension to the information already given and give my coworkers and I some interpretive tools to help reach out to visitors. In researching, I came across two facts which I paired with the above photo and connected like this:

 “Is this Bird Blue?

 While a Steller’s Jay does have a beautiful blue coloring, the blue is not actually a pigment or natural color of its feathers. If you were to hold one of its feathers up in front of a bright light, it would actually have more of a brown color. This is because the blue is a “structural color” meaning that it’s caused by microscopic patterns in the feather’s physical shape. These tiny shapes help to absorb all but the most easily scattered, low-wavelength light which happen to be blue and violet. These two colors are then reflected back out. Our eyes are much more sensitive to blue than violet, so the Jay appears blue to us!

This is similar to the reason why Lake Tahoe has different shades of blue. In the lake’s case, light is absorbed by tiny particles in the water and the water molecules themselves. The deeper the water is, the more light is absorbed as it travels through. The more light which is absorbed, the darker the shade of blue that appears to us.”

       These are beautiful facts to me not just for what they impart or for the elegance of one idea helping to answer two loosely connected questions but for the many other questions they can open up. We know what causes those feathers to appear blue to us. How do they appear to a bird who can see farther into the ultraviolet range? Why those colors there on the Jay's wings and not on its head? Why these iridescent patterns at all but why in places with such uniformity within species and such stunning diversity across species? Why should they look pleasing to us as well? What do these things mean to the birds themselves? They have been proven to have an effect upon mating but why did they evolve in the first place? Evolution as a theory can teach us how these patterns may have evolved but as yet cannot incorporate quite why they have evolved as opposed to other and simpler means to the same ends.

        On the whole, nature doesn't do simplicity. There are simple concepts and patterns within it that we can grasp but its complexity is so great as to be almost indescribable except as evidence of a greater order which we cannot yet understand. This is what Wendell Berry describes as “a music so vast that no one hears it except in fragments.” We can grasp these small parts but must always keep in mind that they are just that, parts of a larger order that we cannot as yet fully see.

        The mind needs these mysteries. Just as we can partially explain these patterns in bird plumage, we can partially explain the intricacies of the brain as a series of chemical impulses. This knowledge can have serious and beneficial effects in finding treatments for mental disease and disorder but how can it ever hope to account for how the mind and its already dizzyingly complex array of emotional shades interacts with the seemingly infinite complexity of the world around us and the other minds around that to create such nuanced and relatively exact communication as we see in works of art from the great on down to the most simple. This is still the realm of the creative mind and can still only be apprehended in parts by the artistic spirit. This is part of the essential nature of art and creativity: To give us the mental, spiritual, and emotional tools to be able to understand more deeply the facets and obscure connections of the world around, inside, and between us. We can analyze great works of art but it would take lifetimes to understand precisely where it came from out of the complex currents of history, society, personal history, emotional intensity, abstract expression and so on. To say nothing of the question of how exactly it is able to bridge that gap and resonate with its audience in all of their own endless and ever-changing complexity. And then to attempt to talk about these things coming about from a base of simple chemical impulses. It seems futile in one sense, but its very nature as overwhelmingly boundless mystery is sustaining to that constantly hungry imagination within us. We may not be able to explain the complexity of bird plumage and our own form of art and dreams but we can dream pointedly and endlessly about them. These huge mysteries create wellsprings of questions which the mind can play at and which can carry us onward into a deeper understanding and connection with ourselves and the beautiful world around us.