Closer
Morning: iPhone
“Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.”
(David Whyte)
It feels like my world has become a little closer lately.
Which isn’t a bad thing. I’ve often been aware that I am living for the next thing; trying to get through the day, through a task list, and to be somewhere else.
My picture of morning light on bed covers is a moment of choosing to pay attention to how the day was beginning.
Just that moment.
Nothing special.
And yet, of course, very special.
I’m conscious of a kind of noticing that occurs before I ‘classify’ what I’m seeing, before I ascribe meaning, ‘pre-language’ even…?
Contemplative practices are often attached to photography and ask us to become conscious of the flashes of ‘perception’ which occur before our direct experience is covered over by concepts or projections.
‘Contemplative photography’ asks us to connect with our ‘perception’ and then work with ‘discernment’ and skill to produce an image that is the equivalent of what we have seen.
But why should this kind of ‘seeing differently’ matter to any of us in our current troubled circumstances?.
As the crises we face; health, climate, social inequality, make themselves clear to us, we more easily see the fault lines that run through our world but which, for the most part, remain explained away by our popular concepts and theories about how the world ‘really’ works.
A discipline of ‘perception’ helps us notice our concepts of status, wealth, consumerism and power and we begin to see who we really are.
As we look through a ‘phenomenological lens’, paying direct attention to what is before us, we can see more easily our embedded social structures and systems, the way economic power works, and how our experience of life becomes fragmented, abstracted and distant. How we become our ‘to do’ lists and constantly strive for something, or somewhere, else.
I wonder if this current experience of crisis can help us to bring our focus a little closer. Towards the world we’re in rather than the one we’re not.
We might find that this world can be mundane, ordinary, nothing special.
And yet, of course, very special.
Notes:
Find David Whyte’s ‘Start Close In’ here: ‘River Flow; New and selected poems’.
In my academic day job, there are many routes into the consideration of these moments of attention that occur before ‘analysis’. The ‘phenomenologists’ tell us to get back to ‘the things themselves’, sticking to our concrete experience and forgetting any analysis, classification or theory about the things. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a key thinker in this field though his writing can be all but impenetrable! Try the appropriately named, ‘Merleau-Ponty - A Guide for the Perplexed’ by Eric Matthews.
I’ve really enjoyed ‘The Practice of Contemplative Photography: Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes’ by Andy Karr and Michael Wood.
Finally, back to fault lines. US anthropologist, Laura Wagner, who barely survived the Haiti disaster noted: “Social scientists who study catastrophes say there are no natural disasters. In every calamity, it is inevitably the poor who suffer more, die more, and will continue to suffer and die after the cameras turn their gaze elsewhere. Do not be deceived by claims that everyone was affected equally — fault lines are social as well as geological.” (Huff Post)
See also:
