Learning to See Again
The capacity to see the visible world with your own eyes is a spiritual capacity.
Hobbit Mini-Lesson: Syntax and Motive—This Thursday, 7pm Central
You have probably been taught to avoid passive voice. But at crucial moments in The Hobbit (and, in particular, in that most crucial moment when Bilbo chooses to escape from Gollum rather than to kill him), Tolkien's syntax shifts toward passivity. In this short lesson, we will consider the connections between grammar and syntax and larger narrative (and even moral) concerns. This free lesson will serve as a preview of Writing with Hobbits, my six-week course starting next Tuesday, September 19.
Click the button below to add the event to your calendar (the Zoom link is in the calendar entry). On Thursday I’ll also send an email reminder with the Zoom link.
This is the second of a three-part series about Josef Pieper’s Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation. You can find last week’s episode here.
The central section of Only the Lover Sings is a short essay, “Learning to See Again,” that Josef Pieper wrote for the catalogue of an art exhibit in 1952. Our ability to see is in decline, Pieper writes. And by seeing he means “the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is.”
This vision is “spiritual,” and yet Pieper isn’t talking here about anything so mystical as the ability to see that which is invisible to the human eye—at least not directly. He’s talking about visible reality. To perceive reality is a spiritual act; this is no less true for visible realities than for invisible realities.
Earlier this year I wrote about the “habit of art,” a phrase that Flannery O’Connor borrowed from Jacques Maritain. The habit of art, O’Connor wrote, “is a way of looking at the created world and of using the senses so as to make them find as much meaning as possible in things.” Pay attention to that word “senses.” O’Connor, like Pieper, is talking about the ways we take in the concrete world in which we live and move and have our being (a world that we receive through our five senses). Because that world is the artifact of the invisible Creator, there’s no reason to make too hard a distinction between realities that are visible realities and those that are invisible.
“To be sure,” writes Pieper, “no human being has ever really seen everything that lies visibly before his eyes. The world, including its tangible side, is unfathomable.” But we can see more or we can see less. “Going below a certain bottom line of perception quite obviously will endanger the integrity of a man as a spiritual being.” Perhaps this isn’t quite obvious, but Pieper’s point, I think, is that beings not created in the image of God can’t take in a whole lot of the world. A lion is better than spotting gazelles than you can ever be. But once it spots a gazelle, the lion cannot see that the gazelle is beautiful; he can only see that it is delicious.
Pieper wrote this essay while on board a ship returning to Europe from New York. He was surrounded by other Europeans who had traveled to see Canada and the United States “with their own eyes.” But even after making the trip, Pieper’s shipmates hadn’t really seen America for themselves. “During the various conversations on deck and at the dinner table I am always amazed at hearing almost without exception rather generalized statements and pronouncements that are plainly the common fare of travel guides.” I feel bad for Pieper’s interlocutors, who no doubt thought they were just making conversation. Still, it’s easy to let the books and the experts do your seeing for you: they saw what they were supposed to see, but they neglected to see what was right in front of them. When I went to Italy, there was a strong temptation to go only where Rick Steves’ Italy guide told me to go, and to see only what Rick Steves’ Italy guide told me I was going to see. And I can’t bring myself to buy art to hang on my walls for fear that I’m going to find out later that the painting I like turns out to be insufficiently sophisticated.
This decline in our ability to see, Pieper suggested was due in large part to the fact that there was just too much to see in the post-war, mass-market West.
The restoration of man’s inner eyes can hardly be expected in this day and age—unless, first of all, one were willing and determined simply to exclude from one’s realm of life all those inane and contrived but titillating illusions incessantly generated by the entertainment industry.
His list of titillating illusions consisted of movies, tabloid newspapers, and television (how many channels were there in 1952? three? four?). If Pieper had seen the Internet, I suppose his hair would have caught on fire.
Hopefully it is starting to become clear what Pieper means when he suggests that even seeing the visible world is a “spiritual capacity.” The ability to see with your own eyes is an essential component of your humanity. To receive the world through your senses, into your mind and heart—to think about it, care about it, make connections, make things—all that is to think God’s thoughts after him. The world, after all, was God’s idea before it was ever a world. When we allow others (or, increasingly, machines) to do our seeing for us, to tell us what we’re seeing, what we’re supposed to see, we are forfeiting some part of our humanity, our dignity, our freedom.
To quote Pieper again,
Only through seeing, indeed through seeing with our own eyes, is our inner autonomy establisehd. Those no longer able to see reality with their own eyes are equally unable to hear correctly. It is specifically the man thus impoverished who inevitably falls prey to the demagogical spells of any powers that be. “Inevitably,” because such a person is utterly deprived even of the potential to keep a critical distance.
I would add one important caveat here. The kind of “autonomy” at issue is not the freedom to believe whatever you find convenient to believe—to treat a thing as true because you believe it would serve your purposes if it were true. Nor is it that maddening tendency to go find “facts” that prop up your preferred version of reality, and call it “doing your own research.” This autonomy is the freedom to come to terms with a Reality that none of us made—which, I realize, is very much out of touch with the spirit of the age.
So…living a life less saturated with mass media is a step toward learning how to see again, but, according to Pieper, that kind of fasting and abstinence is “no more than the removal, say, of a roadblock.” If you really want to learn to see, Pieper suggests, you need to be involved in artistic creation.
Nobody has to observ and study the visible mystery of a human face more than the one who sets out to sculpt it in a tangible medium. And this holds true not only for a manually formed image. The verbal “image” as well can thrive only when it springs from a higher level of visual perception…
The mere attempt, therefore, to create an artistic form compels the artists to take a fresh look at the visible reality; it requires authentic and personal observation. Long before a creation is finished, the artist has gained for himself another and more intimate achievement: a deeper and more receptive vision, a more intense awareness, a sharper and more discerning understanding, a more patient openness for all things quiet and inconspicuous, an eye for the things previously overlooked.
When you learn to see that way, with that intimate, receptive, patient openness to the quiet and inconspicuous, you will help others see that way. That’s a humanizing vision, a vision that invites us to participate more fully in the image of God.
Next week: Memory and the Muses
What are some ways that you have found it hard to see “with your own eyes”? Let’s talk about it in the comments.
Starting one Week from Today:
Writing with Hobbits, September 19 - October 24
In Writing with Hobbits, we will examine The Hobbit with a writer’s eye, to see how we can make Tolkien’s techniques work in our own writing. Writing with Hobbits includes 17 short recorded lectures, six 60-minute live Zoom discussions, as well as a dedicated online forum for discussion and optional writing exercises.
(Recordings of the Zoom discussions will also be available for learners who can’t attend the live discussions.)
Dates and Times:
Tuesdays, September 19 to October 24, 2023
10 AM – 11 AM (student) and 1 PM – 2 PM (adult)
Cost: $97
Intended Audience:
There are two “cohorts” of Writing with Hobbits–one for adults (college-age and up), and one for high-school and middle-school students. The recorded lectures are the same for either cohort, but the two cohorts have separate live discussions and separate discussion forums. Adults will be interacting with adults, and students will be interacting with students.
Please register for the appropriate cohort.
Topics to be covered include:
World-Building
Action and Movement
Realism of Presentation v. Realism of Content
Tone
Writing Weather and the Natural World
Showing and Telling
Setting
Description and Imagery
Using Figurative Language
Characterization
Dialogue
Carolyn Leiloglou Stands “Beneath the Swirling Sky.”
My guest this week on The Habit Podcast is Carolyn Leiloglou. Her new middle-grade novel is Beneath the Swirling Sky: Book 1 of the Restorationists Trilogy. It’s a book about art, creativity, and reclaiming the creative energy that comes so naturally to small children. It’s also about a family of people who can go into old paintings and walk around in them. Like her main character Vincent, Carolyn is the granddaughter of art collectors and the daughter of an art teacher. She is also the mother of four wildly creative children.
That was beautiful! One idea I resonated with is why we want to see more closely and truly is to LOVE THIS OLD PLACE LIKE JESUS DOES! I was grounded into a purpose beyond just trying to see, but you love and to know as he does. I used to hug a large globe in bible club to show Jesus's loving our world. His words reminded me of this purpose.
I was born in 55 and yes, then, 3 channels on a very small black and white TV. It was for me not much of an attraction. I appreciate his words of wisdom about all techy stuff, even continual listening to amazing podcasts, this buying more books! Quietness outside is such a lavish gift! Walks in silence are necessities!
My "own eyes"were given up early due to terror and I vowed as a little girl to never see anything on my own, never say no to anyone, and if I thought I could see, to know it was probably wrong. I'm trying to break that vow now and see as Lori, even realizing I cannot hear his voice apart from trusting my own perception.
I enjoy remembering times I felt alive and vibrant as a child and they were always in beholding beauty of some kind, Coquina shells made into art in Sanibel island once, seeing what a crenoline slip did to my friends dress, eating cake, , hearing rhythm in A Fly Went By, seeing y first Mountain ever, dancing to White Rabbit, kissing my A Little Princess book...each of these tiny experiences remind me I've not changed one bit. That helps remind me to see as myself and fuels such delight! Also, without seeing as me I can't hear his voice as his sheep. How will I hear his special call for me if I'm not me, or trying to be all the "y'alls everywhere" taunt me into being. Weaknesses are the best for helping remind me of who I am. And trying to draw anything ( I'm not an artist) but sometimes try to be one, or writing too, demands such quiet pondering and looking.. Remembering who this little girl still is, even in her old body, is a habit of loving that demands the sight you're speaking about, seeking to see with love, not in order to shame.
This whole letter resonated so much, and gave me the gift of words around a thought I've not been able to put words to (anyone else have thoughts like those?). This quote in particular:
"Long before a creation is finished, the artist has gained for himself another and more intimate achievement: a deeper and more receptive vision, a more intense awareness, a sharper and more discerning understanding, a more patient openness for all things quiet and inconspicuous, an eye for the things previously overlooked."
...It leaves me with such deep gratitude. For the way God calls us not just to produce something, but to awaken something in us in the process, to usher us closer to Him in the journey. I do not see the world the same as I did seven years ago, and I imagine that seven years hence, I'll see it differently than I do now...a thought that brings so much wonder. In essence it's this, from Job, after the writer has gone on for chapters upon chapters about the fathomless wonder of this world:
"And these are but the outer fringe of his works; how faint the whisper we hear of him! Who then can understand the thunder of his power?” (Job 26:14)