Seeing as Labor. Or, What Exactly Do Cows Have to Do With Science?
Image Credit: luca-bravo
I started reading Maaza Mengiste’s novel, The Shadow King, almost immediately the package arrived from Amazon—the book still, (strangely), fresh with the smell of print and damp paper, and something else that whiffs to my nose but which I would never get to decipher until the book has lost its bookish-ness: the smell gone, the crisp edges now folded and blunt. All these needless details by which I mean to say that I read the book—am reading the book, will continue to visit this book—so thoroughly, if anything, so that the writer in me can inhabit its spirit of history, the weaving of its details, the impeccable structure that binds the storytelling. And, of course! The sentences, so lush and generous. Now, this: I hold the book with a sense of mild fascination, not because I am enjoying it so, but because the first time I tried to read it, having downloaded the preview on Apple books, I had found the prose spurious and dense, the page weighed down with a cluster of loud and meaningless details—the kind of book I would typically describe as…too much! And yes, it felt too much at the time. A lot of too much, actually. So, that on a Sunday evening, fresh out of a flight, it seemed ridiculous that I would have a sudden ‘knowing’ that I had to read the book.
I recently learned about The Symbolists,1 a group of French poets in the 19th century who preoccupied themselves with following their dreams and visions, and translating it to their art. The movement would expand in scope to include painters, writers of prose, and even political thinkers. Many of them were not particularly theistic, so I imagine there was no looming voice, loud as the sound of troubled waters, telling them that this was something they had to do. Their logic, the reports go, was that the purpose of art was not to ‘represent reality but to access greater truths.’ Now, an even more interesting fact, they were positioned in the idea that Symbolism, as a movement, was the necessary forerunner of modernism; the world of reality created by things that are not real: Is this faith, or is this madness?
When I was a child, I wanted to be a bird. Or rather, I believed I was a bird. Also, I dreamt for an entire season about a specific bird, large as a house swooping down from heaven, perching at my feet, without words or language, thank goodness! And so, staring me down with its bulky bird-like eyes. I still remember those eyes, jagged. I remember, too, the beads of sweat that snaked down my face and neck and back, caused more by a night of power outage than by the dream itself. Still, big bird and night sweats? Can’t resist the terror in that. Now this, I have had a dream almost every night, and for almost as long as I have known myself alive. In many of these dreams there have been details more vivid and real than the feeling of flesh over my bones—the surreal strung together by its own trappings of texture, light, sound. I approach my dreams sometimes as a map, reading for signs and cues. And sometimes with the understanding that they are an endless spurl of confusion—in essence, days of light and days of madness. (I use madness linguistically, rather than clinically, to depict disorientation, but also the stigma associated with fragmented thinking.) Incidentally, I have always been interested in the workings of delusions: the practice of madness. Perhaps, somewhere in that muffled speech of the discombobulated mind lies a subject, a framework of reality, an addresser, and the addressee. Tell me, what else is needed to make sense of an idea?
I will tell you, though, this is not really about dreams. But first, Einstein. He was presumed to have begun his work on relativity after having a dream of cows on a field. There are quite several people whose dreams spurred the productions of books, innovation, wars. And yet, to dream is just another way of seeing. Like my experience with Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, coming to see the pages I had seen before, yet, seeing them differently. I wonder: when does this vision occur? Not the sensory seeing that permutates through color and light, but that of intuition, the very one that happens in the pit of your stomach? What is the site of this knowing—the context in which vision crystalizes into something concrete?
What I mean to say is that seeing is not always about seeing, it’s about translation, too. And sometimes we are not the agents of translation itself, we are merely recipients, witnesses. I like to think that time is a translator. Words too. Maybe even prayer. Producing meaning in unlikely places. Producing us as custodians of such meanings. I like to think that the work of translation that happens between one moment and the next is an act of mercy, that we come into incidents and events that some external agent has broken down for our access. So that when I return to Mengiste’s The Shadow King and see it differently, I know that I have inhabited a small miracle. And most importantly, I like to think that there is a logic to spiritual intelligence, a path to knowing things that cannot be known, seeing things that cannot be seen—moving through the physical structures of time and space, while knowing that the world I inhabit is exponential and uncontainable. Maybe this is faith. Maybe this is madness. It depends on how you see. But I like faith better. Even if you don’t. One thing I know: all seeing is labor. We look because we expect an encounter, something real and immediate, or something distant and otherworldly. Whether you follow the science, or you follow the surreal, one thing is true: we look because we believe.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Symbolism". Encyclopedia Britannica, 22 May. 2013, https://www.britannica.com/art/Symbolism-literary-and-artistic-movement. Accessed 1 February 2022.