Lately I’ve been trying to see more clearly. Since I have an unfortunate predisposition to taking myself seriously, I mean this in the most insufferably pretentious way; because the fight over precisely what information manages to reach our eyeballs becomes ever more competitive, complex, and opaque, almost nothing can be taken at face value. There is the factualness of the story itself, but also questions of framing, tone, and most of all, in a world of effectively limitless information, the question of why I see this and not that, regardless of what this and that happen to be today. Whether truth, outrage, or advertising (or perhaps all three at once) ulterior motives stand behind all the words and sounds trying to pry their way from our screens into our heads. Perhaps it’s always been so, but it seems to me the whole edifice of information grows increasingly inscrutable by the day.
As a sort of modest antidote to this I have also been trying to see clearly in the more conventional meaning of the term. I was talking with Alanna recently about the strange phenomenon by which removing my headphones, whether I’m listening to music or a podcast, lets me notice visual details that I’d previously ignored. What’s striking is that it isn't bird song or the soft drip of melting snow that I notice, though I notice those as well, but that I actually see things I couldn’t when I was listening to witty British guys discuss history. That is, listening to words has limited my ability to see, which is pretty wild.
Once I start looking I have a tendency to continue. On Wednesday, which the kids had off from school for the Lunar New Year, and which they would have had off regardless due to the snow storm that blew through, I walked out to talk to them for a minute. They were playing at the mouth of the gorge where the snow blows over a steep embankment to make a drift deep enough to jump into or excavate a fort out of. Once I’d delivered my message I noticed a particular hemlock that leaned inquisitively out over the frozen stream.
I have looked at this tree many times, yet now I found myself looking again. The most striking quality was the way the tree’s form reflected the forces that had shaped it. The base of the trunk angled out from the bank before curving upwards into the open space above the stream. Its roots made a tangled mass that both grasped to the bank and reinforced it, anchoring the massive weight that cantilevered over the slab of shale that widens the stream beneath it.
Stepping back to take in the hemlock in its entirety I noticed its quality of movement. The regular trees, growing upright, conveyed stability; even rocking in the wind they would endlessly return to balanced, upright repose. But the peculiar circumstances in which this singular tree had grown, with the point of balance shifted out from the base, with its weight and the compensations by which it fastens that weight to the earth visible in its form, told a story of change over time. I didn't know whether it started growing straight only to have the bank slide beneath it, or whether it was shaded and had always been moving towards the light, first out and then up.
Whatever the reason, it was pleasing to look at. The way snow highlighted the dark boughs of an evergreen makes the individual branches stand out with a clarity they lacked in the summer, and the purposeful curve of the trunk reminded me of a taut bow.
Is there a connection between these two types of seeing? Does looking closely at a tree sharpen my eye, making it capable of piercing the obscure clouds of information that blow before me, to see the truth behind them? I doubt it. But things like trees and birds and the salt eating a net of holes in a cracked sidewalk and a plow truck rumbling down the road are worth looking at regardless, for the simple fact of their reality. Their honest existence can be an invitation to join them in the material world, at least for a moment.
