Seeing stars and snowlight
attention as love
Hello friends
Kicking off the new working year has been a stop-start affair here in Orkney. We’ve had an unusual amount of snow these past few days. Everything is stilled.
Schools have been closed. The airport too. Buses and ferries have been cancelled. The roads have been almost deserted. The coastguard have been ferrying key workers to the hospital and farmers have been out with their tractors shovelling side roads while the council gritters try to get the main roads cleared. I’m sure my friends in the snowy city of Aomori would find our disarray laughable, but we’re simply not geared up for snowfall. It’s something of a rarity in these salt laden, windy islands.
I went out earlier to take some photographs in this sudden stillness. The freshly fallen snow was, of course, beautiful; plump, fluffy and unmarked. The knifing north wind that has bitten down on us hard these last few days had eased for a time, apart from the odd squall. The air was still and crystalline.
I wanted to capture the way the raking winter sunlight strafed across the granular surface of the snow, but my camera just couldn’t catch the vibrant, living quality of the light, how it shimmered between a warm, peachy yellow in the highlights and cool lavender-blue in the shadows. Or how, when I gazed at the bright blankness of a flat snowy field, my eye danced with floaters and tiny stars.
Looking at the brilliant white snow and the equally brilliant clear sky, I became aware of the artefacts of my own seeing; sparkles, squiggles, faint, drifting loops and coils in the vitreous humour in my eyeballs. It made me aware of how our seeing is not neutral but active, our visual intelligence at work in and with the world, filtering some details out, conjuring others, always working to make some sense out of the light our eyes are gathering moment by moment.
There is light inside the eye too, known as entoptic light. The human eye is so sensitive to light that it takes just a few photons for it to register a flash. A few, but not just one single photon. The eye won’t register a single photon because inside the eyeball the substance rhodopsin, which allows us to see in the dark, is continuously breaking down, molecule by molecule. Each time a molecule breaks down it emits a photon. So, if the eye was any more sensitive, we would be constantly blinded by inner fireworks sparkling inside our eyeballs. Cave explorers and volunteers in labs report that even in perfect darkness they see spots and sparks of light. These lights appear when there is nothing left to see, as the brain invents lights known as ‘dark noise.’ If you press your fingers to your eyeballs you can watch the kaleidoscoping phosphenes exploding in the dark.
The psychology and physiology of perception show us that we are half-blind, our brain filling in the gaps to provide a seamless flow of experience, while things unseen constantly overflow our narrow sensory channels, dodging our skittish attention, or filtered out by our expectations and systems of understanding. The human eye saccades continuously in tiny flickering jumps, giving us our vision in discrete packets like frames in a movie that the brain joins together to create the illusion of seamless flow. We all have a blind spot in each retina where the optic nerve connects, but our brain quietly smooths that over for us too.
We can’t see anything that does not emit or reflect a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to our eyes, nor hear anything beyond our acoustic bandwidth or sense anything too small, too large, too slow, too fast or too far away for our eyes and ears. Our sensory experience of the world is full of holes and enmeshed in a web of memory, imagination, story and theory that both reveals and conceals. Yet, patchy and inadequate as it is, we have to stay with the world as we experience it through our senses, to pay it proper attention. It’s our only way in.
Simone Weil uses this word “attention” with fine precision. She sees attention as a kind of desire. The quality of attention she describes is like a centrifuge; as if the pull of the world might tug us out of ourselves into a clean, bare attention, stripped down, emptied of content. In her aphoristic, note-taking way she writes: “The wrong way of seeking. The attention fixed on a problem. Another phenomenon due to horror of the void”1.
Weil warns us to stay right there with what presents itself, not to trust our imagination, as it will lead us away from the truth. She insists that we must learn to let go of the theories and stories we keep telling ourselves, and instead of filling in the gaps, adopt an attitude of quiet waiting. To learn how to still the mind and the busy self: “this is the task,” she insists.
It is a kind of love. Instead of looking for a reason for the existence of the world, looking for solutions to problems, Weil focuses her attention instead on the reality of her love for it. To attend, from the Latin ad - tendere, means ‘to stretch into’, to stretch one’s mind toward something. To attend means to be present at, to take care of someone or something, to serve, to wait. Most of the world will always remain unseen. This is neither a problem nor a solution. It is simply how it is. The task is, Weil suggests, to learn how to attend.
It’s this quality of deep attention that I hope, this year, to cultivate, in the studio and out of it. This is not in spite of the increasing noise, violence and discord of these out-of-balance times, but because of, and in counterpoint to them. I take inspiration from the mediaeval monks who would have patiently carried out their daily devotions in the now ruined monastery over on the the nearby Brough of Birsay, cut off twice a day by the roiling tides and right in the teeth of every Atlantic gale. It seems to me that attending to the fleeting, delicate qualities of light as it moves in and through the water, cloud, mist, snow and rain that are in constant movement around me here, is a task worth undertaking. As Weil says, attention is a kind of love for the world, all the while knowing it will always exceed us.
I’m lucky I can stay home for now, but I’m watching the weather forecast, hoping anxiously for a thaw. I’m due to travel to Edinburgh soon for a ‘meet the artists’ event on January 10th at The Scottish Gallery, where I have several new paintings in the exhibition “The Northern Isles”. I’ve had January exhibitions in Edinburgh for the past two years in a row, and both times the weather has thrown my long-laid plans into disarray. I’m bracing myself for a repeat, while still hoping that everything will go to plan this time around. Do come along on Saturday if you’re in the area, or drop by to the see the show. It’s on until January 31st. Alternatively, you can view everything online HERE.
Weil, S. (1952) Gravity and Grace, Reprint edition, Oxford: Routledge Classics, 2002
The Life Raft Co-Creating Community is back!
Relaunching after a hiatus while I was away in Japan, I’m delighted to invite you once again to join our weekly creative co-working session on Zoom. I’ve missed you! Our meetings are a little Life Raft of shared creativity in these stormy times. It’s very simple. We just say hello at the start and say what we plan to work on and then leave our cameras on and work together in companionable silence. We start at 3pm UK time and finish around 4.30pm. Just click the link below to join us. If you can’t make it live I share a recording to the paid subscriber chat each week.
That’s all for now!
Sam
I envy your snowscapes. Where I live in my part of North Yorkshire all we have is icy cold winds and deep frosts which my hens do not like. Their water is frozen and I found one old hen dead in the hen house this morning whether she succumbed to the cold or old age I do not know. I noticed she had separated herself from the flock yesterday which is always a sign but she was showing no signs of illness. Very sad morning.
Lovely. Your third photo from top is exceptional and beautiful.