Seeing Things
Robert Clark Yates
THERE ARE NO CONFIRMED SIGHTINGS of mermaids in Hamilton Harbour. No one claims to have encountered leprechauns in the Red Hill Valley. If there are fairies in the woods on the side of the escarpment, gnomes around Cootes Paradise or trolls under the Skyway bridge, they remain unseen and unreported.
Stories of these and similar things from Europe and the East are welcome in Canada, but the things themselves do not seem to transplant to this soil. Dragons, zombies and vampires choose to make their presence known elsewhere in the world. Cyclops and centaurs do not come to Ontario. Goblins and minotaurs stay away. Down to earth and all across the land, Canada remains free of an animated sense of mythology, free from living legends and imaginative mumbo-jumbo, or whatever else you want to call it.
As a Canadian with deep North American roots, I have no sense of coming from or longing for another homeland. Even if I did, as a pure-bred mongrel I wouldn't know which of six or seven countries to turn to. Yet I believe Canada has the most ancient, deep and lively of all traditions, even if it is not generally recognized as such. It is the tradition that says the present is more important than the past. It also says it is better to see for yourself than to take another's word for it. And even after you do that, it is best to remain skeptical.
If someone says it is bad luck to have a pure black cat cross your path, we don't necessarily belittle the superstition. But when they say, “Look out! A black cat!”, our response is apt to be, “Yes, it appears to be black--on the side facing us. But for all we know, the other side may be white or tiger-striped, or pink with purple polka-dots.”
Most of us realize there are many ways of looking at the world around us, but we would like to believe that only one way is real. As if to deny the evidence of our eyeballs, we would like to define "other" ways of seeing as either illusions or delusions. We hope that if we are suffering from deception, it is only a temporary state. We really do want to see through the lies that shield us from reality. We want to see what is.
I would like to say a few things about “seeing” as I see it. What follows are a few personal anecdotes about perceiving the world and how an animated enchantment can be felt, even in Canada.
WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN WITH A GROWING AWARENESS that I was to become a visual artist, still going to school and living in my parents' house, I began having quiet times of solitude and meditation. I would sometimes go to our basement family room and lie on my back and look up at the ceiling. The ceiling was white when the room was well-lit but for the times I am describing it was a dimly lit, non-descript greyish colour. One day by accident I discovered I had a certain "power". (This was during the sixties but there were no drugs involved in the episodes I am relating.) I would lie on my back and look up at the ceiling and by an act of “will” cause it to turn red or any other colour I wanted. The non-descript grey ceiling would start to glow pink then intensify into bright red, just as if it had been given a coat of paint. There was no mistaking it, I was seeing a red ceiling where none had been before. From there it was easy to make it turn green, then blue, orange, yellow, purple or any colour I wanted.
Anyone who has played the perception game where you stare for a minute or so at a Canadian or British flag printed so that black is where the white should be, green is where the red should be, orange is where the blue should be, will know what I mean. You give the strangely coloured flags all your attention for a few moments and then stare at a blank white surface and the flags appear as they were designed in red and white, or in red white and blue, as the case may be. There is no doubt you can see the flag in living colour there on the blank sheet of paper where nothing is printed. You can see it, but others cannot. All seeing is a first person experience and it may be that no two people see alike.
Tristan Tzar, one of the Dadaists, once said that “The world is blue like an orange.” This is generally thought to be a humorously anarchistic statement of the type the Dadaists were famous for. It could be far more simple than that. There is a likelihood Mr Tzar was colourblind with the type of colourblindness that cannot distinguish between orange and blue, which are complimentary colours in the same way red and green are complimentary colours. Colourblindedness is being unable to distinguish between at least one set of complimentary colours.
So my coloured ceiling was, of course, entirely a first person experience and if anyone else was to come into the room at the time, they would see the ceiling that I saw as red simply as white. I don't do this anymore. I am only interested in the whiteness.
You may not see the same from day to day. We all know our eyesight deteriorates as we age. We can develop lack of focus, an emphasis on the close-up or the far-away, or a stigmatism so we see the vertical more clearly than the horizontal, or vice versa. But beyond the physical and into the psychological, we still may see differently from day to day. The way we see something now may depend on what we were looking at before and it may even depend on what we were thinking about before.
Many times I have been reading a book, either completely enthralled with it or struggling with it to ward off the boredom that would have me abandon it. Then some external force like a call to dinner, or the need to get up and make dinner--whatever it is, something in these situations forces me to put the book down. I return to it later, but something magic has taken place. (This doesn't happen every time I read a book but often enough that it is worth noting.) In my absence from the book a reversal in the book's hold on me has mysteriously taken place. What was enthralling has suddenly become barely tolerable, or what was almost boring is now magically enthralling. A new voice has emerged. And this turnaround can happen mid-chapter or even mid-paragraph... wherever I happen to stop reading for a while.
All art depends on the first person viewer or listener or reader. It is a collaboration between the artist and his audience. A colourblind landscape painter who always paints the grass and foliage red may appeal only to those who are also colourblind and only they may see what a great painter he or she is. The work of a visual artist will not impress a blind person. The work of a musician will not impress the deaf. The illiterate get nothing from books.
Similar to lying on my back and watching the ceiling change colours, I could always see faces and figures in stuccoed ceilings or in clouds or in the leaves of trees or in patched pavement. The world around me has always been very animated, always unexpected and never to be taken for granted.
In the bathroom of my parents' house where I grew up, there was marbled arborite and in it I saw many things over the course of my many visits to that room. The particular image I will always remember was a flying devil with his horns and goatee, seen from a three-quarter back view as if through heavenly clouds, with a pointed tail trailing out behind him. My brother tended to focus on another segment of the marbling and his memories are of seeing something else. I think it was a bear.
The house where I am now living has a portrait of my wife in the swirls of the grain of the wood in the door from the hall to the kitchen. Some people I have shown it to cannot see it but see only the grain of the wood, others can sort of see what I mean, but others agree with me that it is a strikingly real portrait found free in nature, unaided by human hands. It may require the ability to see a smudge as a distinct detail, a suspension of disbelief, but the reasons are unimportant. To me, it is there. I look at it fondly every time I am talking on the telephone. If we ever move I will probably take that door with us.
Different things can be seen almost everywhere. There is no need to stop with clouds and foliage and water-stained plaster walls. As most critics know, you can also look at paintings by artists and see whatever you want to see. Much to the horror of many artists, I can see things in their paintings they did not intend. Or, as some would say, they did not consciously intend. Look at a Cezanne still-life of apples and pears and notice the folds in the table cloth in the foreground. Why, they can be read as a very good portrait of Pig Robinson! The wind-blown tree in Tom Thomson's famous West Wind painting can be seen as a caricature of a haughty snob, and once you see it this way it is hard to believe Tom Thomson as a landscape painter was not influenced by the caricatures of Daumier, the nineteenth century French satirical cartoonist.
WE CAN LOOK IN MANY WAYS, not only at art but at all things. Reality plods through the landscape of our days like a huge dark beast and when you try to focus on it, it can break into tiny pieces and fly away as if it were a flock of birds. This is no dream.
We can awaken to the awe-inspiring reality of simply being alive. If you are asleep to the joy and mysteries of being here, you may someday be rudely awakened by a scream. If you are lucky, it will be a scream up close, right in your face, intended just for you.
I showed a couple of paintings I had been working on to a fellow painter. One of the paintings was what I considered to be "finished" and the other had not yet arrived. It had a few things to be resolved so I was showing it prematurely which is not my normal practice. The unfinished painting was critiqued in a way that convinced me my fellow painter had a good eye. He said what he thought was wrong with the painting and I knew it to be true because it was precisely what I felt myself. When it came to the finished painting, however, his criticism was as wide ranging as it had been for the unfinished painting. I felt he was wrong in his criticism but I didn't want to take what he had to say personally. I was curious to find out how he was seeing my painting and in trying to see how he was seeing I made a curious discovery. I could catch glimpses of what I think he saw and sometimes hold onto them for a moment or two before being overtaken by my own way of seeing. As far as I was concerned he wasn't looking at the painting in the right way, so I finally rejected his criticism as irrelevant to me. For me, trying to see my painting the way he was seeing it was like being on a boat when a dock or a boat beside you starts to move and it seems as though you are moving when you are actually standing still, or vice versa. I could see his critique was like being in the position where it seemed like we were moving but we really weren't. He believed we were moving. That is the way he was viewing my painting. I could see what he meant momentarily, and it seemed like he was right, we were moving, but it was an illusion. The truth of the fact we were stationary overtook me every time. I could see, as far as I was concerned the boat was still, my painting was finished, and he was looking at it in the wrong way. It may have appeared to be right to him, but he was wrong. My painting was finished and it worked. He just couldn't see it. I was sure I was right because I could see what he meant and could see it was an illusion.
I suppose this is an argument for the subjective nature of viewing art, no matter how objective we try to be. It is, and has to remain, a first person experience, or else it has no meaning. Laying down the law in these things is like verbally dressing the king in wonderfully embroidered clothing and trying to convince others of the only decent way to view royalty.
As most painters know, there are those paintings which don't seem completely resolved and are set aside or abandoned, but after a period of time sometimes you see that they have completed themselves. They are finished, but you couldn't see it initially. The work of some painters (sometimes the painter can even be yourself) requires getting used to before you can really see it for what it is. This cannot be forced. You can listen to the advice of others but you can't take their word for it. You must see for yourself.
THE WORLD IS NOT NECESSARILY out to trick us, but life is certainly full of misinterpretations. In most things one explanation is not the only one possible for all people, at all times, in all places.
A few years ago I was printing a small illustrated book of poetry on the old Washington press of McMaster University’s English Department. The print room had no windows, no chairs and had overhead tube lighting. I decided to take a break from work and went out for a hot cup of coffee which I brought back to the room to drink. I set the cup beside me and, being tired, I lay down on the floor on my back to think. The ceiling did not change colour although the lighting in the room was very strange. I turned my head and to my surprise the legs of the press were wobbling. My initial shock that the press might be falling over caused me to focus on the legs of the press and it seemed stable enough but the legs were definitely waving. I felt very sane but my eyes must be deceiving me. I sat up. The press was not moving but was, as normal, standing there as solid as the Canadian shield. Curious, I laid back down again and again the legs began to wave. But now I could see the waving was of the type you see on hot days on a highway, a mirage in the desert. The hot air rising from my cup of coffee was causing distortions in the way I was viewing my world. I was seeing the legs of the press through the invisible steam of the coffee and the legs appeared to be wobbling. This explanation satisfied me. As I always suspected, I was not mad.
Late one night, before going to bed, I sat alone on the front stoop of my house with a cup of tea to unwind after a long evening of painting. We have a tree on our front lawn and I noticed it. It was as though I had never seen a tree before. It was night, it had been raining, and the birch on our front lawn was magically glistening and shimmering in the light of the streetlamps, every leaf wet and shining brightly, each leaf surrounded by a shadow of darkness. The trunk of the tree came straight out of the lawn, then the branches spread out and up and were full of leaves. It was top-heavy. As an abstract design, at that moment it didn't work. It would be better if it was upside-down or sideways. If you had never seen a tree before--which was what I was feeling at the time--and if you did not have any assumptions and pre-conceived notions about trees--which, at that moment was precisely the state I was in--then this tree was a miraculous object. Visually, I was unaware of its rootedness in the earth and it was quite impossible for any object of that shape and size to stand there like that. It was as though I had never seen a tree before and it was a miracle. Even with the realization at the back of my mind that it had roots and was alive, the mystery and wonder increased because it was not explained. I was now aware of what I imagined were probably the real and true spread of roots beneath the ground which balanced the top growth of the tree and explained how it could stand there like that. But now the fact that it was alive, that it grew and was growing was overwhelming. What a strange creature or living thing. It was as though I was being visited by a totally unfamiliar thing from outer space. The birch on my front lawn! I sat on my stoop and the tree stood in the darkness not far from me. It was hard to believe I was sharing the universe with such a strange object. I myself felt so strange I could identify completely with even something as weird as that tree. In the embrace of those two famous siblings, eternity and infinity, the tree and I were also brother and sister that night.
ANOTHER TIME, WHEN I WAS IN LOW SPIRITS, I took an aimless walk. The details of my state of being are not important here but it is enough to say my personal life was not smooth (there had been a death, illness, sadness, discontent--I was suffering some form of heartbreak). It was a cold late afternoon in November with snow in the air and a strong wind was blowing. Night was approaching and I walked alone down by Cootes Paradise to Sassafras Point. I saw no one and the signs of nature were foreboding and not comforting. The world seemed pretty inhospitable. The mood I wanted to be free of was only reenforced and further entrenched. I was cold and confused and had vaguely hoped for a sign of some sort to give me direction. It would soon be completely dark so I turned to head homeward.
Climbing up the path from the point I was stopped dead in my tracks by a ghostly wailing about ten feet in front of me. I could feel to the depths of my being that spirits were on the move. An adrenaline rush, an awareness of the roots of every hair on my head, my eyes opened wide to see what was happening or what was about to happen. All the worries of the world were focused on this one moment. The wailing subsided as if to trick me into relaxing, then increased with greater fury. The sky was overcast with fast moving clouds, the wind was whistling through the trees, growing darkness was obscuring the world, and the eeriness of the situation was closing its embrace on everything. I could imagine running from that haunted place and from then on always fearfully believing in ghosts. This was not imaginary. There was a real voice present here. The whistling wail was like a scream right in my face, as though it was a deliberate attempt to provoke me. Every thought, every feeling, everything was driven far from me but that scream. My mind was in neutral.
I could see no apparition and, in spite of the former low state of my spirit, I sensed this cry I was hearing was not psychological but a real physical sound assaulting my eardrums. I took a couple of tentative steps forward. The cry stopped. I stood by a tree and felt the dark freezing wind increasing on my face. Then the scream again. There was no mistaking it. It was coming from right beside me. I turned my head to see, not knowing what to expect, and saw in the dim light a vibrating piece of bark which was firmly attached to the tree at either end but free in the middle. Much like making a whistle with a blade of grass held between your thumbs and blowing it with your mouth, the wind was blowing this piece of bark and causing the most haunting wail I had ever heard. I touched the vibrating bark with my finger and the wailing stopped. I let it go and it resumed.
This is not to say there were not spirits in that place that conjured that cry to come into being as if from the ends of the earth. It is simply to say I saw the physical cause of the sound which I will probably remember as long as I remember the unforgettable sound itself. I really believe that place was spiritually charged that night.
YET AGAIN, ANOTHER TIME, I WAS WALKING along some abandoned railway tracks in the Dundas Valley, enjoying a sunny afternoon, when movement in the trees ahead caught my eye. Just on the other side of a row of trees and undergrowth I could see a large dark creature moving from the right to the left. I was alarmed at its size. We don't have large black bears in this area anymore, but even if we did, this creature was far too big for that. As it moved behind the trees I could see its dark shape through the openings in the branches of the trees. It was enormous, the size of a dinosaur. It reared up on its hind feet, still moving to the left. What could it be? Its head was almost level with the top of the trees. Then it rose above the trees and I watched a flock of crows fly clear of the treetops, into the sky and off elsewhere. The changing irregular shapes of the many sloppy wing-flapping birds which were between me and the trees I had interpreted as one huge shape showing through gaps in the foliage from the far side of the trees. I had visually read a flock of crows as a huge unidentifiable monster and it was real.
I told this anecdote to Larry Marshall, an old friend of mine, with whom in earlier days I have shared many wilderness adventures on hiking, camping and canoe trips. He said that if a shaman saw what I had seen he would probably say he saw a huge dark monster which turned into a flock of birds and flew away. I said, Yes, yes, yes; that's what I saw.
THERE IS NO MORAL to these stories, just an observation. It is this: When we are open to see the world around us as it really is, we see it is enchanting. It is of the moment, always new, magical and wondrous in a way simply undreamed of in any oft-repeated and preconceived mythology.
THERE ARE NO CONFIRMED SIGHTINGS of mermaids in Hamilton Harbour. No one claims to have encountered leprechauns in the Red Hill Valley. If there are fairies in the woods on the side of the escarpment, gnomes around Cootes Paradise or trolls under the Skyway bridge, they remain unseen and unreported.
Stories of these and similar things from Europe and the East are welcome in Canada, but the things themselves do not seem to transplant to this soil. Dragons, zombies and vampires choose to make their presence known elsewhere in the world. Cyclops and centaurs do not come to Ontario. Goblins and minotaurs stay away. Down to earth and all across the land, Canada remains free of an animated sense of mythology, free from living legends and imaginative mumbo-jumbo, or whatever else you want to call it.
As a Canadian with deep North American roots, I have no sense of coming from or longing for another homeland. Even if I did, as a pure-bred mongrel I wouldn't know which of six or seven countries to turn to. Yet I believe Canada has the most ancient, deep and lively of all traditions, even if it is not generally recognized as such. It is the tradition that says the present is more important than the past. It also says it is better to see for yourself than to take another's word for it. And even after you do that, it is best to remain skeptical.
If someone says it is bad luck to have a pure black cat cross your path, we don't necessarily belittle the superstition. But when they say, “Look out! A black cat!”, our response is apt to be, “Yes, it appears to be black--on the side facing us. But for all we know, the other side may be white or tiger-striped, or pink with purple polka-dots.”
Most of us realize there are many ways of looking at the world around us, but we would like to believe that only one way is real. As if to deny the evidence of our eyeballs, we would like to define "other" ways of seeing as either illusions or delusions. We hope that if we are suffering from deception, it is only a temporary state. We really do want to see through the lies that shield us from reality. We want to see what is.
I would like to say a few things about “seeing” as I see it. What follows are a few personal anecdotes about perceiving the world and how an animated enchantment can be felt, even in Canada.
WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN WITH A GROWING AWARENESS that I was to become a visual artist, still going to school and living in my parents' house, I began having quiet times of solitude and meditation. I would sometimes go to our basement family room and lie on my back and look up at the ceiling. The ceiling was white when the room was well-lit but for the times I am describing it was a dimly lit, non-descript greyish colour. One day by accident I discovered I had a certain "power". (This was during the sixties but there were no drugs involved in the episodes I am relating.) I would lie on my back and look up at the ceiling and by an act of “will” cause it to turn red or any other colour I wanted. The non-descript grey ceiling would start to glow pink then intensify into bright red, just as if it had been given a coat of paint. There was no mistaking it, I was seeing a red ceiling where none had been before. From there it was easy to make it turn green, then blue, orange, yellow, purple or any colour I wanted.
Anyone who has played the perception game where you stare for a minute or so at a Canadian or British flag printed so that black is where the white should be, green is where the red should be, orange is where the blue should be, will know what I mean. You give the strangely coloured flags all your attention for a few moments and then stare at a blank white surface and the flags appear as they were designed in red and white, or in red white and blue, as the case may be. There is no doubt you can see the flag in living colour there on the blank sheet of paper where nothing is printed. You can see it, but others cannot. All seeing is a first person experience and it may be that no two people see alike.
Tristan Tzar, one of the Dadaists, once said that “The world is blue like an orange.” This is generally thought to be a humorously anarchistic statement of the type the Dadaists were famous for. It could be far more simple than that. There is a likelihood Mr Tzar was colourblind with the type of colourblindness that cannot distinguish between orange and blue, which are complimentary colours in the same way red and green are complimentary colours. Colourblindedness is being unable to distinguish between at least one set of complimentary colours.
So my coloured ceiling was, of course, entirely a first person experience and if anyone else was to come into the room at the time, they would see the ceiling that I saw as red simply as white. I don't do this anymore. I am only interested in the whiteness.
You may not see the same from day to day. We all know our eyesight deteriorates as we age. We can develop lack of focus, an emphasis on the close-up or the far-away, or a stigmatism so we see the vertical more clearly than the horizontal, or vice versa. But beyond the physical and into the psychological, we still may see differently from day to day. The way we see something now may depend on what we were looking at before and it may even depend on what we were thinking about before.
Many times I have been reading a book, either completely enthralled with it or struggling with it to ward off the boredom that would have me abandon it. Then some external force like a call to dinner, or the need to get up and make dinner--whatever it is, something in these situations forces me to put the book down. I return to it later, but something magic has taken place. (This doesn't happen every time I read a book but often enough that it is worth noting.) In my absence from the book a reversal in the book's hold on me has mysteriously taken place. What was enthralling has suddenly become barely tolerable, or what was almost boring is now magically enthralling. A new voice has emerged. And this turnaround can happen mid-chapter or even mid-paragraph... wherever I happen to stop reading for a while.
All art depends on the first person viewer or listener or reader. It is a collaboration between the artist and his audience. A colourblind landscape painter who always paints the grass and foliage red may appeal only to those who are also colourblind and only they may see what a great painter he or she is. The work of a visual artist will not impress a blind person. The work of a musician will not impress the deaf. The illiterate get nothing from books.
Similar to lying on my back and watching the ceiling change colours, I could always see faces and figures in stuccoed ceilings or in clouds or in the leaves of trees or in patched pavement. The world around me has always been very animated, always unexpected and never to be taken for granted.
In the bathroom of my parents' house where I grew up, there was marbled arborite and in it I saw many things over the course of my many visits to that room. The particular image I will always remember was a flying devil with his horns and goatee, seen from a three-quarter back view as if through heavenly clouds, with a pointed tail trailing out behind him. My brother tended to focus on another segment of the marbling and his memories are of seeing something else. I think it was a bear.
The house where I am now living has a portrait of my wife in the swirls of the grain of the wood in the door from the hall to the kitchen. Some people I have shown it to cannot see it but see only the grain of the wood, others can sort of see what I mean, but others agree with me that it is a strikingly real portrait found free in nature, unaided by human hands. It may require the ability to see a smudge as a distinct detail, a suspension of disbelief, but the reasons are unimportant. To me, it is there. I look at it fondly every time I am talking on the telephone. If we ever move I will probably take that door with us.
Different things can be seen almost everywhere. There is no need to stop with clouds and foliage and water-stained plaster walls. As most critics know, you can also look at paintings by artists and see whatever you want to see. Much to the horror of many artists, I can see things in their paintings they did not intend. Or, as some would say, they did not consciously intend. Look at a Cezanne still-life of apples and pears and notice the folds in the table cloth in the foreground. Why, they can be read as a very good portrait of Pig Robinson! The wind-blown tree in Tom Thomson's famous West Wind painting can be seen as a caricature of a haughty snob, and once you see it this way it is hard to believe Tom Thomson as a landscape painter was not influenced by the caricatures of Daumier, the nineteenth century French satirical cartoonist.
WE CAN LOOK IN MANY WAYS, not only at art but at all things. Reality plods through the landscape of our days like a huge dark beast and when you try to focus on it, it can break into tiny pieces and fly away as if it were a flock of birds. This is no dream.
We can awaken to the awe-inspiring reality of simply being alive. If you are asleep to the joy and mysteries of being here, you may someday be rudely awakened by a scream. If you are lucky, it will be a scream up close, right in your face, intended just for you.
I showed a couple of paintings I had been working on to a fellow painter. One of the paintings was what I considered to be "finished" and the other had not yet arrived. It had a few things to be resolved so I was showing it prematurely which is not my normal practice. The unfinished painting was critiqued in a way that convinced me my fellow painter had a good eye. He said what he thought was wrong with the painting and I knew it to be true because it was precisely what I felt myself. When it came to the finished painting, however, his criticism was as wide ranging as it had been for the unfinished painting. I felt he was wrong in his criticism but I didn't want to take what he had to say personally. I was curious to find out how he was seeing my painting and in trying to see how he was seeing I made a curious discovery. I could catch glimpses of what I think he saw and sometimes hold onto them for a moment or two before being overtaken by my own way of seeing. As far as I was concerned he wasn't looking at the painting in the right way, so I finally rejected his criticism as irrelevant to me. For me, trying to see my painting the way he was seeing it was like being on a boat when a dock or a boat beside you starts to move and it seems as though you are moving when you are actually standing still, or vice versa. I could see his critique was like being in the position where it seemed like we were moving but we really weren't. He believed we were moving. That is the way he was viewing my painting. I could see what he meant momentarily, and it seemed like he was right, we were moving, but it was an illusion. The truth of the fact we were stationary overtook me every time. I could see, as far as I was concerned the boat was still, my painting was finished, and he was looking at it in the wrong way. It may have appeared to be right to him, but he was wrong. My painting was finished and it worked. He just couldn't see it. I was sure I was right because I could see what he meant and could see it was an illusion.
I suppose this is an argument for the subjective nature of viewing art, no matter how objective we try to be. It is, and has to remain, a first person experience, or else it has no meaning. Laying down the law in these things is like verbally dressing the king in wonderfully embroidered clothing and trying to convince others of the only decent way to view royalty.
As most painters know, there are those paintings which don't seem completely resolved and are set aside or abandoned, but after a period of time sometimes you see that they have completed themselves. They are finished, but you couldn't see it initially. The work of some painters (sometimes the painter can even be yourself) requires getting used to before you can really see it for what it is. This cannot be forced. You can listen to the advice of others but you can't take their word for it. You must see for yourself.
THE WORLD IS NOT NECESSARILY out to trick us, but life is certainly full of misinterpretations. In most things one explanation is not the only one possible for all people, at all times, in all places.
A few years ago I was printing a small illustrated book of poetry on the old Washington press of McMaster University’s English Department. The print room had no windows, no chairs and had overhead tube lighting. I decided to take a break from work and went out for a hot cup of coffee which I brought back to the room to drink. I set the cup beside me and, being tired, I lay down on the floor on my back to think. The ceiling did not change colour although the lighting in the room was very strange. I turned my head and to my surprise the legs of the press were wobbling. My initial shock that the press might be falling over caused me to focus on the legs of the press and it seemed stable enough but the legs were definitely waving. I felt very sane but my eyes must be deceiving me. I sat up. The press was not moving but was, as normal, standing there as solid as the Canadian shield. Curious, I laid back down again and again the legs began to wave. But now I could see the waving was of the type you see on hot days on a highway, a mirage in the desert. The hot air rising from my cup of coffee was causing distortions in the way I was viewing my world. I was seeing the legs of the press through the invisible steam of the coffee and the legs appeared to be wobbling. This explanation satisfied me. As I always suspected, I was not mad.
Late one night, before going to bed, I sat alone on the front stoop of my house with a cup of tea to unwind after a long evening of painting. We have a tree on our front lawn and I noticed it. It was as though I had never seen a tree before. It was night, it had been raining, and the birch on our front lawn was magically glistening and shimmering in the light of the streetlamps, every leaf wet and shining brightly, each leaf surrounded by a shadow of darkness. The trunk of the tree came straight out of the lawn, then the branches spread out and up and were full of leaves. It was top-heavy. As an abstract design, at that moment it didn't work. It would be better if it was upside-down or sideways. If you had never seen a tree before--which was what I was feeling at the time--and if you did not have any assumptions and pre-conceived notions about trees--which, at that moment was precisely the state I was in--then this tree was a miraculous object. Visually, I was unaware of its rootedness in the earth and it was quite impossible for any object of that shape and size to stand there like that. It was as though I had never seen a tree before and it was a miracle. Even with the realization at the back of my mind that it had roots and was alive, the mystery and wonder increased because it was not explained. I was now aware of what I imagined were probably the real and true spread of roots beneath the ground which balanced the top growth of the tree and explained how it could stand there like that. But now the fact that it was alive, that it grew and was growing was overwhelming. What a strange creature or living thing. It was as though I was being visited by a totally unfamiliar thing from outer space. The birch on my front lawn! I sat on my stoop and the tree stood in the darkness not far from me. It was hard to believe I was sharing the universe with such a strange object. I myself felt so strange I could identify completely with even something as weird as that tree. In the embrace of those two famous siblings, eternity and infinity, the tree and I were also brother and sister that night.
ANOTHER TIME, WHEN I WAS IN LOW SPIRITS, I took an aimless walk. The details of my state of being are not important here but it is enough to say my personal life was not smooth (there had been a death, illness, sadness, discontent--I was suffering some form of heartbreak). It was a cold late afternoon in November with snow in the air and a strong wind was blowing. Night was approaching and I walked alone down by Cootes Paradise to Sassafras Point. I saw no one and the signs of nature were foreboding and not comforting. The world seemed pretty inhospitable. The mood I wanted to be free of was only reenforced and further entrenched. I was cold and confused and had vaguely hoped for a sign of some sort to give me direction. It would soon be completely dark so I turned to head homeward.
Climbing up the path from the point I was stopped dead in my tracks by a ghostly wailing about ten feet in front of me. I could feel to the depths of my being that spirits were on the move. An adrenaline rush, an awareness of the roots of every hair on my head, my eyes opened wide to see what was happening or what was about to happen. All the worries of the world were focused on this one moment. The wailing subsided as if to trick me into relaxing, then increased with greater fury. The sky was overcast with fast moving clouds, the wind was whistling through the trees, growing darkness was obscuring the world, and the eeriness of the situation was closing its embrace on everything. I could imagine running from that haunted place and from then on always fearfully believing in ghosts. This was not imaginary. There was a real voice present here. The whistling wail was like a scream right in my face, as though it was a deliberate attempt to provoke me. Every thought, every feeling, everything was driven far from me but that scream. My mind was in neutral.
I could see no apparition and, in spite of the former low state of my spirit, I sensed this cry I was hearing was not psychological but a real physical sound assaulting my eardrums. I took a couple of tentative steps forward. The cry stopped. I stood by a tree and felt the dark freezing wind increasing on my face. Then the scream again. There was no mistaking it. It was coming from right beside me. I turned my head to see, not knowing what to expect, and saw in the dim light a vibrating piece of bark which was firmly attached to the tree at either end but free in the middle. Much like making a whistle with a blade of grass held between your thumbs and blowing it with your mouth, the wind was blowing this piece of bark and causing the most haunting wail I had ever heard. I touched the vibrating bark with my finger and the wailing stopped. I let it go and it resumed.
This is not to say there were not spirits in that place that conjured that cry to come into being as if from the ends of the earth. It is simply to say I saw the physical cause of the sound which I will probably remember as long as I remember the unforgettable sound itself. I really believe that place was spiritually charged that night.
YET AGAIN, ANOTHER TIME, I WAS WALKING along some abandoned railway tracks in the Dundas Valley, enjoying a sunny afternoon, when movement in the trees ahead caught my eye. Just on the other side of a row of trees and undergrowth I could see a large dark creature moving from the right to the left. I was alarmed at its size. We don't have large black bears in this area anymore, but even if we did, this creature was far too big for that. As it moved behind the trees I could see its dark shape through the openings in the branches of the trees. It was enormous, the size of a dinosaur. It reared up on its hind feet, still moving to the left. What could it be? Its head was almost level with the top of the trees. Then it rose above the trees and I watched a flock of crows fly clear of the treetops, into the sky and off elsewhere. The changing irregular shapes of the many sloppy wing-flapping birds which were between me and the trees I had interpreted as one huge shape showing through gaps in the foliage from the far side of the trees. I had visually read a flock of crows as a huge unidentifiable monster and it was real.
I told this anecdote to Larry Marshall, an old friend of mine, with whom in earlier days I have shared many wilderness adventures on hiking, camping and canoe trips. He said that if a shaman saw what I had seen he would probably say he saw a huge dark monster which turned into a flock of birds and flew away. I said, Yes, yes, yes; that's what I saw.
THERE IS NO MORAL to these stories, just an observation. It is this: When we are open to see the world around us as it really is, we see it is enchanting. It is of the moment, always new, magical and wondrous in a way simply undreamed of in any oft-repeated and preconceived mythology.