We have given up challenging our senses. We have banished strong smells – the era of Napoleon Bonaparte, who once asked Josephine not to wash for two weeks before meeting him, so he could intoxicate himself on the fullness of her natural bodily scent, is long past. The world we sense, the world of planted trees and straight roads and soothing jingles, is mass-produced, carefully engineered to satisfy the average person. It is a world that trains us to become that average person, to have average senses and an average sensibility. This destroys the best bits of us, the bits of us that make us create, explore and live rather than survive. There is nothing average about wonder; the moment we content ourselves with what we know and stop looking for more mystery, wonder is lost. To find it again, we have to make ourselves uncomfortable.
Wonder happens when our space of possibility shudders and grows. Inside that space there is nothing new or surprising; outside it, there is nothing at all. On the border, magic lies. It is fundamentally important, then, that we know that the border exists, that our space of possibility, the box within which we think, is only a tiny, haphazardly cut slice of a bigger reality, which is more magnificent than our grandest dreams. And it is important that we know that not only in theory. We must see and hear and lick and touch and smell that border, so as to know it physically, and sense the new, unexpected things that lie just beyond it.
It is not a matter of making our senses ‘better’, but of paying attention to them; of shutting up for once to let them talk. Our journey so far has had the not-so-hidden goal of making us less self-assured, but in a good way. When we are uncertain what to think, it becomes easier to stop the thinking for a while and let the body do its work. Every step of the journey has led us further down that path. Before going back home we are going to visit our senses, one by one, pay our respects to each in turn, and bond a little with them.
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Sight is the sense we rely on the most: we ‘look’ where we are going, rather than ‘smelling’ or ‘feeling’ our way. We need to be reminded that ‘there is more than meets the eye’ (and to challenge the impulse that makes us instinctively trust good-looking people).
Our society is over-reliant on sight at the expense of the other senses. It is tempting to say that we should care less about sight rather than more: that our sense of sight is, if anything, overstimulated. But quantity is not quality.
Our daily activities require only a very basic level of visual awareness: we spend most of our time processing information that other humans have tailored for us by plucking out of it any last traces of ambiguity. Let’s say you are working with a spreadsheet, and you need to see whether there is a number ‘3’ in the third or fourth column. This is all you need to see, and there is no room for visual interpretation. You do not linger to evaluate the shape of the ‘3’, its hue, the way it looks today compared to yesterday; or how it is set against a nice white background, in the context of all the shapes surrounding it, those lovely 5s and bullying 7s. Nothing like that; once you see that your 3 is a 3, you are good to go. We have been trained to a pragmatic gaze. To learn a gaze of a different sort, we could do worse than look at some art.
Alain de Botton and John Armstrong argue, in a book called Art as Therapy, that art can give us a deeper appreciation of our apparently humdrum reality. They cite the example of a famous work by the American artist Jasper Johns, who cast in bronze two Ballantine Ale cans, and set them on a pedestal. They are just normal cans of the sort you would have found in many an American fridge of the 1960s, but once they are cast in bronze, and put in a gallery, they become ‘art’. And because they are art, the cans make you stop, and look, and what you find in them is a previously unsuspected beauty in the colour of the label, in ‘the attractive proportions of each cylinder’. You look at the beer cans ‘as a child or a Martian, both free of habit in this area’.4 You really look at them for the first time, rather than just glancing over them. They are made new, and unexpected; and your world gets a little larger.
You can take from this experience much more than the joy of looking at art in a gallery: you can take, if you are lucky, the joy of seeing art in your fridge. Remember what we learned from Christina, the High Priestess? Your kitchen can be more amazing than a levitating monk. We are circling back there.
What if you are someone who finds art boring? You drag yourself to a gallery, you go through the motions of looking at the works on display, but your heart is not in it. One or two paintings are nice, sort of. But frankly, you would rather be at home watching TV after a long day at work. In theory, you appreciate that art is important, but in practice, you don’t know what to do with it. I had the same problem for a long time, until something very simple dawned on me.
Sight-based forms of art first developed in societies in which people, at all levels of wealth, had more free time available than almost anyone does today. They also had a much slower rhythm of life. We prize velocity; sight-based art comes from a world where slowness was the norm, and it is on slowness that it thrives. To appreciate art and let it work on us, we need to approach it at its own pace, which is a slow one.
Our instinctual response to a painting in a museum is to briefly look at it and move on. We want to bag as many paintings as we can in our visit, to get good value for our money and time. But when it comes to art, value is a matter of seeing more of one thing: five paintings, carefully selected, would be plenty for an exhibition. John Armstrong points out that ‘it can seem strange to treat lingering as a virtue’,5 because when you linger, you are not accomplishing anything. But art invites you to linger, and sensuously dawdle.
A dawdling experience I remember fondly was with a painting by Jackson Pollock. Until that moment, I had refused to like Pollock’s work: I saw in it a jumble of colours and chaos and nothing more, a cheap trick for people with too much money for their own good. That particular time, for no particular reason, I happened to linger on Reflection of the Big Dipper, and something odd happened: I could feel the inner rhythm of the work. I didn’t actually hear any music, but it was as if I was remembering a long-lost tune. I gazed at the work and started noticing – or projecting – patterns: the tune in my mind made the colours beat and shift almost visibly, but not quite so. I was in a light trance. By slowing down, I had found a new artist I liked, and a new opportunity, if nothing else, for pleasure.
Through art we learn to let our sight linger, and notice the miracles that are already happening – quite literally – in front of our eyes.
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Other miracles manifest as vibrations in our eardrums. We live immersed in an aural reality we scarcely consider unless we are forced to by the wail of an ambulance or someone shouting our name. At any moment, there are sounds around us that our ears are perfectly equipped to pick up, but never make their way into our consciousness. There is an immense potential for wonder here.
When I was thirteen, the headmaster of my school organized a classical music concert, which all students were required to attend. Having to endure a bunch of old buffers playing Beethoven was excruciating, a shocking act of institutional violence. I sat down, brooding, in an uncomfortable lumpy chair and braced myself for excruciation.