Excerpt from “Elixir” by George Herbert
A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.
“Snow” by Louis MacNeice
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands –
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
~~~~~~~~~~~
It is up to us whether we see deeper into and beyond the surface of things. And this is true not only metaphorically, it is literally true. When we look into and “at” an object, our gaze can stop at the name, the label, our idea about the object. Or we can put aside all of that and look with a more feeling-centered gaze, we can start to feel deeper into what we see, to sense the life force, the movement, even in what we call inanimate objects. Scientifically we know that what looks to us like solid matter is actually energy, a constant movement of atoms and molecules in what is, relative to the size of atoms and molecules, vast areas of space between them. And at the quantum level, what we call particles are both waves and particles, both movement and observable points, depending on the observer and the method of observation. Looking more deeply is similar to softening the gaze to see an image that wasn’t visible to you at first glance, or adjusting your eyes in order to see beyond a reflection in a window. Your gaze doesn’t have to stop at the reflection, at the surface of things. This feeling gaze can take you through the glass into a sense of the source from which the “object” emerges, a sense of the mystery and wonder that somehow anything exists at all.
“There is more than the glass between the snow and the huge roses.” What we see depends on the way we see, on the glass we’re looking through. When we see through the lens of separation, everything appears separate and divided. But world is crazier and more of it than we think, and much suddener than we fancy it.
© 2023 Shanti Natania Grace
Photography by Janice Drew: “Snow on Pink Roses”
