Peripheral Visions

alternative perception can be found; they lie curled within the carefully rationalized, domesticated patterns of adult seeing that are so heavily overlaid with cultural patterns. Yet as adults, if we have not learned socially acceptable ways of classifying the diversity of experience, we often dismiss the possibility of more than one way of seeing. Reasonable people can see things differently. “Reasonable people” also see things in more than one way. Quite ordinary daily experience may contain within it a multiplicity of vision that proposes the willingness to question what has been taken for granted. Certainties fluctuate over time, so that a respect for one’s own past variability can open the door to accepting a multiplicity of views in the present, worthy of respect in oneself as well as in others. Everyone has been both in and out of love.
    I saw a vision once by a stream in New Hampshire. Light filtered downward through the trees was echoed by light reflected from the moving current, dapple meeting ripple. A multitude of leaf and fern shapes, fully etched, spoke clarity and presence. Believing in God, I could feel the presence of God. Not believing, I could tell myself some other story of the sacredness in the wood and my sudden recognition of it. But the lack of a name might make me turn away from the undomesticated moment, scratch it from memory. Such moments, labeled from a shared mythic tradition, become the basis of certainty; unlabeled, they may be too disturbing to retain. The lack of a theology can make one tone-deaf to the event, but many theologies could serve. Pan, quietly playing his pipes off in the distance. A naiad, rising from the waters of the brook. A wingbeat of the Shekhina or the Paraclete, or the stirring of a Jungian archetype. Any one of these can give license to retain and treasure the moment, but each entails a set of additional beliefs and assumptions. In Western culture, we all too easily see natural phenomena as inert and as commodities, surely a very peculiar kind of vision.
    A name makes it easier to say yes to the moment. To say, This beauty is called blue. Different names for experience that cannot be shared or confirmed become matters of contention and even warfare, while the lack of a name opens the door to the anxieties of hallucination, error, insanity. Yet artists can convey that sense of presence without evoking any of the names that divide us. The newly in love do see the beloved on street corners and subway platforms. A patient in therapy may recognize the face of the therapist in a poster or on a frieze. The newly bereaved do hear voices or, watching by the body, see the chest rise and fall. Declared in poetry, none of these experiences is threatening, but in prose they make us worry about our friends’ mental health or our own. It is easy to reject the knowledge of one’s own mysterious changeability, like those who rationalize away intense love when it is followed by disappointment.
    Surely everyone has moments, often unlabeled, often very brief, when perception is somehow changed. Most people learn to forget them, as they learn to forget or reinterpret the experiences of childhood, to label them as dreams or segregate them with theological or psychiatric labels, protecting themselves from awareness that the world they have learned to see is a depleted one. A few people escape these limits, learning to use their unlicensed visions and even to offer them to others in the arts. A few pursue the images of possibility into new technologies. Others rush from such experiences to dogmatic commitments that close the door to future variation in perception.
    That stray impression of a vision in the woods, with all its vividness, may have simple physiological or psychological explanations. It may have fit some template or evoked some earlier learning, perhaps even the first encounter with light on emergence from the womb. Joan and Erik Erikson have pointed out how often the images of deity match a prior image of the nurturing mother, the tender face and focused eyes seen from below. But vision is more than its mechanism, whatever the mechanism. Insight, as some mystical traditions teach, involves affirming both, “This also is Thou,” and “Neither is this Thou.” Such moments offer the awareness of other levels of perception, other ways of being, a continuing awareness that the beloved lives, the forest and the stream live. It is an impoverished life that makes do