By
Gerald Hausman
Santa
Fe, NM, USA
I
was surprised to hear a few days ago that a class of MFA students in college
were totally befuddled by Ways of Seeing by John Berger, a profound,
world-class book. They didn’t know what to make of it. They didn’t know how to
get into it or out of it, and when they finished it, they could not say what
the book was about.
How
could they have been puzzled by Berger’s masterful vision of how human beings actually
see the world around them?
Was
it possible, I wondered, that the simple relationship between eye, mind and
audience eluded an entire class of graduate students? Having read the book five
times simply for pleasure, I didn’t get what they didn’t get. To be perfectly
clear on this, here is what Berger states:
Seeing
comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But
there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing
which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world
with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The
relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.
This
seems stunningly, profoundly, cogent to me.
In
a sense you could say that the child’s first word, though unformed, is light.
This holds true, as well, for someone passing from this world to the next. They
always speak of light at the end of life. The guiding light. The light of life.
The light beyond.
The
poet Aram Saroyan in his great one-word poem expresses it this way:
lighght
As
an art teacher once said to me: “Everything that we see around us is influenced
either by our individual perception or the collective view of society, or both.
Usually both at the same time.”
I
would put it this way … think of a cave painting or a petroglyph. In Berger’s
sense of seeing, we view an image of, say, a bison. But this image is informed
by how others have seen the same pictograph.
This
perception would hold true for a painting by Dali or Picasso or even an
advertisement on a subway wall. We see, Berger says, what our society sees. We
see what we have been told to see. We see, not what we want to see, free of
influence, but what we have been taught to imagine when looking at something.
 |
| Gerald Hausman |
In
truth, it’s difficult to view anything objectively. Maybe there is no such
thing. A good example of this is seen in classical nude paintings as well as any
photographs of nudity on the human scene.
Berger
states, in viewing classical nudity “… the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed
to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.”
Thus
the painting is transformed from one thing to another, just by an observer’s
eye.
Berger
elucidates his idea with perfect clarity:
If
you have any doubt that this is so, make the following experiment. Choose from
this book an image of a traditional nude. Transform the woman into a man.
Either in your mind’s eye or by drawing on the reproduction. Then notice the
violence which that transformation does. Not to the image, but to the
assumptions of a likely viewer.
Roshi
Philip Whalen once asked: “WHAT IS IT I’M SEEING? & WHO’S LOOKING?” In Whalen’s
mind, as he once told me, nothing is what it seems and everything is what it is
… but it’s also conditioned by who is doing the looking.
Philip
Whalen and John Berger might’ve seen eye-to-eye. But that statement is also a
picture, an image, a transformation of truth.
If
nothing else Berger awakens us to the debatable mystery of human vision – “Look
into the pewter pot” wrote English poet A.E Housman, “to see the world as the
world is not.”
Link:
______________________________________
Gerald
Hausman is an award-winning, bestselling author and storyteller.