Sharks, painting, and patience

The research about the plasticity of our brains is thrilling but I don’t need a neuroscientist to tell me this: to catch a wave requires presence and acceptance: you can’t hurry things, or waste time thinking about the past or the future, or wish they were easier or more interesting. There just isn’t time for that. Not if you want to be there for that ride, to feel the rush and lift, and respond in whatever way your own body will allow, to be with that force for a delicious instant, to feel the joy of being on a planet with gravity instead of putting your creative energy into the futile task of working to somehow defy it.

One of the 20th Century philosophers I think is worth wrestling with is Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He wrote that “[t]rue philosophy consists of re-learning to look at the world.” It’s a pretty inclusive definition and seems to include those of us who are honest and brave enough to know that we need to revise our vision as we, our insights, and the world change. Merleau-Ponty’s work focused on that instant of perception, a sliver of time before our scientific, categorical mind can take over and begin to catalog, dismiss, prioritize, and judge. He thought this moment of perception was the beginning of all creativity, all art. 

He wrote that “it is the expressive operation begun in the least perception, which amplifies into painting and art.” He also thought painters were uniquely well suited “amplifiers.”

Carolyne Quinn wrote a wonderful, accessible article about Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception and painting. Quinn writes that, for Merleau-Ponty “meaning is not found pre-existent in the world but is called into existence by the body’s own activity in the world.”

Merleau-Ponty’s work is more popular since his death than during his life because, as it turns out, his writing is more relevant to what we’re learning about our brains now than what we knew about them then. Think about it. If he’s even a little right, and we are dependent on our sensing bodies to help create meaning, what are our hyper-stimulated, scanning, swiping, fractured, and busy days doing, not just to our bodies, but to the meaning we call into existence in the world.

Quinn describes one of Merleau-Ponty’s most inspiring ideas, something called “reversibility.” Merleau-Ponty thought our body is both an entity that senses and an entity being sensed, and not just in the way your body is busy seeing and being seen by other partially dressed humanoids on the beach, but in the touch of a tree or a rock or a wave. You can be altered by the wave and the wave by you. Everyone who plays in the ocean knows this to be true. Merleau-Ponty just expands that intuitive understanding to encompass all perception. He thought that to understand either side of perception- being touched or touching, we needed to know they were not wholly separate, not either/or, and not one and the same. Instead, they overlap, both always part of any perception we have of the other. He thought most of us walk around with limited vision that ignores much of the rich, invisible depth of  being sensed by the other. But not painters. According to Merleau-Ponty, while the rest of us (including photographers) couldn’t get at the real substance of perception, painters could render the invisible visible to the rest of us. Their paintings had the potential to render some of this fluid motion, this oscillation between seeing and being seen.

Because I live on the coast, because it’s the discipline at the center of my work and life, because it makes me feel sane, and is just too damn too beautiful to miss, I get in the ocean almost every day. A few weeks ago I hurt my rib in an unlucky fall and, while it’s been healing, I’ve been going in with my camera instead of my surfboard, photographing in the small, late summer waves each dawn and early morning. There are fewer black skimmers and the fish are starting to return in droves, each peaking shore break wave filled with dozens. My own species has begun its daily turtle walks. One one level, they’re out there looking for signs of nesting. But really, I think they are looking to call the meaning of hope into existence, walking with the hope that, for some perceiving moment in the future, they might dig a trench or hold a light that could help hatchlings, endangered as individuals and species, along their way. Even if they don’t save every turtle, they might save themselves.

Today, between sets of waves, a small shark swam from behind me, passing me on the right at a slow, leisurely pace— maybe there’s food aplenty. Rushing isn’t a priority. It must have seen me before I saw it, just so much inedible flotsam.The moment I saw its fin break the water, that instant of perception before I could categorize, the moment when my animal brain registered its size relative to mine (it was tiny, maybe 2 feet long), at its presence in the water, right there, with me, seeing me, and the resulting elation I felt at being seen (if it had been 2 meters long, I expect my perceptions might have been… different),— all reminded me of both Merleau-Ponty, and one of Joanna’s paintings that hangs on my wall, one that evokes something of immersion in liquid and light and motion, just like this morning. Reminding is a word we often say but don’t appreciate. To remind yourself is not just to recall, but to restore your mind to something valuable. I love that painting because it feels like the dissolution that happens to me in the ocean, the unimportant stresses and worries gradually losing concentration until they wind up just disappearing, and, even if they return, the wisdom and perspective that comes from the their intermittent disappearance endures.

Philosophers have been imploring us for a long time to learn to accept what we can’t change. The Stoics of Ancient Greece did it. Some Buddhists did (and do) it. The Serenity Prayer does it. But most of us still suck at it: quick to irritation or anger or a wish for a trap door into which you might dispense with or exchange the reality of the aggressive driver, the glitchy gadget, the broken rib- there are so many situations in our daily lives that regularly, reliably immerse us in stress, even when everything’s going “right.”