A Mind Like a Kaleidoscope

Twisting, turning, breaking and re-forming.
Mirrored, moving, opening and collapsing.
A living centre from which pulls all
To the centre and
In the blinking of the eye
The swinging of a door
Expels out and away.
Pieces are shaken
And while peering through a glass, darkly
A new constellation appears right before our eyes.

***

A kaleidoscope is an instrument for seeing, a bit like a telescope at first appearance. Inside the tube are two or more mirrors tilted towards each other, so that objects contained within one side of the mirrors are reflected and seen as a symmetrical pattern, due to ongoing reflection. Usually, what is within the lens are coloured pieces of glass or beads which move with rotation and turning of the instrument, which results in ever-shifting images appearing from a central place when peered at through the peephole.

***

“Perspective makes the eye the centre of the visible world, but the human eye can only be in one place at a time. It takes its visible world with it as it walks. With the invention of the camera, everything changed. We could see things that were not there in front of us. Appearances could travel across the world. It was no longer so easy to think of images travelling regularly to a single centre.” (Berger, 1972).

***

Our bodily instruments for seeing are located within the centre of our face, with information traveling to the brain for interpretation.
 
Unless I train myself to remember that only my eyes are central and local to me, a basic error in perception can take place.
 
I can see only what is in front of my eyes at any given time.

Even to see behind me, I must give up my front view and move to change perspective. To do so will render what was in front, is now behind.
 
To be able to see what is in our environment, we orient ourselves in accordance with our location, not only physically, but also psychologically and emotionally to become receptive to our vision, to focus.
 
By virtue of being human we are limited in our capacities to see from multiple perspectives at any moment in time. Attempting to continue to hold in our mind’s eye what is not in our view can cause a sense of inner disarray, and we may need to revisit our original position of seeing again to create and hold a more complete picture.
 
Essentially, our biological nature sets us up for a limited view at any given time and we forget easily with new stimuli.

Without being compelled to hold other perspectives and ways of seeing, it is easy to imagine ourselves located at the centre of our own solar system, resplendently crowned with orbiting celestial “others”.

In this way, the image of the self burns as bright as the sun and is the central figure located on the stage of our lived experience. This central positioning can give our vision a kind of vortex quality; all personal perception appears to be the essential meeting place of all that is occurring at any one time.

Like peering into a kaleidoscope and observing the emergent and vanishing images of patterns emitting from a unifying middle point, the ways in which we see are coloured by how the external world appears to our highly personal, interpretive centre. All perceived forms appear to be mirrored within the centre of the formation, moving out in endless repeating sequences. Our understanding of these formations (what we see) are dictated to us by the stored memories (and perceptions of memories) that may mutate and reform over time, as memory impresses upon memory, reshaping it, re-image-ing it. We may not remember exactly what happened, or its temporal expression in time, but we are likely to remember exactly how we perceived the happening as it arose in our experience. Recollections therefore are not impersonal, as they are always filtered through our own particular patterns of seeing and our relied upon configurations of knowing; the stories we tell ourselves deliberately, or not.

Our inner emotional experiencing responds to our perceptions of the world outside us and will add a sort of colouring-in to the crude outline of raw data of our experience, with feelings, internal textures and a particular intensity (or lack thereof). If music is the language of the unnamed but felt, consider how the scariest movies you ever watched in your childhood might have been rendered harmless, dull or even comical had the sound been turned off. The soundtrack moves us to the emotional temporal score of the moments we perceive on screen, colouring our cinematic experiences with meaning and impending conclusions in the same way our in-dwelling, felt experiences paint and play our reality. Our ways of seeing are not the outside-coming-in only. They are the outside-coming-in, mingling with our personal inner score, to point to newer meaning in the now. We then act out what we now know.

To add further complexity, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1843) reflected that life can only be understood backward, but must be lived forward.

Quite the paradoxical inconvenience, if you happen to appreciate order and sense-making in your life-creating efforts.

But do we ever see what is really there, even upon the most objective self-reflection?

If our lived experience has historically brought forward feelings of lack, insecurity, superiority or a coldness towards living we may simply view the world of other through the eyes of lack, insecurity, superiority or coldness. Also, we may only see what we know of ourselves, reflected through our vision. When we only see ourselves, our vision begins to narrow as we believe that our inner experience of the self is in fact the totality of experience. In a true experience of narcissism, we only see the self shining back on the waters of the world, just as Narcissus gazed into the pool to fix on his own image in the ancient Greek myth. So enamoured he was by the image of seeing his own seeing, he lost balance on dry land and fell into the pond and drowned. When we only see ourselves in the world, and are happy to conclude our witnessing there, we miss the opportunity for a new engagement with a fuller, more grounded reality. We do not allow ourselves to see the world outside of us, right in front of us, speaking in the language of otherness, inviting us out of self-referential solipsism and into the complexity of experiential knowing through relationship.

Beginning to practice the art of seeing and listening to others, as a doorway into understanding the self, we can observe the result of the activities of other’s hands. To sit and gaze at a work of art can bring about a change in our inner reality as we are confronted with the self-reflective process of another, made manifest in material form. To begin to see more clearly, we must quieten our minds, to dim the inner noise and pay particular attention to the soundscapes of our inner reality as we look and take in the articulation of the artist. We want to be so centred, we can begin to see from beyond our centre.

This is not easy. We do not train each other in these ways of seeing. Take a trip to a modern art gallery, and what do you see? Do you find it a challenge to contemplate, gaze and step into the feeling world of another in an attempt to understand, or do you carry with you the expectations that you should form a view, intellectualise what you see, know more, feel more, be entertained with novelty? Or do you go with the intention to be distracted from the world as you know it with newness?

I suggest that we struggle to see art because we don’t know how to look. And art, in response, has often been reduced to a tool for self-aversion and become the business of spectacle.

When we look, does our seeing bring forward an experience of our essential isolation from self and others and the world, once the shiny materials and the sounds of the milling crowds have been forgotten? Or is it inviting us deeper into a contemplation of the nature of living reality, the fabric of human consciousness that binds us together?

Through learning to look through something other than ourselves, the object of our considerations can become a companion on the path to knowing. Through this lens of peering through other forms in dialogue, we can see that art making can be deeply pro-relational as this is predicated on the presence of separate otherness. As we work with the material of art-as-partner, we might find that no matter how beautiful the forms are, they are only a representation of the unseen reality. But when we play with art, we can change our eyes so we can begin to see again, as if for the first time. Through art making, we alter the doors of perception and glimpse the veiled relational mystery behind all matter. Making and contemplating art is essentially one person reaching out for contact to another, an attempt to heal one’s self of the existential aloneness and loneliness that we all experience and bear as art therapist Bruce Moon (2010) describes.

The feelings of aloofness from the world in which we find ourselves may be inevitable when we consider the essential subjective and personal nature of the ways in which we are bound to see. We are separated, self-referential and isolated in our world-view. And at the same time, we are all engaged in the communal process of living. We are found in the multiplicity of intersections of interrelatedness, which includes the imagination of other, the inner reflective life, as well as the social interplays we live from.

When we make art with others and another takes a position of openness while contemplating the outworking of our hands, the art will echo and bring forward personally resonant sounds and images located in the viewer’s inner being. When we engage in such interpersonally vulnerable ways of being with others, we are participating in and adding to the kaleidoscopic tapestry of the human lived experience with sensitivity and curiosity. This allows for a kind of grace to unfold, to experience ourselves influencing the shifting and turning inner reality of another, giving space for new constellations of self and other to arise.

References:

Berger, J. (2012, October 8). Ways of seeing [Video file]. YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk
Kierkegaard, S. (1996) Papers and journals: a selection. Penguin Classics
Moon, B. (2010). Art-based group therapy. Charles C Thomas Publisher.