Clarity for Teachers: Day 37
By: Dougald Hine
Tags: William Blake, Advice, Clarity, Happiness, Beauty

To make these enchiladas appear beautiful and happy, the food stylist used cosmetic sponges, glue and WD-40. (Photo: Rick Gayle. Food styling: Kim Krejca. Full story here.)

‘Beauty and happiness come from being clear and loving.’

Some days, these lines of advice feel like equations. Statements of relationships, like the laws that physicists discover or create. Laws of an inner physics.

A theatre director I worked with described her training at drama school. For the first six months, she said, in all the work she did, the only instruction her teacher gave, over and over, was to trust her judgement.

It made me think of the stories I’ve heard more than once from friends who teach in universities, where a bright student will come to the writing of their masters thesis and fall apart, because for the first time in their education there isn’t a correct answer. One young woman having hit this point was brought back to the memory of being twelve years old, when she’d written ‘I think’ in an essay at school and the teacher scrawled in red ink in the margin: ‘No one is interested in what you think!’

That’s the kind of story that makes me angry at much of what gets done under the authority of education. It’s not always spelt out that crudely, but very few of us experience teaching that encourages us to trust our judgement, and that treats this as a skill that requires development.

When someone says, ‘Well, that’s subjective!’, it tends to imply a kind of laissez-faire relativism: whatever you feel, whatever you say it is, no one can argue with you. The way of approaching the world that has characterised modern Western societies lays great emphasis on a rigorous search for the rules that govern those aspects of the world that can be seen to be objective, but there is little sense that subjectivity too might benefit from rigour. Or not unless you go to drama school.

It’s one of the reasons why I’ve often worked with artists, because at its best an artistic training and the development of an artistic practice involves the honing of a rigorous subjectivity. And on a good day, the processes of artistic collaboration involve learning to work together without blunting the sharpened edges of what each of us has honed and what it allows us to see, and without cutting each other with them. There’s quite an etiquette involved.

But I’m told that there have been times and places where the pursuit of inner rigour and the exploration of inner space was given the same weight as our societies give to the search for knowledge of the outer world. The roots of the advice we are working with here lie in such a culture, so the analogy to the equations of physics is not fanciful, though nor is it exact.

Today’s equation has four terms: beauty and happiness, being clear and being loving. The first pair arises from the second. Not to say that they cannot be simulated by other means — whole industries are dedicated to the simulation of beauty, after all, and increasingly to techniques and chemical stimuli for the production of happiness. But the equation may point to the misguidedness of pursuing either of these things directly, without recognising that the real thing arises as a byproduct of being clear and loving.

Think of those moments when you see someone’s face light up, and then think of the skill of a set of lights carefully positioned for a photo shoot. They are utterly different things, yet in some sense the latter attempts to produce the impression of the former, only the light is projected from the outside rather than radiating from within.

‘Now I a fourfold vision see,’ wrote William Blake, going on to contrast this with the objective worldview of modern science: ‘may God us keep/From single vision and Newton’s sleep!’

The scientific revolution and the philosophy which accompanied it is bound up with the grinding of lenses and the techniques of optics, from the telescope to the microscope. In the society which emerges from this, the eye is mostly thought of as a camera, passively receiving images from the world. Until not long before the time of Newton, the everyday understanding of vision had been quite different: the gaze was thought of as something that reaches out from the eyes — ‘the fingers of the soul’, in the old Greek expression — so that to look at someone is to touch them. For me, this is the prime example of how the development of worldviews cannot be reduced to a linear progress of knowledge: the older account of vision is not simply a cruder and less accurate description, replaced by the more up-to-date scientific model of what is going on; rather, each of these ways of describing what happens when I look at you brings certain aspects of the experience into focus, while casting others into shadow.

When I look at the staged images of happiness in the adverts on the Tube, the bodily extremes and manipulations by which beauty is portrayed — it seems to me that these must have started out as attempts to push through the narrow window of the camera lens, with its single vision, something that would stir a memory of the manifold experience of beauty or happiness when it comes from within. Only they end up displacing and marginalising that experience, producing instead a world where we stage our lives and our looks for the lens. An Instagram world, you might say.

If there’s any truth in this reading of the world, then it might sound like the beginning of a call to arms, or at least to indignation. A revolt against camera phones and beauty norms. Looking at today’s advice again, though, I wonder if the most subversive response is to take it all less seriously than that, to laugh sadly at the substitutes for beauty and happiness, and to live out love and clarity in such a way as to show that there can be a beauty and a happiness that come from within — that this is what those words once meant and can mean, even now.

Västerås, 24 April, 2020