It’s morning in the middle of June. It’s not quite chilly outside, out of the sun. The sky is whispering blue. The dog standing next to me has kind eyes. The people around me are enjoying themselves. So it appears. I’m considering life and the pursuit of happiness, something that I’m very fortunate to have a lot of time to do right now. I’d like to have the kind, patient eyes that this dog has. I don’t always have kind, patient eyes. I often have hunger in my eyes, impatience in my face. I believe this has something to do with seeing with an objective, rather than seeing with a view, a variety of ways of seeing. This seeing is the seeing of a bird watcher. What is this bird doing? How is it singing? What is the environment? Where are other birds? Finding birds is an objective insofar as it’s desirable, but it’s the seeing that’s the point, whether it’s through binoculars, a spotting scope, or sunglasses, perhaps even the naked rods and cones. To see is an art, beyond even a medium. A verb art form. This is the art I’d like to refine, to paint and arrange and sketch in seeing. This is not to stand back, but rather to participate, and see through being a part of from many angles: one’s own angle, the angles of others, the other angles of one, and other angles still. Sightlines as pen-tips, writing poetry as they cut across the scene. I prefer this to rallying my oneness to do a specific thing (emphasis mine and pejorative). I’d like to see in my doings, but not to see in order to do.
In that way, writing functions. It’s a doing that serves seeing and the sharing of lines of sight. It articulates the dimensions of a site, but not as a blueprint for building, rather as a mechanism for articulate the sights. I believe some architects take this in the extreme other direction: Howard Rourke is a hyperbole of a fictional nonsense commitment to doing and blindness and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (I will not provide the seeing observation of Le Moniker) made imagined visions into “real reality” to impose a way of seeing on other people. Seeing imperialism is a will similar to the “will to wall-punching when angry”; sure, a will to power might be an undeveloped human desire that can be used for “”super”” human development (double terror quotes). However, humans can willfully redevelop their will. And rather than punching walls when angry, one can see other perspectives and rather re-articulate one’s anger through seeing. Better for knuckles and architects.
I had to exercise my seeing over sight-imperial will in reading Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. My knee-jerk reaction is to build a counter-punching power-will-machine to arm wrestle against self-interested industrialists who have sprayed benzene and mercury all over the surface of the earth. But when I move my perspective back to the seeing and the observing (and bike fifty miles), I find myself seeing toward calm instead of emoting toward action. I’ll still act, but through seeing rather than by powering up. What I see are a group of individuals who have created a religion in the image of their self-interest, selling self-interest as the god particle that is the pilot light living inside each of us. That all the actions of any given person can be traced back to this god particle is the shibboleth of economists. To enable the most effectively self-interested to develop their god particle into a living godhood is the divine right of the efficacious, to these well-capitalized believers. To negotiate on any terms with these characters and their ilk is to negotiate about the existence of god with the devout; a ridiculous proposition. To fight them is to fight a religious war. To declare self-interest dead or immoral is to copy the tactics of the willing powerful. The world is not a battlefield, a stage war for wars of ideology. Rather it is a place full of birds and fish and one can see the birds and fish and people in so many ways. A place of sense experiences and many interpretations. Even if my sense experiences sometimes include a little bit of mercury due to the imperial sight-lines of a few powerful people, I can still conscientiously object to the terms of war, not just laying down my arms, but interpreting arms in as many ways as I can. I see sadness and anger and horrible childhoods and then power. The desire for control as a response to fear, loathing as a shield. Architects trying to impose their vision on the otherwise “unwashed and unworthy hordes”. How could someone deal with a position so potently “above” others than but worship naturalistic fallacies about survival and fitness and evolution and luck and hard work? Probably lots of ways. But fighting against ideas is far less attractive to me than finding new ways of seeing what’s happening. I understand why people fight, though.
Roman Ryan 