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monthly reflection on current Lapidus-related issues

May 2010

vision on a bank of violets

In spring four centuries ago the poet John Donne (1572-1631) reclined, in imagination or reality, with a lover on a bank of violets. His poem describes a state of ecstasy in which their 'eye-beams twisted, and did thread/Our eyes upon one double string'. 'The Ecstasy' was published in 'Songs and Sonnets' 1633 and in private circulation before that.

Here's our Spring: a time of movement and flux, of forward-looking and visions ahead. Freed from the clench of winter, nature opens and reveals itself, in leaf, in colour. Blossom ushers pinks and creams and dark reds into the eye's palette, scatters its confetti on windscreens, flirts with the idea of snowflakes, long gone. The small flowers peek above the earth, their shapes and details surprising - noticed or unnoticed. Uncertainty hovers in the air.

In the UK the flux and flow of human voices debating a general election have risen in crescendo. The contenders have shown their colours in their sophisticated or simplified ways. For the first time the key players have stood together on television in front of a questioning audience to be scrutinised on what they say; on how they look. Ironically, it might be said, given that 'television' means far-seeing (tele = far), this medium offers us the most immediate, up-close and surface of impressions.

Invisibility is a popular superpower, which is surprising when you consider how often humans yearn to be seen and noticed. Where health is concerned, there is a wish to be seen (on time, carefully, compassionately). Young people growing up in a celebrity-attuned culture, long to 'be famous', to be captured in the public eye.

Donne's poem draws on an Elizabethan idea that the eye functioned by emitting a 'seeing beam', rather than receiving light. His metaphor is of the lovers' eye-beams becoming entangled, and forming a place (a kind of ethereal washing-line?) where their souls intermingle and conjoin, while their bodies wait, stilled, for the new souls, purified, to re-inhabit them.

The theory of eyes emitting beams goes back to Aristotle, and generated the shadow-idea, that of malevolent eyebeams as in futuristic films. In 'Burnt Norton', T S Eliot refers to eye-beams while considering existence and how dependent it is on 'being seen', or for that matter, being recorded. How we record the narrative matters. How we see shapes what happens next.

The state of ecstasy is a spiritual experience but to be complete, says Donne, a spiritual man who became Dean of St Paul's, it must reach into the body, for the soul without the body is unable to interact with the world and is therefore in prison:

'Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book'

Violets respond well to being moved. When transplanted from one site and planted in better soil, they can gain in vigour, grow more rapidly, and even become more brilliantly coloured. Donne's poem suggests that when love brings souls together they acquire new and more energetic life.

Politicians may feel that what is on view is most important. But somewhere in the mix is a sense that what is needed is vision. Not only vision of the details in front of us (and no longer the superficial sight of their presentations on screens) but a 'bigger picture'. Donne's reflections may give us pause to consider how seeing clearly might involve different ways of looking.
© F Hamilton