Day 39: The Tao of Seeing

TAO

Proust was often engrossed by things he encountered, rendered oblivious to the world around him. His close friend and sometime lover, Reynaldo Hahn, were walking through the garden of a Château when Proust stopped dead before a rosebush, taken suddenly by something he saw. He sent Hahn to continue on, and, when he returned sometime later, found Marcel still there, entranced, “...his head tilting forward, his face very serious, he blinked, his eyebrows slightly furrowed as though from a passionate act of attention, and with his left hand he was obstinately pushing the end of his little black mustache between his lips and nibbling on it.... How many times I’ve observed Marcel in these mysterious moments in which he was communicating totally with nature, with art, with life, in these ‘deep minutes’ in which his entire being was concentrated....” (White, p.6)

This kind of seeing, so deep, so profound, drinking, tasting, touching, feeling the pure essence of a thing, I feel, is what makes Proust’s writing so magnificent and astonishing, the unique and breathtaking way he is able to take the most mundane things and, through such intense and insightful observation, infuse them with such wonder and magic.

For example, his description of the memorial stones at the church in Combray, “...beneath which the noble dust of the Abbots of Combray who lay buried there furnished the choir with a sort of spiritual pavement, were themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter, for time had softened them and made them flow like honey beyond their proper margins, here oozing out in a golden stream, washing from its place a florid Gothic capital, drowning the white violets of the marble floor, and elsewhere reabsorbed into their limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest were disproportionately distended.”

This tao of seeing is something I think we lose to a certain degree when we obtain language, as we then rely on words to describe things, thus losing the wordless essence of that thing, which is inexorably linked to base sensations, particularly smell and taste, rather than cognition.

I use the word “tao” because it is, paradoxically, a word used to describe the indescribable. From both Chinese (tao - pronounced 'dao') and Japanese (dô), it can be translated loosely as “the way,” or “the path.” However, in such Japanese words as sadô (the way of tea)  and shôdô (the way of calligraphy)  or iaidô (the way of the sword), “the way” is something completely intangible, which can only be fully comprehended by losing the “self” and becoming the essence of tea, becoming the brush, becoming the sword....

Mon dieu!!!  I am waxing philosophical!! Must be all the drugs I’m taking for my cold.... Although, I guess I am not that far afield, really. Proust certainly had a way of communing with the world and people around him which he was then able to absorb and crystalize, like the varnish in the stairwell of his house, and transmit back to us.

I’d love to hear your thoughts....

À bientôt,

Michel