The art of long looking

SPEAKING of surge, there is a tsunami that is about to overwhelm us. It’s the digital wave that is carrying us to another world and another kind of life, accelerated by the pandemic.

Just look around. Our new world is restlessly moving at what someone describes as “twitch speed.” It is now normal for us to have instantaneous access to information, goods and services at the click of a mouse. We can communicate with anyone or anything at anytime, anywhere day or night.

Information is shared so rapidly that an image can get viral in a matter of seconds. Send a message on social media, and immediately you get comments from people, some so ridiculous that it is obvious they never bothered to think first before clicking.

Our children are the Instant Messenger generation that has virtual access to friends, games, music, movies, shopping and tens of thousands of online sites.

So much to access, so little time. Waiting is now fast becoming a thing of the past. We are being transformed into a society that is increasingly expecting, wanting and demanding instant gratification. My techie friends tell me that 5G, the fifth generation of the Internet, will be even 100 times faster and will transform both our professional and personal lives by enabling new use cases like connective vehicles, Augmented Reality and enhanced video and gaming.

Our kids are being visually bombarded with simultaneous images, text and sounds, faster than they can absorb them. They are getting compelling experiences that can convey more information in a few seconds than can be communicated by reading an entire book. This is one of the reasons why it’s harder and harder to get children to read today. Reading is a delayed gratification medium while TV, video games and the Internet are immediate gratification media.

No wonder my wife complains that she cannot share my writings with her socmed friends because they are too long. Nobody likes to read long text anymore, she keeps telling me. Even on Facebook, one never gets “likes” when the message has a lot of words. Look at Twitter she points out, the number of words you can say are limited.

The irony is that as an advertising copywriter for many years, I used to write copy for commercials and print ads that had to be short. In fact, the shorter, the better. Our mantra then was: no polysyllabic words, please. “Brevity is the soul of wit” was the terse lesson I imparted to junior copywriters who came after me. The more conversational and colloquial, the better. And don’t forget, active tense not passive tense.

Even novelists who write words copiously seem to be having this problem. In an interview I chanced upon, the novelist Martin Amis says: “The novel has had to speed itself up—in answer to an accelerated reality. Saul Bellow’ s Humboldt’ s Gift—long, static, and digressive— spent several months as a best seller in the 1970s. That audience has more or less disappeared.”

Did Amis say “disappeared” as in vanished? At a time when I am just feeling my stride?

Perhaps I have turned into an anomaly or an anachronism or at best a contrarian in an emerging world of accelerated reality. I find myself writing long sentences, complex sentences, compound sentences. I cannot help but pour out my thoughts and feelings in torrents. Is it my revenge against the time I was constrained to condense a message in 70 words or less?

I am now reading books that are “long and static.” I don’t rush through a book. I savor the words and the sentences, discovering the nuances of their sound and sense.

My preference for films are the ones that focus on character development, such as the films of Yasujiro Ozu or Ingmar Bergman or other masters of the long-lasting shot. In their films, characters enter frame and move to and fro and exit frame and then the camera stays for a few seconds more on the empty scene.

This is quite the opposite of what my wife and kids prefer, which is fast-paced action thrillers where every sequence is an actionfilled set piece of slam-bang action with spectacular special effects and soaring soundtracks.

I specially love documentaries that let lingering visuals tell the story of a place with minimal voiced over narration.

The images in these films are almost like still photographs or slides or paintings that one must look at for a long time and let them come to you, wash over you, go and penetrate through you. Have you met someone who gives you that long penetrating discomfiting gaze, as if he could see through you? That is the art of long looking. This art is achieved through the cultivation of the practice or discipline of attention. It requires time and mindful long looking. It means that you have to consciously notice what is happening on a painting or a screen so that you don’t miss a clue or an epiphany. While reading books, you don’t scan the pages. You note the words in every page; see them in context, and the meanings behind them. It’s slow reading, but much like a food or a wine connoisseur, I get to discern and relish the full flavor of the words and phrases on my mental palate. I don’t mind going back to the early pages for passages that could shed more light on the character or the incident in the later pages.

Art critic Roger Housden is a practitioner of this art of contemplative viewing. He doesn’t just look at paintings, he savors them as reflects on what he perceives in them and takes his appreciation to another level. For instance, he can discern the light that seeps out of the darkness in so many of Rembrandt’s paintings. He admires the incomparable beauty that the artist reveals in the human body, whether the subject is a young child or an elderly man. He tries to imagine how Rembrandt, as a collector of curios and exotica, lavished attention, and maybe even adoration, on these objects that then inspired paintings. He respects the artist’s soulfulness, his reverence for the world of spirit and the remarkable qualities of ordinary people. And he praises Rembrandt’s extraordinary religious art, especially those Biblical paintings designed to “inspire a mood of interior reflection rather than to tell a story.”

Housden explains: “It’s too easy to treat paintings like illustrations or pieces of prose that are merely meant to convey a message. But paintings aren’t prose pieces. They are poetry transposed into paint. They speak through metaphor. And we need time to let those metaphors slip through our preconceptions and reach us below the level of words and meanings.”

For him, there is more than meets the eye: “These varied and poignant explorations of the artist’s many selves are portals through which we may enter and see afresh our own joy and sadness, success and defeat, faith and foolhardiness; suddenly find yourself blown into a world full of awe, dread, wonder, marvel, deep sorrow, and joy.” He wants us to value these works as timeless creations that embrace matter and “reach into territory that lies just beyond our conscious experience.”

I may not go as deep as Mr. Housden in my casual practice of contemplative looking, but I agree that long looking or repeated looking can reveal many things such as little slice-of-life images where God is in the details. For instance, as I watched a documentary on birds just this morning, I cannot but experience feelings of awe and marvel in divine creation as the camera lingersonthekaleidoscopeofplumages, shapes and sizes and the sonic diversity of singing and chirping.

But alas, such details are being missed by a world that is moving at the speed of touch and click in which people have trained their eyes to surf only over the surface of reality. In our adrenaline rush to get to the next task or appointment, we no longer can afford to pause and put the world on hold.

As for me, I’m letting so-called “accelerated reality” pass me by since after all my life is already at its last lap. Call me slow poke, lingerer or quirky. But just go ahead without me. Leave me be to devote my remaining time to the quiet art of long looking.

Or you can join me in practicing the art of contemplative seeing and long looking. Just don’t do it on someone, or she might freak out.

What have you seen or read today? Pay close attention to the image or the sentence. How does it touch your senses; what emotions does it evoke? Perceive the meanings that come to you as you watch or read. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. It is simply about feeling, sensing, noticing, and being present to the moment and keeping your mind open to epiphanies, no matter how small.

When eye and mind are in the same place, life becomes more fully vivid moment by moment.