Contemplation, Vision, Revision

adjusting the lenses

[Image: “Eye of Maria Miles Heyward,” Edward Greene Malbone, c. 1802, courtesy of The Met’s Open Access collection, Dale T. Johnson fund, in the public domain.]

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As I said last time, I’m deep in the weeds of revision on my thesis/short story collection. So whatever else I say today will just have to be provisional and undeveloped, because all the available effort is going into making these other texts as refined as they can be.

Meanwhile, people keep on asking me for a one-line definition of contemplative realism. I keep dodging the question—dodging it to the tune of almost twenty thousand words, by now. For one thing, I’m not claiming authority over the concept, only developing it. For another, my brain dislikes one-line definitions. It resists formulae. It protests pat answers. (How then am I Catholic, you ask, and well might you. But that is kind of beside the point here. At least, it’s not what we’re presently working toward together.)

My brain likes, however, distillations. It wants frameworks. It can work with flashes of illumination. And in such a flash it came to me that contemplative realism, considered as a literary style, might be writing that encompasses both nature and supernature and achieves aesthetic justice with relation to both.

Oh for crying out loud, you’re saying to yourself now. She insists on defining one inscrutable phrase by means of another (and what an incorrigibly Catholic thing that is to do). Well, but play along for a moment: so what is this aesthetic justice we’re now invoking?

One possible definition is this: aesthetic justice* is that state of full realization in which each aspect of the external reality to which an artwork refers receives its rightful emphasis within the internal completeness of that work.

Well, okay, that sounds very craft-conscious and well-intentioned. But rightful, you’re saying: who decides what’s rightful? I mean, I know what I think is rightful, but it may not be the same as what you think is rightful, and we’re just never going to bring these lenses into total focus with one another, so we might as well not try.

Yet that is just an intellectual eyetwitch we’ve all developed in a time when people don’t tend to think any kind of universally valid truth is attainable by the human mind. I’m tired to my bones of handwringing over this limitation, which is just a condition of the contemporary moment that we have to work around. Think the position a false one all you want; I know I do. Once we’ve exhausted ourselves protesting over our false position, though, there we still are, face to face with the same situation so many others haven’t wasted any of their time and energy complaining about. And yet if we write fiction or poetry we are actually in the best possible position to address it, because we get to start with the evidence of the senses which still constitutes a kind of common ground, perhaps the last such ground available.

From this vantage, subjectivist hesitancy might just be—to mix metaphors—a tension in the hip flexor, a hitch in the gait: but one that really affects how we (intellectually) walk, how we dance, what we might want to call our minds’ athletic capacities. We are differently able, in these days, than were the writers of the past we admire. They could easily do some things we can only do with difficulty, even as we have strengthened some capacities which in them were only latent. So then, let’s try to work with the way we were trained to move: to focus first on steps we can do before we attempt feats we cannot yet perfect.

So let’s try returning to that first, visual metaphor: Could aesthetic justice be simply a matter of finding the lens that best corrects our sight? It’s such an appealing thought that I fear it won’t fully work, but let’s investigate. In order to know what kind of lens we need, we have to know what we should be seeing that we’re not. More to the point, someone else has to know what we should be seeing that we’re not—and to know that we’re not seeing it. Someone else has to check up on us.

Unless and until we receive individual attention to correct our vision—and I don’t think we sometimes appreciate how rare and marvelous a thing that is, in human history—we are not going to experience that little click inside the brain, that “oh!” of what we’ve been missing. Or to return to the metaphor of movement, we are not going to correct our athletic hitches and tensions without some kind of coaching or training.

This has a lot of evident implications, but the one most on my mind at the moment is the need for authentic human connection if we want to have any hope, even at the most basic levels, of confirming shared meaning, or of overcoming limitations that—while they might be commonplace and conventional—aren’t innate or inherent.

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*A cursory search turns up exactly one book that has this title, and it seems to mean something quite different by the phrase. Plenty of people are interested in aesthetics & justice as they intersect in many ways, evidently, but as far as I know I’m the only person using the phrase in just this way. Happy to be corrected if incorrect, though.

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