musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Presume not that I am the thing I was.


There are fleeting moments when, far from becoming more clear, they shimmer with meaning not shape, appreciation not fact; they cease to be describable in numbers, or equations; the very fact of their existence is a revelation, a mystery: a glimpse just outside a border; an unrepeatable event, new each time it occurs…

‘It is  not a factual truth -a truth of accountants- but an ecstatic truth that evokes the mystery of existence.[i] The word comes from the Greek ekstasis, ‘to stand outside oneself’. Ecstatic truth takes us out of ourselves; it hints at an excess of meaning, over and above what we might otherwise reduce to plain statements of fact. It is a singular event that transcends any particular interpretation.’ 

I suppose that such moments are what poets attempt to reach with metaphors, and that visual artists try to represent: such glimpses are more real than real. ‘Merely in pointing out the fact of the world’s intelligibility, we are touching an ecstatic truth behind all fact and reason. We can count and measure things, and thereby reduce them to mere objects to be tagged and classified, but we can do this only because the things are there to be counted and measured, inexplicably.’

Of course, many would argue that the ordinary ‘truth of accountants’ is more fundamental than ecstatic truth, which relies heavily on perception, interpretation and subjective feeling. Yet this misses the reality that art, poetry, or the world discloses.

When I was a child, I remember being fascinated by magnifying glasses. Although I suppose the ability to burn holes in paper contributed to my enjoyment, it was really something else that captured me: discovering a new world. Printed letters in my books fragmented into little particles when highly magnified; stripped somehow of their meaning, they occupied a different realm: no longer letters, they were just, well, dark splotches that were coaxed into letters only when I looked with my unaided eyes. It occurred to me that their existence as a letter, a word, had been stripped away through the glass: transformed. It opened a new and unexpected world for me: things were not always how they seemed -or were perhaps more than they seemed.

Were the component parts of some things forever changing depending on how closely, or distantly I examined them? What, in other words, was real? At what point could I consider them to be magic? It’s interesting how things which the rest of us have come to accept, are questioned by a child.

The article I have just been quoting about the effect of Art, or metaphors, on who we are as humans, reminded me of those childish questions I asked with the magnifying glass. At what point in our development as Homo sapiens, do we begin to prioritize the ‘truth of accountants’ over the radical mystery that every event, by its mere occurrence, confirms? The magic that every child wants to believe? When do we fail to prioritize the gift of clouds on the horizon glowing like embers at sunset? When do we begin to file such things away as simply interesting, and then smile and get on with our still-busy evening?

But back to the article. There different kinds of beauty -different truths: ‘the beauty of the geometers’ whose properties are said to cause aesthetic pleasure by their symmetry, harmony, proportion, regularity and so on. And then there is a different beauty:  another beauty, ‘this one immeasurable because it inheres not in regularity and generality but in the qualitative, the singular, the eventful, the unrepeatable, even the monstrous: beauty as the ecstasy of the strange and the new.’ These two beauties are interdependent, in fact: their contrast makes us aware of just how unique some things like a beautiful sunset, or the colours of autumn leaves on a distant hill really are… especially if we come upon them without warning. Our realization is often sudden, and unexpected; the initial emotions, the sudden flush of euphoria created are not the same each time; they may be re-assigned to the ‘isn’t that nice’ list in our head and we move onto something else.

‘In beauty, we encounter a gap between what we expect to find in a material universe governed by physical laws – and what we actually find there, however rarely… More astounding than the fact that a world exists at all is the fact that the existing world should be so full of wonder and strangeness, because each instance of wonder or strangeness prevents the calculating intellect from clamping down on things and persuading us that we have figured them out.’

Art, and by analogy Poetry, to be truly meaningful, should do more than only represent Nature because representing is merely reproducing, changing nothing. Rather, ‘proper art participates in the mystery of creation itself, the process through which the world emerges anew from the womb of nature at each moment.’

I am fascinated by the view of the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. He referred to some things as natura naturans: the world of things in the making, ‘the living movement by which all things come to be as events before they can be rendered as facts. It is not causal in the mechanical sense, but purely and bafflingly creative.’ It is what a forest with its greenery sparkling on a mountain in the sun after a rain becomes in that magic moment when it is first noticed. It is almost a thing-in-the-making rather than a thing-made.

The magnifying glass in my childish hands revealed yet another world-in-the-making I think. The initial astonishment as I witnessed it for the first time, was an ecstasy -an ekstasis, perhaps: a realization that there were worlds around me I had never imagined. And as that initial flush of wonder faded, I grew to expect such transformations and, for a while, re-entered ‘the world of the accountants’ again.

But it did not last, it could not last- not while there were sunsets, and the roar of ocean waves beckoning me to experience them again and again. Presume not that I am the thing I was… I could never be that thing for long…

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/humans-did-not-invent-art-it-was-the-other-way-around

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