Contemplation as Rebellion

The case for unenchantment.

This is the third installment of my series Seeing Things. In the first installment, also titled “Seeing Things,” I discussed how the contemplative gaze can be both aesthetic and interpretive. In the second installment, “Restoration of the Demon,” I looked at the contemporary phenomenon of re-enchantment. Here, I try to weave the threads together.

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Winslow Homer, Artists Sketching in the White Mountains

The middle section of Seamus Heaney’s triptych “Seeing Things,” the title poem of his 1991 collection, finds the poet contemplating the exterior of an unnamed cathedral. He discovers, carved into the stone facade, a representation of Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River. He looks closely at the sculpture-in-relief, amazed at the artist’s skill in evoking water from rock:

                                               Lines
Hard and thin and sinuous represent
The flowing river. Down between the lines
Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.

As he continues to gaze at the carving — he spends “all afternoon” on the cathedral’s steps — his memory and imagination begin to work on the sculptor’s art, adding to it, deepening it, transforming it. Across the ages, viewer and artist collaborate in an act of re-creation. The “nothing else” becomes much else:

The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:
Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,
The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.

In Heaney’s quiet epiphany, the two seemingly opposed meanings of the phrase seeing things — seeing what’s there and seeing what’s not there — come together in a single act of perception.

What Heaney experiences in looking closely at the relief is the same mode of vision that Antonio Muñoz Molina displays and celebrates in “Imagining the Real,” his Prado lecture. “You must stand a long time”: Muñoz uses that phrase twice in the lecture’s opening paragraph, as he begins his lengthy discussion of the layers of meaning to be found in Joachim Patinir’s oil painting Rest on the Flight into Egypt. The repetition is deliberate. He’s establishing at the outset the posture that will characterize everything he says about Patinir’s work. His stance as a viewer — patient, unhurried, careful, curious — mirrors the posture of the artist himself. A painter has to stand a long time at his easel to paint a painting, Muñoz is saying, and we, as viewers, have to stand a long time to see it.

Muñoz’s lecture is itself a long and challenging one. He had to spend a long time at the lectern to deliver it, and the audience had to sit a long time in their chairs to hear it. The reader of the transcript, too, has to devote a long time to reading it. What we have here is a kind of reciprocity of courtesies. The paying of attention — to a painting, to a lecture, to an essay, to a person, to anything — is also always a paying of courtesy. In paying attention we pay respect.

In emphasizing the amount of time needed to see a painting in full, Muñoz offers an implicit critique of contemporary culture. The critique becomes explicit, or nearly so, a little later in the lecture when Muñoz discusses the “interactivity” of the patient, contemplative gaze:

In this Rest on the Flight into Egypt, our gaze and our imagination rest on the ground of the real. We should be allowed to sit down in front of a painting in order to look at it unhurriedly. Then we, too, could rest from our wanderings through the museum. The very stillness of the painting presents us with a kind of challenge. It provides what we would now call an interactive experience, except one that employs the cutting-edge technology of the early sixteenth century.

The implied contrast between the sixteenth-century media technology of paint and panel — a technology of “stillness” — and our own twenty-first century media technology of computer and screen — a technology of busyness — is sharp. The much-applauded interactivity of today’s media is an illusion, a trick and a trap. In pushing us to assume a harried, impatient posture of perception, reflexive rather than reflective, the screen is really a means of avoiding the kind of deep intellectual and emotional engagement that Heaney and Muñoz experience. We might today be quick to characterize their posture of calm, steady observation as “passive,” but as Muñoz makes clear, it’s anything but. It’s only through the contemplative gaze that we activate our sensory, imaginative, and interpretive faculties to the fullest, that we become most in touch with the world.

Although this sort of gaze is aesthetic, it need not be aimed at a work of art. It is also a way of seeing, and re-creating through memory and imagination, the natural world. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in a remarkable entry in his journals, describes how, by attending to his immediate surroundings with all his senses, he gains access to the “emotions, ideas, associations, which flow through the haunted regions of imagination, intellect, and sentiment.” It’s worth quoting the entry at length.

I sat down to-day, at about ten o'clock in the forenoon, in Sleepy Hollow, — a shallow space scooped out among the woods, which surround it on all sides, it being pretty nearly circular, or oval, and two or three hundred yards in diameter. The present season, a thriving field of Indian corn, now in its most perfect growth, and tasselled out, occupies nearly half the hollow; and it is like the lap of bounteous Nature, filled with breadstuff. On one verge of the hollow, skirting it, is a terraced pathway, broad enough for a wheel-track, overshadowed with oaks, stretching their long, knotted, rude, rough arms between earth and sky; the gray skeletons, as you look upward, are strikingly prominent amid the green foliage. Likewise there are chestnuts, growing up in a more regular and pyramidal shape; white pines also; and a shrubbery composed of the shoots of all these trees, overspreading and softening the bank on which the parent stems are growing; — these latter being intermingled with coarse grass. Observe the pathway; it is strewn over with little bits of dry twigs and decayed branches, and the brown oak leaves of last year, that have been moistened by snow and rain, and whirled about by winds, since their departed verdure; the needle-like leaves of the pine, that we never noticed in falling, — that fall, yet never leave the tree bare; and with these are pebbles, the remains of what was once a gravelled surface, but which the soil accumulating from the decay of leaves, and washing down from the bank, has now almost covered. The sunshine comes down on the pathway with the bright glow of noon, at certain points; in other places there is a shadow as deep as the glow; but along the greater portion sunshine glimmers through shadow, and shadow effaces sunshine, imaging that pleasant mood of mind where gayety and pensiveness intermingle. A bird is chirping overhead among the branches, but exactly whereabout, you seek in vain to determine; indeed, you hear the rustle of the leaves, as he continually changes his position. A little sparrow now hops into view, alighting on the slenderest twigs, and seemingly delighting in the swinging and heaving motion, which his slight substance communicates to them; but he is not the loquacious bird whose voice still comes, eager and busy, from his hidden whereabout. Insects are fluttering about. The cheerful, sunny hum of flies is altogether summer-like, and so gladsome that you pardon them their intrusiveness and impertinence, which continually impels them to fly against your face, to alight upon your hands, and to buzz in your very ear, as if they wished to get into your head, among your most secret thoughts. In fact, a fly is the most impertinent and indelicate thing in creation,—the very type and moral of human spirits whom one occasionally meets with, and who perhaps, after an existence troublesome and vexatious to all with whom they come in contact, have been doomed to reappear in this congenial shape. Here is one intent upon alighting on my nose. In a room, now, — in a human habitation, — I could find in my conscience to put him to death; but here we have intruded upon his own domain, which he holds in common with all the children of earth and air, and we have no right to slay him on his own ground. Now we look about us more minutely, and observe that the acorn-cups of last year are strewn plentifully on the bank and on the path; there is always pleasure in examining an acorn-cup, perhaps associated with fairy banquets, where they are said to compose the table-service. Here, too, are those balls which grow as excrescences on the leaves of the oak, and which young kittens love so well to play with, rolling them on the carpet. We see mosses, likewise, growing on the banks, in as great variety as the trees of the wood. And how strange is the gradual process with which we detect objects that are right before the eyes! Here now are whortleberries, ripe and black, growing actually within reach of my hand, yet unseen till this moment. Were we to sit here all day, a week, a month, and doubtless a lifetime, objects would thus still be presenting themselves as new, though there would seem to be no reason why we should not have detected them at the first moment.

Now a catbird is mewing at no great distance. Then the shadow of a bird flitted across a sunny spot: there is a peculiar impressiveness in this mode of being made acquainted with the flight of a bird; it affects the mind more than if the eye had actually seen it. As we look round to catch a glimpse of the winged creature, we behold the living blue of the sky, and the brilliant disc of the sun, broken and made tolerable to the eye by the intervening foliage. Now, when you are not thinking of it, the fragrance of the white pines is suddenly wafted to you by an almost imperceptible breeze, which has begun to stir. Now the breeze is the gentlest sigh imaginable, yet with a spiritual potency, insomuch that it seems to penetrate, with its mild, ethereal coolness, through the outward clay, and breathe upon the spirit itself, which shivers with gentle delight. Now the breeze strengthens, so much as to shake all the leaves, making them rustle sharply; but it has lost its most ethereal power. And now, again, the shadows of the boughs lie as motionless as if they were painted on the pathway. Now, in the stillness, is heard the long, melancholy note of a bird, complaining alone, of some wrong or sorrow that man, or her own kind, or the immitigable doom of mortal affairs, has inflicted upon her, the complaining but unresisting sufferer.

Hawthorne continues in this vein for a few hundred more words before ending his entry on a slyly apologetic note: “How narrow, scanty, and meagre is this record of observation, compared with the immensity of what was to be observed.”

The writer’s sensory perception of the world is pre-verbal, and in recording it in words, he knows he is creating a representation — an image — of the experience that is necessarily reductive. Yet, and at the same time, the representation is wildly expansive. Hawthorne’s contemplative gaze adds to and deepens the natural scene, transforming it just as Heaney’s gaze transforms the cathedral sculpture. The image Hawthorne creates with his pen is utterly unlike what Jean Baudrillard’s “evil demon of images” creates. Indeed, Hawthorne’s work, resting firmly on what Muñoz calls “the ground of the real,” is a rebuke to the demon of images — the demon of the screen, the demon of hyperreality, the resident demon of our time. Contemplation is rebellion.

In his recent essay “If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You’re Not Paying Attention,”

L. M. Sacasas

describes the posture of deep attentiveness well:

This form of attention and the knowledge it yields not only elicits more of the world, it elicits more of us. In waiting on the world in this way, applying time and strategic patience in the spirit of invitation, we draw out and are drawn out in turn. As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it, we may also find that we ourselves are also extended, that is to say that our consciousness is stretched and deepened.

Even as I find Sacasas’s essay inspiring, I find it troubling. The way he frames the contemplative gaze as a means of re-enchantment makes me uncomfortable. An enchanted world is, by definition, a world that presents a false front to us — a front composed of what Sacasas terms, at the end of his essay, “mere things.” To see what’s really there in an enchanted world, you need to see beyond or through the surface. You need to discover what’s hidden, what’s concealed, by the merely material form, and that requires something more than sensory perception. It requires extrasensory perception. In this framing, the contemplative gaze is not just unlocking what lies untapped within us — the powers of perception, imagination, interpretation — but also exposing some spiritual essence that lies hidden within the object of the gaze.

The issue I take with Sacasas’s essay is not a matter of sense — I’m pretty sure we’re talking about the same perceptual phenomenon — but of wording. When he suggests that “enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention,” he’s muddying the waters. When we look at the quality of attention demonstrated by Heaney, Muñoz, and Hawthorne, we’re not seeing enchantment. We’re seeing an exquisite openness to the real. A sense of wonder does not require a world infused with spirit. The world as it is is sufficient. The reason the wording matters here is simple. What bedevils our perceptions today isn’t a lack of enchantment. It’s a lack of reality.

“Things change according to the stance we adopt towards them, the type of attention we pay to them,”

Iain McGilchrist

wrote in The Master and His Emissary. He’s right, but it’s important to recognize that the changes take place in the mind of the observer not in the things themselves. The things, whether works of art or of nature, have a material integrity that’s independent of our own thoughts and desires, and the stance we adopt toward them should entail a respect for that integrity.

The desire to re-enchant the world may seem like an act of humility, a way of paying tribute to the world’s unseen powers, but too often it’s the opposite, an act of hubris. In demanding that the world hold greater meaning for us, that it be a reservoir for the fulfillment of our own spiritual yearnings, we are attempting yet again to impose our will on the world, to turn its myriad material forms to our own purposes, to make it our mirror. Whatever enchantment may once have been, re-enchantment often becomes a power play.¹

It’s interesting that, in the English language, we have enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment. What we don’t have is unenchantment. A state of disenchantment is by definition a state of loss, one that begs to be remedied by a process of re-enchantment. A state of unenchantment presumes no loss and requires no remedy. It is a state that is entirely happy with the thinginess of things. So let me, by fiat, introduce unenchantment into the language. And let me suggest that the contemplative gaze is best when it is an unenchanted gaze.

1. [2/27/25] I edited this paragraph slightly to soften it. In its original form, I realized, it made too large a generalization about the motives of re-enchanters.