And yet it is not he who really catches our eye; it is the man in front of him, who seems to be stopped, or twisting, or falling backwards – a ricochet man, as if Francis Bacon had painted him. The foremost man has been stopped in his tracks by something so forceful – we presume a bullet – that, as his body reels backwards, his clothes have yet to get the message that the advance is over. The man’s body is dying, but his clothes are still living. We connect the body and the clothes. We notice the difference between them.
As we look at this image we look into movement, into time and death. The man is a French soldier. We are in Verdun in the northeast of the country, in 1916, during a 303-day battle in which an estimated 714,231 men died, as our man seems to be dying. Even his moment seems to defy gravity or space – that contortion, that blur. We look into his face in this image, and what do we see there? The pity of war distilled? Or a guy in his twenties, with a moustache, who had a life back home, but which is expiring as we look at him?
This image sucks us in. It is easier to look at it when we hear that, despite often being published as a photograph of a real soldier dying in Verdun, it is actually from a re-enacted movie, Verdun, souvenirs d’histoire, released fifteen years later. So much about the image convinces us that it is not fifteen years later, that it is from 1916, and a split second in 1916. More than anything, what convinces us is the motion blur, which is the shot’s relevance here. If we had been in Verdun, our eyes would have been darting all over the place, to look for safety, to try to get a sense of the atrocity. And yet it is unlikely that, as a result of such rapid, zigzagging looking, we would have experienced motion sickness.
Look up from this book, and then around you. Connect your reading world with the world that immediately surrounds you as you read. Let your eyes dart about. In doing so you will take in several visual moments per second, yet this will not disorient you. When we first film moving imagery, with a video camera or mobile phone, we tend to pan the camera in a similar way, quickly and from one moment to the next, but when we look back at it we are struck by how wobbly it seems, how uncomfortable it is to watch such movement. The camera is right; everyday looking is jerky, it is an accumulation of rapid visual impressions that should overwhelm us. And yet they do not, because our brain learns to compensate for the motion blur. It is a great image stabiliser. On the savannah grasslands, our hunting ancestors might have seen a zebra they have speared suddenly reel and die, the way the Verdun soldier reels. Their brains would have stabilised the image.
Perhaps our brains are too good at this. There is nothing stable about a man dying from a gunshot on one of history’s worst battlefields, so the image overleaf is right to be unstable, blurred. And in the twentieth century, painters sought new ways of depicting motion seen by a static observer. Life was speeding up, especially in cities, so in this painting, The Cyclist, completed three years before Verdun, Russian Futurist Natalia Goncharova gave the front wheel three visual echoes, the back wheel four and the man’s back four.
Things this fast, she is saying, would be in more than one place at once in the painting. They connect several spaces. We see where the cyclist is, but also where he was. The composite image, the layered looking, allows us to see movement.
LOOKING AND LANDSCAPE
Our baby grows up. History moves on. Imagine, now, that we are looking through the eyes of this child strapped to her father’s back in a Mexican sculpture from CE 900. She looks up and smiles.
As her father walks, she sees movement. She has seen a lot, this kid. The world has pulled into focus for her, and become chromatic. She can easily track her parents’ movements now, and has seen distance and looked into the eyes of animals. Her brain has learnt how to stabilise movement. Her looking life is well under way. Next we should consider her encounter with the visual world of emotions, but before we do so, let’s have an interlude, as journeys have interludes. Let’s imagine her seeing the natural world’s tableaux, what we call landscapes. As she is jogged along on her father’s back, or around his shoulders, she will see such tableaux, this girl – growing spaces that have form. She will be on a guided tour of the visible world. At first she might see like this:
Beneath growing things, which will give her a sense that these yellow flowers are reaching. When she sees this . . .
. . . she will feel that everything – the thistles, the trees – is reaching that upwardness in nature that we will see all our lives.
She will notice gradation in colour and space. She will begin to feel extended by these landscapes.
And that snow, when she first sees it, is like a beach in that it reflects light upwards, under her chin.
She will see that in nature there are accidents of positioning and colour, which you could call form.
In her life, she will sometimes encounter form in nature that will astonish her because of its symmetry or fanning, its design and display.
She will start to notice how colour and space combine with form and light.
And will perhaps think that she is in the most splendid place in the world.
But there will be more. She will happen upon sheep by a river, which kick up dust in a way that will remind her of all sorts of looking – into a goat’s eyes, Leonardo’s sfumato, Goethe’s colour wheel.
And, on that savannah, she might glimpse her future solitude.
In doing so, in seeing her emotions symbolised or reflected in things outside herself which are, in reality, indifferent to those emotions, she will be projecting. She will be connecting to the tableaux of the natural world. Throwing a line from our inner world onto the outer world, like a boat throws a line onto the dock as it arrives in harbour, is something people will always do. It is what E.M. Forster meant when he wrote ‘only connect’.
If we do not grow up in a city, and are alert whilst looking at the natural world, we will come to learn how to read a landscape, its habits and revelations: the green flash at sunset; the fact that if you lie on your belly to watch the sun dip below the horizon, then jump up exactly as it does so and you see another moment of it, you are proving that the Earth curves; a holly bush is less prickly at the top because its grazers cannot reach up there; hydrangeas change colour, from blue in acid soil to pink if the ground becomes more alkaline; if you see a secondary rainbow, its colour sequence will be the opposite of the first one; shadows are always slightly blue because they are gently lit by the blue light from the sky; when the Moon is a crescent and if we can see the pale remainder of it, we do so because