Observation itself changes things. In Craig Vetter's words, "to observe any of this subatomic business you have to bombard the parts of the atom with rays that change what's going on, the way a flashlight beam changes the behavior of a roach work gang, so that you can't ever know what they were doing before you started looking."
Sometimes it's a matter of where you stand. My kitchen door has four panes of glass in its top half. From a certain spot, the wooden crossbar completely blocks out the street and the cars parked along it. When I stand there, I see nothing but grass in the bottom two panes and trees in the top two. All I have to do is hit my mark, as they say in the theatre, and the reward is a peaceful country scene.
When things go wrong, our first impulse is always to change the world, the people and things around us, which effort is usually doomed to futility. But sometimes it's only a matter of changing where we stand. Stance, foundation, platform, posture, attitude - all these concepts are related, and to know their secret is to know some potent voodoo.
Yet another problem of vision is the obstacle, that which obstructs the view, whether inner or outer. The obstacle may be other people: as Henry Van Dyke says, "Those who would see wonderful things must often be ready to travel alone." And even that may not be enough to ensure clear sight, given man's capacity for getting in his own way. "The artist doesn't see things, he sees himself." (William Rotsler).
And then you've got your Visionaries. When I think of Vision I think of William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne, those Irish radicals and, it goes without saying, visionaries. Utne Reader recently listed 100 contemporary examples, some quite surprising. They are absolutely correct in naming Michael Ventura a major visionary. Colin Wilson in Religion and the Rebel reports that someone asked Arnold Toynbee how to become a visionary. The answer, said the great man, is to study history.
to Vision 8
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