RABINDRANATH Tagore was once asked why he constantly insisted on ignoring what was in front of his eyes and, instead, only looked at what lay beyond. Why, for instance, did he talk about the majesty of a tree and the grandeur of forests when the bark on the trunk with all its dry, desiccated and dead tissue were also there staring him in the eye? Did it not also ever merit a mention — even if in the negative? Was he not, in fact, conveniently glossing over hard reality in favour of some pretty and romantic picture? The poet’s reply was that poetry dealt with what was outside and past the obvious, otherwise it would be no different from everyday conversation or academic text.
While it’s true that without a skin-like bark which protects it from the vagaries of the surroundings by keeping life sustaining systems in and antagonistic influences out a tree would be toast, a tree’s totality — its beauty if you will — is not simply barkdeep. It goes much besides, beneath and beyond. A lyrical inward eye could see in its interior arrangement water and food conducting tissues consisting of supporting sieve tubes, fibres and cells made up of molecules, atoms and, ultimately, subatomic structures in their perpetual quantum dance. A metaphorical outward eye could look at its placement in the scheme of the setting that involves Earth, Sun, weather, animals and us.
This distancing from the immediate sensory impact point of perception becomes important if we need to see the many forests existing inside and outside of a tree or almost anything else for that matter. Like people. Or events. Or circumstances such as joy and sorrow, life and death, being and nothingness.
With our feet on the ground and our heads only slightly higher in the air its difficult to tell and easier to forget the Earth is round. About the only thing we seem to know for certain is that it’s permanent, hard and daily and sometimes, these days, perhaps a little fragile. But go a hundred km up and our relationship with it begins to look different. From orbital space the globe becomes a true sphere; from the Moon it’s a blue planet in the night sky; from Mars it’s gone into the stars. And from most anywhere beyond that, only its cosmic environment exists. That’s the whole story behind gaining perspective. If Tagore had said the poetry he liked to write was the product of his soaring perspective, he would not have been wrong at all.
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