Life’s Dim Windows
Life’s Dim Windows
William Blake long ago warned us about the vulnerability of the eye when he said:
This life’s five windows of the soul
Distorts the Heavens from pole to pole,
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not thro’ the eye.1
We are intended to see through the eye, with the conscience. Instead, the visual media, especially television and movies, manipulates us into seeing with the eye, devoid of the conscience, whose role it is to place parameters around what we see. The supremacy of the eye-gate makes it easy to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.
Seeing is believing, it is said. But by seeing something only in its narrow sense, one may miss the big picture and believe something that is actually not true. And that belief, even though it may be false, may become the generator of culture and national mood.
What is it about television and movies that makes them both attractive and dangerous? In so many ways, television is truly a fantastic medium. Which of us who watched the first landing on the moon can ever forget the awe-inspiring sight? How incredible it is that we can sit at home and watch some of the greatest performers, as if they were in our own living rooms! The experience of being able to watch a great sporting event or national and world event such as a royal wedding or the funeral of a great leader or a national memorial service is a memory that lasts forever. It allows the imagination to soar and gives wings to dreams. The imagination is one of the most vulnerable, though fascinating, faculties that we humans have. Nothing better describes the beauty and vulnerability of the human imagination than the song written and sung by John Lennon years ago, “Imagine.” He wanted us to imagine no heaven, no hell, no countries, and no religion. No, he said, he was not a dreamer, just offering possibilities.
Anyone who has heard the song cannot help but stop and hum the tune as they read these words, and even hear Lennon’s voice in the words. It’s a beautiful, haunting melody… especially after sitting through the daily news and wondering when all the strife will end. When you think about it, why did he need all those descriptions about an ideal world? Why not just one or two lines? A world without killing and all of us living as one—that’s the dream, isn’t it? Who can take issue with that? And nothing could have been more instrumental in killing the dream than the senseless killing of Lennon himself at the hands of an assassin. English journalist Steve Turner writes of Lennon’s brief struggle with Christianity, a struggle that his wife, Yoko, strongly influenced him against and toward magical stones and astrology instead.2
Isn’t it interesting that no astrologer was able to warn him and protect him from that fateful day? Just because Lennon could imagine such a world doesn’t mean that it exists, or that there is any chance of it existing. Just because he wanted to believe in such a world didn’t make it real, even for him. And here is the contradiction: He imagined a pure world without any ultimate reason for life and destiny. He amputated accountability but wished for a world of responsibility. That’s the privilege of music… it doesn’t have to justify its flawed reasoning.
Fame, fortune, and adulation are generally based on measurements that serve only to disfigure reality and make the imagination king over common sense. Common sense ought to tell us that there is no guarantee that a person with a gifted voice and musical genius is any better a person than someone who cannot sing or write music. Common sense ought to tell us that a world without heaven or hell in the future generally leads to one or the other in this world. But a gifted voice and an errant imagination can angle a lie to fit into the worldview one wants to believe.
It has been said that at first art imitates life. Then, life imitates art. Finally, life finds the very reason for its existence in the arts. This visual medium of television was catapulted into our private living space via electronic advances and we understood its power very little. I believe that this medium was a key means by which the truth came to be seen as a lie.