This week there’s a full lunar eclipse during the full moon, in the early hours on May 16, partially visible from higher ground in Europe and more fully visible in the Americas. The effects of the moon on the tides are irrefutable. The effects on people are more disputed, though anecdotally significant, but on birds the effects are remarkable. Moonlight has a large and immediate impact on the altitude at which birds fly at night. Swifts, for instance, climb to great altitudes and hunt insects by moonlight—during a lunar eclipse they make dramatic dives to lower altitudes. Many species synchronise their breeding by the phase of the moon so a lunar eclipse throws off this pattern. Other species forage by the light of the moon and are most active around the full moon, so again an eclipse cuts across this rhythm.

Living with more and more artificial light across the centuries has  no doubt made the human species less and less attuned to the moon and its phases. Many of us are also less attuned to the rhythms of daylight and darkness that once made a difference to how our ancestors shaped their days and nights.

Modern living comes with fewer fluctuations in how we need to shift perspective in order to connect with the natural environments that we are part of. Yet these shifts in rhythm, while they might have ruffled the rhythm of life and decentred our ancestors to some degree, provide a metaphor for the huge shifts in perception that are vital to how we make our way through life that is always in flux.

Writing from decentred place

Some people dwell on the land that their ancestors lived on a hundred, two hundred … centuries ago. Some of us have to go back to the ice age before there is a story (now become a hazy legend) of major movement. But most of us have more recent tales of movement in the lives of our families or in how we got to the place we inhabit today. Some of these movements are to do with aspiration and choice, some compelled by economic or political pressures, some by the relationships we make…

For a myriad of reasons we find ourselves dwelling on the land of other people’s ancestors and there is always a process of decentring in this. We might find ourselves in some way on the margins, not quite belonging, not catching all the cultural nuances and without the full range of support systems that we rely on the make sense of who we are in a particular place.

In the mid 50s,  Etel Adnan, a Lebanese writer, artist and philosopher whose mother was Greek and father Labanese, and who was educated in France, moved to California to lecture in philosophy. In Journey to Mount Tamalpais she explores, in an exquisite books that sits between essay and prose poetry, how she falls in love with a mountain as an immigrant, how:

geographic spots become spiritual concepts.

In the commentary on the book Omar Berrada notes:

aesthetic thought is based in perception … (and) perception is incomplete without practice.

For Adnan the practice became painting:

To see in order to paint. To paint in order to see.

And Berrada goes on

She expanded it into a method for bearing witness to the undying vibrancy of all things.

Decentred, she learns how to see, how to perceive and connect deeply and how to make her art from this.

Writing from decentred otherness

The poet, singer-songwriter and photographer, Patti Smith, explores this process of decentring not as an immigrant but as a traveller in her remarkable memoir, M Train. Her writing and photography imbue ordinary places with an extraordinary aura because of how she sees them. Under her gaze, places that are either overlooked or that are preserved in cultural aspic, in such a way that there power is anaesthetised, are filled with numinous meaning. A boardwalk at Rockaway beach, Sylvia Plath’s gravestone, Frida Kahlo’s bed…

Both Adnan and Smith are artists who move easily between words and images and, in their meditative witnessing, they are concerned with the kind of perception that requires deep, sustained attention. This is attention so acute that the boundaries between subject and object blur.

Reading both of them, I was reminded of how the poet and paleolithic researcher, Clayton Eshleman developed a mytho-poetic thesis, in his cross-genre book Juniper Fuse, that the modern mind began in the process of the early humans separating out of the animal and natural world. He believed that the repression of the animal within led, by tiny but certain increments, to the repression of animals and the natural without, speculating that over millennia a fecund underworld transformed into myths of a Dantean Hell that has since surfaced in horrific events like the Shoah, Hiroshima or the mass extinction event humanity is currently visiting on the earth.

It seemed to me that artists with the acuity of Adnan and Smith have the ability, for the brief spell cast by their images and words, to take us back to a moment before that separation. Adnan’s relationship to the mountain is visceral, embodied and simultaneously spiritual. As she negotiates a new country as ‘the other’ she finds in the land an otherness that takes her into itself (or perhaps the mountain is himself, herself, themself…)

Adnan sees water flowing down the mountain as thought it is the mountain’s tears and experiences Mount Tamalpais as deliberately sending

a wild smell of crushed herbs into the air.

Smith comes to places through objects—her world is animistic and multidimensional. In both writers there is a permeability to other forms of life or objects to such an extent that the gap closes. There are conversations with trees, stones, coats… that make perception something fluid, something that goes beyond the surfaces of mere seeing.

And there is a fierce political element to this manner of perception which refuses to live alienated lives and will not be prescribed what to see and what to dismiss. Rather than being decentred by finding themselves ‘the other’ in a strange environment, both of these writers, and many others, have the vision to decentre otherness itself through their insistence on paying attention and connecting.

Writing from decentred centres

To have a practice that is based on perception, that is based on deep and sustained listening to the point where subject and object become one, is the essence of embodiment. It is at once a decentring, because to give such attention is disorienting in our modern whirl of activity, yet completely centring in the sense of the profound connection it gives us, if only for moments. This is what Clayton Eshleman was grappling towards in his research and in his poetry—glimpses of being at the centre of life itself not as ego but because we experience connection.

Cultures that have a strong myth of the world tree see the tree as the centre of the world. In these cultures, when the people are nomadic, the central pole, or the meeting place of the poles in the chum, tipi, lavvu, goahti or yurt, symbolises the world tree. Each person’s tent is the centre of the world, but no one is more central than anyone else. Being central is neither about staying still nor about an individualistic sense of importance. It’s about recognising that all life is connected.

This is what we do when we walk in (or visit in whatever way our particualr body allows) the same forest, the same beach or the slope of the same mountain daily or weekly… and practice being present—not distracted by the shopping lists of things to do in our heads, but inhabiting the place we find ourselves and asking only—’how can I know you?’

When we have this level of connection, when wherever we find ourselves is the centre of our world, then we find ourselves, as artists and writers becoming witnesses. And as witnesses we are changed—we are involved, part of what we are witnessing.

Writing from decentred time

In M Train, Patti Smith not only meditates on the decentring that comes from moving from place to place and from the relationships she makes with objects, but also on the slipperiness of time that is anything but linear, particularly when it comes to memory and how we negotiate loss while retaining the transformative present of love.

Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Are our thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension,  whizzing by massive posters with repeating images? Catching a fragment  from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame?  If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the  face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.  I looked out into the street and noticed the light changing. Perhaps the sun had slipped behind a cloud. Perhaps time had slipped away.

After losing her husband and brother in quick succession while she has young children, she moves across country in a state of shock and only slowly realises that she is experiencing immense sorrow and compassion and a sense of carrying her loved ones with her all at once. The enormity of the love she has experienced and goes on feeling, unhooks her from commonplace time and while she longs to go back she also finds that love accompanying her:

Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time. A curtain of purple wisteria partially conceals the entrance to a familiar garden… In a wink, a lifetime, we pass through the infinite movements of a silent overture. […]

Maybe we can’t draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we  can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole.

This is time given fragrance and meaning, far beyond what mere chronology can offer.

Writing from decentred perception

We become decentred in so many ways. Sometimes in a familar place we have a strange moment of seeing everything differently. Sometimes life takes us on huge new adventures that force us to change perspective. I have decentred my life by moving to a forest in France where the culture, the language… everything is different. It is at times overwhelming, yet I’m learning how to be in my body again and learning again how to have an artistic practice that is about paying attention in this place until I become a witness and also until I come to know myself witnessed here.

We learn a great deal when things are not comfortable and familiar, which is not to say we should be shaking up our lives for no reason, but simply that we can alter how we respond when change seeks us out. We fall in love, experience loss, travel through ill health, watch children leave home, feel a call to a new place, change job or whole way of life, retire, grow older, move house, train in a new skill…

In all of life’s invitations there is the to and fro of being thrown off centre so that we can establish new rhythms and begin again. These are the invitations to pay attention and allow our perceptions to change. These are the opportunities that allow our art to bear witness to the vitality and connectedness of all life.