The mind’s eye

WHEN I was an art student, all Sturm und Drang and torn fishnets, Lawrence Weschler’s “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees,” a study of Los Angeles artist Robert Irwin, inspired me to tape a number of long pieces of yarn between my bed, desk, floor and ceiling. As I recall, I was interested in defamiliarizing the relationship between my body and my room. My drooping, fuzzy web was nothing like Irwin’s sublime installations, but it strikes me now that it was something like Weschler’s “Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences” -- a web of connections, some more secure than others, with another web at their center: that of the mind itself.

“Everything That Rises” is the latest work by the author of “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders” and “Vermeer in Bosnia.” Handsomely illustrated, it pursues in a series of short essays what Weschler calls “uncanny moments of convergence, bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whispered recollections” culled from a folder filled with images that the author gathered over many years. These convergences defy partitions of history, geography and causal logic: a modernist jailhouse in Chicago echoes the form of a cuneiform tablet from ancient Persia; the curves of the Rokeby Venus haunt the hilly landscape of 20th century Venezuela.

Weschler admits that some of the connections he makes may say more about his own mind -- or, in his daughter’s words, his “loose-synapsed moments” -- than about the world. Yet the mind that sees the Mona Lisa in a photograph of Monica Lewinsky is no blank slate, but a richly illustrated book (perhaps not unlike “Everything That Rises” itself). Images like the Mona Lisa, Weschler proposes, are part of a common visual vocabulary by which we read the world. We are products of cultural history as well as personal history, so maybe our private associations are not so private after all. We are like Klein bottles, the three-dimensional versions of the Moebius strip: Our insides and our outsides flow together.

The first piece in “Everything That Rises,” an interview with photographer Joel Meyerowitz about his images from the World Trade Center excavation, makes a strong case for this claim. It’s an illuminating, even thrilling glimpse into a mind preternaturally alive to the visual world, and it is enough to convince me that you can’t help thinking of Vermeer -- at least, you can’t if you’re Joel Meyerowitz -- when you see a ray of light shafting down into a distant cityscape haunted by loss.

Weschler strains credulity, however, when he argues that a photo of a dead Che Guevara resembles Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp” because “the image (hot-wired, as it were, into all of their brains) ... taught all of the strutting officers how to pose in relation to their prize.” Even if the Bolivian military recruited heavily in art history departments, I imagine the officers would have other things than the traditions of Western art on their minds.

Similarly, Weschler overreaches when he suggests that Michelangelo’s “Pieta” readied us to be moved by the famous 1970 photograph of the Kent State shootings in which a young woman falls to her knees in grief beside the body of a student protester killed by the National Guard. For some viewers (me, for example, indelibly marked by that photo at age 7) it might well be the other way around: The present can change forever how we see the past. As Weschler himself observes elsewhere in the book, sometimes “the temporal vectors are entirely reversed.” Either way, this argument attaches a bit too much importance to the “great works” as originators. Do we really need a “Pieta” to teach us to be moved by a girl mourning a dead student?

But Weschler does not often look at images through such a narrow filter. Indeed, he revels in the range of his convergences, some of which, he admits, “were fanciful, others polemical; some merely silly, others almost transcendental. Some tended to burrow toward some deep-hidden, long submerged causal relation; others veritably reveled in their manifest unlikelihood.”

In stressing the pleasures of variety over unity, Weschler offers a pretty good description of “Everything That Rises” as a whole. This central conceit, though -- fascinating as it is -- has only a loose sway over the contents. Some of the essays, like the long, excellent study of the graphic art of Poland’s Solidarity movement, are considerably more carefully composed and researched than others, and for that reason resist assimilation to his larger point. For a sustained view of Weschler’s mind at work, readers should turn to other writings. This book is something different: an unapologetic tour of the mess behind the scenes.

Of course, if you accept his premise -- that we’ve all got the same mess in our own minds -- it might occur to you at some point to wonder why you’re reading about Weschler’s connections instead of making your own. Right about then, mid-book, you come upon a few pages of paired images with no explanatory text. Go ahead, Weschler seems to say, just look.

Just looking is not only the method but also the topic of some of “Everything That Rises’ ” best essays, especially when such a process is guided by the eyes of others. In “Gazing Out Toward,” Weschler links a stenciled image of two silhouettes against a cityscape by a Polish artist named Kret to a still from Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin,” then to Caspar David Friedrich’s “Evening Landscape With Two Figures” and finally to Rene Magritte’s “La reproduction interdite,” in which a young man looks at the back of his head in the mirror. “We both see them and see with and through them. Their eyes become ours in a sort of gathered focus -- or rather, a sort of ingathered and then outpoured vantage,” Weschler observes.

Similarly, in a stunning essay on Diego Velazquez’s “The Spinners,” he identifies a “ziggurat of perception”: “noblewomen idly gazing upon working women slaving away so that noblewomen can idly gaze upon the image of a peasant woman being carried off by the gods.” We can add Weschler to this ziggurat. His eyes become ours here, and what clear eyes they are.

Since this is a book of likening, it might be appropriate to ask: What is it like? In true Weschler style, the answer vaults centuries. “Everything That Rises” is reminiscent of those ancient natural philosophers (Lucretius, Pliny, Aelianus) who relied on intuition, not observation, to describe the world, making easy leaps from resemblance to cause (barnacles look a bit like eggs, so geese must be born from barnacles; clamshells look a bit like sailboats, so clams that get the urge to travel must rise to the surface, flip open their shells and allow the wind to blow them where it may). They were often wrong, but how I envy their confidence that with nothing but your own mind, you can figure out the world. De Rerum Natura: What 20th century thinker would presume to explain the Nature of Things? Modern science has deprived us of the confidence to speculate freely; we are all too aware that someone, somewhere, knows better than we do.

But can the value of speculation be measured solely in its yield of answers? Weschler seems to suggest not. My favorite loose-synapsed moment in the book occurs in a discussion of David Hockney’s controversial claim that credit for Renaissance artists’ unprecedented command of perspective ought to go to a little device called a camera obscura -- a sort of pinhole camera -- that could project images directly onto a canvas to be traced. Discussing a Caravaggio painting of Christ’s doubters fingering the wound in his side, Weschler suggests that the wound recapitulates the hole in the camera obscura, “as the earthbound, mundane concerns of the terrestrial poke and prod their way, convergent, into and through the looking glass of the Messiah’s wound, splaying out, on the far side, transformed and transcendent.” For me, the value of this image is not its verifiability, but its incitement to wonder.

Near the end of “Everything That Rises,” Weschler directs our eyes to a tree, that favored subject of the camera obscura. The rays of light that carry the image of the tree enter the pupil, come to a point, diverge and deliver the tree, upside down, to our retina. It turns right-side up again in the mind’s eye, where, if Weschler is correct (and I think he is), a host of related images -- from roots and rivers to the tree-like structure of the brain’s own neural networks -- offer themselves up as more or less apt matches.

Here, things get loopy: The brain notices itself noticing itself, whereupon there is a gorgeously vertiginous tumble of metaphor into its material substrate. Weschler doesn’t stop there, though. Instead, because the brain is a product of the very universe that has also produced trees and roots and rivers, he has the insight that all this is a reflection, that the universe is noticing itself.

Weschler describes the process by which a virus evolves resistant strains as a kind of wool-gathering: “Being is itself thinking: the world is daydreaming.” Maybe there is not, then, a great difference between the matter that thinks, and our thoughts about that matter; all is thought, and everything, potentially, matters. That’s the nature of things. *