Djelloul Marbrook

We not only don’t see what others see, we often don’t see what’s there or we remember seeing what was never there.

The art conservator Roxanna Lehmann-Haupt and her husband, the bassist Lou Bruno, brought this home to me not long ago. Lou had been watching a television show in which a neurologist showed six people passing a basketball. Three wore black and three wore white. What did you see? the neurologist asked after showing the film clip. Well, some saw the ball passed ten times and some saw it passed twelve times. But none mentioned the huge gorilla that shambled into view, stared into the camera and shambled off.

Oh, I said, that’s a variation on the elephant in the room, isn’t it? But surely we see the gorilla. And the elephant. Don’t we? I stood still and silent for a moment, to see where my mind would go. I thought of the huge elephant in our political parlor. With hardly a murmur we watched a president take us to war for highly suspect reasons, and three years later a near majority of us still believed his widely discredited reasons. So we believe what we choose to believe, and it doesn’t matter if the elephant rampages and shakes the room apart or drops dead in the middle of it.

Lou’s story prompted his wife to tell one of her own. Most conservators, Roxanna said, take before and after photographs. Sure, I said, to show what a great job they did, or maybe to show how hard it was to do. Yes, she said slowly, but there’s another reason. And then she told us about the curator who, picking up a bucolic British landscape from a conservator, asked, Where’s the cow? What cow? said the conservator. The one that was right here in this field, the curator said. He suspected an oafish conservator had purloined the bloody cow. But there hadn’t been any cow. The curator’s mind had played a trick on him, and of course before and after photographs would proof a conservator against such fiascos.

So we don’t see what we don’t want to see and we persist in insisting that something should be there that isn’t there. There should have been weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even if all we found were weapons of mass distraction. There should have been a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, so we’ll just go on insisting there was, and we’ll never take another painting to that damned conservator. That will teach him not to tell the truth.

My aunt, the much-respected abstract geometric painter
Irene Rice Pereira, had an idea that the light of the mind makes an exchange with the light inherent in a painting. Many of her paintings, with their impossible depths, invite you to lose yourself in them, not in the pleasure of considering them but in their deep interplay of light. I thought of her work as I considered the stories Roxanna and Lou had told me. We can choose to engage the complexities and interplay of things, or we can withhold the light of our minds from them.

My guess is that in wanting to be avenged for 9/11, a majority, a chilling majority, of Americans have withheld the light of their minds from the facts in front of them. Certainly they were invited to do so by a mendacious White House, but the onus remains on the people for willfully ignoring the gorilla and the elephant, for insisting there had been a cow when there had been none, and for refusing to engage with the facts.