These words of Winterson’s, published in 1994, seem prophetic in relation to world events occurring decades later, especially the 2004 Abu Gharib prison scandal in which photos of dehumanized, humiliated Iraqi prisoners became, for awhile, like wallpaper to our days. I wanted to feel bewildered, and to lament, but instead I felt numb. I wanted to feel powerful emotions commensurate with the horror of the story behind the images.

In her novel Art & Lies Jeanette Winterson comments on this promise, writing in the voice of her character Picasso that when we forget how to look at “the unpainted beauty of everyday,” the artist can return to us “not the shock of the new, but the shock of the familiar suddenly seen.” Especially in our media and image-saturated culture, we don’t need the shock of the new to lift us out of ourselves because, as Winterson writes, “Isn’t it well known that nothing shocks us? That the photographs of wretchedness that thirty years ago would have made us protest in the streets, now flicker by our eyes and we hardly see them?” Or at least that’s one of art’s promises. We use words the way we’ve always used them, to mean what they’ve always seemed to mean, until we no longer think about or “see” them.īut then Art comes along and startles us out of our clichéd habits of speaking and thinking, so that we see things - things we’ve been looking at all along - newly. Too often we use language mechanically, as if meanings and words are literal and fixed, rather than figurative and mutable. Instead, she was being filtered through the expectations her mother already had about the (limited) value of what her daughter had to show her.

Though Nancy’s literal eyes were turned in her daughter’s direction, her daughter could tell she was not being fully seen. Nancy’s six year-old daughter captured what seems to be one of the central challenges of using language well: the need to see the world, to pay attention intensely and with our “real eyes”: seeing what is really in front of us, rather than what we think we see, what we expect to see, or what we’ve been told to see. “I want you to look at me with your real eyes.” “I am looking at you.” “No, mom,” the daughter said.

Nancy glanced at her, exasperated and distracted.

“What do you need?” Nancy said, not looking up, continuing her project. “Mom, look at me,” Nancy’s daughter said. One day while my friend Nancy was working around the house, her six-year old daughter was trying, unsuccessfully, to get her attention. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.

Jeanette winterson's the passion