New eyes

The real voyage of discovery...
consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes,
in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of a hundred others,
in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees.

Marcel Proust

I heartily agree with the quote and would like to expend my research question on it. Big question comes forward: how? It has a rather broad subject, there are lots of ways to actually change your views on something. But for me it comes down to symbolic ways of leaving something behind and starting anew, by changing your past you control your future, a transformation of some sort. There are abstract ways to do so as well as figurative ways. The most abstract way of doing so has to be the black square by Malevich: "In my desperate struggle to liberate art from the ballast of the world of objects, I took refuge in the form of the square." The square being the symbol of earthbound matter, of the body and physical reality.



M.L. von Franz explains that the circle (or sphere) is the symbol of the self representing the totality of the psyche in all its aspects, including the relationship between man and the whole of nature. A sphere points to its ultimate wholeness. Even Plato described the psyche as a sphere. Reflecting upon your own sphere didn't exist for the primitive man, they just got along with the things they used to do. Now we are in an age of rationalism and we tend to try to understand the things we do. Reflecting upon you own- or someone elses sphere leads to understanding, and ultimately, your own sphere starts to grow. This is the real voyage of discovery.

Paul Klee made a drawing called "limits of understanding" where he places the sphere or circle above a complex structure of ladders and lines. C. Jung pointed out that a symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt. This is the purpose of the drawing.



Since symbols are universally recognisable, they loose their personal meaning when they're outside a personal context. Symbols are in the public domain and a means of connecting people, not setting me apart from you.

So we have the symbol itself, a heavy loaded sign. This sign is a means of symbolizing transformation, I might call this a ritual of bridging differences, in "seeing the universe with the eyes of another", leading to universal understanding and becoming the sphere that is the world, being part of a new whole.