On friendship and seeing more
Dear friends,
I wanted to tell you about my friend Doug. I was thinking the other day about friendship, about how our friends are often the ones who really see us, and who help us to understand our own unique way of seeing, because what they see in us is reflected back to us from their perspective.
Back when my friend Doug was still alive, some time before he got very sick, when the diagnosis of a terminal interstitial lung disease was hanging over him but he still had the use of his mobility and could breathe unassisted — he and I went on his motorcycle to the Cape Town Waterfront to see the most wonderful exhibition of the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci.
Doug was interested in absolutely everything. In those days, we would frequently spend hours just talking about art, about science, about philosophy, about his children, and life. In fact, it strikes me now that perhaps Doug himself was a little bit of a Leonardo figure. This is not to imply he was a genius — but rarely have I ever met someone with such a relentlessly creative and inquiring mind. Having studied art and trained as a medic, he was constantly tinkering, inventing, making all kinds of things. He was always drawing and painting, learning some new technique or exploring some ingenious new idea, or interrogating his own beliefs. He was always pushing beyond the bounds of platitude thinking, always questioning authority, resisting the prescribed ways of doing things, always insisting on seeing and discovering things for himself.
Growing up in apartheid South Africa, he had endured a tough childhood, and then gone to serve as a medic for two years in the army on the border between what is now Namibia and Angola, bearing witness to an intense dirty war involving the colonial and Cold War geopolitics of the time. Returning from the war, he had married young, raised three children and run a successful construction business. In his spare time he had invented a specialised microphone for acoustic musicians, which produced a rare and beautiful quality of sound.
As I mentioned, this Leonardo exhibition was marvellous, and Doug was just the person to see it with. We meandered through the cavernous interior of an old battery of subterranean moats and excavated walls left from the early days of the Dutch colonial settlement, which had been converted into a museum. From the ceiling hung real life models of Leonardo’s many inventions — flying machines and other contraptions harvested from the prolific drawings he had secreted away in notebooks throughout his life. These were wild contraptions bedecked with various forms of wings, wheels and gauges — contrived by a genius mind equally fascinated with the human body, the dynamics of flight, the movements of water. The prototypes on display had been built by contemporary Italian artists and craftspeople.
Doug and I spent hours gazing up in wonder at these contraptions hanging from the ceiling, and poring over the replicas and reproductions of Leonardo’s paintings and anatomy drawings, his sketches of plants, his diagrams and drawings of ingenious engineering marvels, and his intricate, painstakingly complex illustrations of the flows of water.
As Fritjof Capra describes in his book Learning from Leonardo, da Vinci was opulently bestowed with all the markers of genius: boundless curiosity and intellectual fearlessness; relentless concentration and exhaustive attention to detail; holistic memory; commitment to the empirical method, and systemic thinking.
As Capra relates, Leonardo would never hesitate to leap into any field of inquiry, no matter how daunting or revolutionary — even bunking the dogmas of the Catholic Church, a deviance not taken lightly in those days, if they did not stand up to the rigour of his empirical investigations. He invented his own scientific method, figured out the water cycle through observation, and formulated his own tectonic theory to explain how ancient marine sediments bearing oceanic fossils could have found their way to the tops of mountains. His contemporary, the writer Matteo Bandello, remembered that as he painted the Last Supper he would spend hours in silent, motionless contemplation, or would suddenly arrive from across town to place just one or two precise strokes of paint.
As Capra writes:
‘Nature as a whole was alive for Leonardo. He saw the patterns and processes in the microcosm as being similar to those in the macrocosm. At the most fundamental level… Leonardo always sought to understand the nature of life.’
The Leonardo exhibition was one of the last occasions I can remember having this kind of an adventure with Doug. As we went through the exhibition I noticed a placard with a saying attributed to Leonardo on it: ‘There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.’
And in that moment, I could really see Doug as somebody who sees. I remembered a moment when we were sitting together sketching in a beachfront cafe. We were both drawing sketches of the palm of our own hand. And at one point Doug looked at his own sketch and then he glanced over at mine. You know, he said, your sketch is so much you, and my sketch is so much me. Your sketch just has a few well placed lines, you don’t show every detail but you give us enough to see that it’s your hand and it’s done well. And that’s how you express yourself too. You give the bare outlines but you don’t feel the need to fill in every detail. You keep it simple and that’s enough.
Then he held up his own sketch which was chock full of detail. The shading and tiny intricate lines showed every tiny little line or wrinkle.
I’m the opposite of you, he continued. When I draw or when I talk, I want to tell you everything, every little detail. I want you to see every little detail the way I’m seeing it, and I can just keep going and going. (Indeed, he could talk the hind legs off a donkey.)
And he was right! I’ve thought about that moment often — because for me it was a moment when I really did feel seen as who I am. And I could also see us as two friends who saw and approached life very differently but held a great love and appreciation for one another, just as we were.
Doug lived for several years after we saw that Leonardo exhibition together — and steadily his condition deteriorated, but never his curiosity or his zest for life. He came to rely on a fulltime oxygen supply, and was increasingly confined to his apartment. But still he delighted in drawing detailed sketches of African wildlife, and he cast the tiny footprints of my son Ben into a pewter frame. He held Ben and told him stories, and sometimes when he was feeling up to it we would all go down to the beachfront cafe to sit and drink coffee and talk while Ben ran around in the sand and chased the waves.
Then one day, I got an incredulous phone call from Doug. There had suddenly come up the possibility of a lung transplant. The odds of a complete recovery were not likely, but there was a real possibility that he could have his life back. There was an equally good chance that he would die. He went for the transplant. He was far more afraid of the long, slow, painful decline he was already suffering than he was of death. And indeed he did die about a month after his transplant when his body suddenly went into shock, rejecting the new organ. He had given life his best shot, and now it was over. He was at peace.
But of course his memory lives on in me and in so many others whose lives he touched. When I think of him, I think of the precious qualities we find in our dearest friends who see things that we are not able to see, and share them with us so that we too see more. As they share something of themselves with us, we are in turn able to share something of ourselves with them. I always left conversations with Doug feeling that my own world had been enlarged a little, and that I saw things and understood myself from a somewhat richer and wider perspective.
Leonardo was a rare genius who could see leaps and bounds beyond what any ordinary person would be capable of. His seeing did not seem to rely on connection with others. As Fritjof Capra describes: ‘He worked alone and in secrecy, did not publish any of his findings, and only rarely dated his notes. Having pioneered the scientific method in solitude, he did not see science as a collective, collaborative enterprise…’
Perhaps Leonardo had no need of sharing or exchanging with others to enhance his own vision, which was so formidable, so comprehensive and so radically advanced. Perhaps the times made it difficult for him to share the genius of his mind — as sharing depends on others being open to receive what we have to offer.
Today more than ever, I treasure Doug’s friendship, and the way that it expanded my own seeing, my own sharing, my own sense of the world.
With love,
Megan