What Secrets Are We Not Seeing?

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I recently read how some cultures don’t have words for certain colours, and can’t perceive those colours. I guess it’s like how folks looking through microscopes at cells didn’t see that little dot of a nucleus, not until after someone wrote about it in a magazine. Even then, not everyone included the dot in their sketches. It took a while.

I was once in a student bar. Three of us were drinking: me, my buddy Jay and an art major. Jay spoke up, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.”

The artist leaned forward to retort, “And you like what you know!” What if Jay didn’t know to see the dot in the cell? What if he and I were cell blind?

I have enjoyed a sympathetic Doctor Who episode where they time traveled to visit Vincent Van Gogh: That poor man couldn’t sell any of his “crazy” paintings in his life time. 

I was surprised to learn that an entire “portfolio” of Shakespeare’s plays only survived to posterity because two friends saved it, as Shakespeare’s contemporaries didn’t see enough value in preserving his plays. And I was astounded to learn something about a certain household-name classical composer: Some of his works only survived because they were worth more as paper than as musical notation: his classical compositions were saved as insulation and for writing on the back… maybe as to-do lists and recipes.

Which begs the question: How about those classical Greco-Roman writings? The ones we know of only because, as pages decayed, they were copied and re-copied down the generations. With due respect to household names such as Plato and Caesar…  maybe the best works were not seen as worthy. Maybe only the mediocre writing survived. …Incidentally, down in the US, during this year of Trump, the teaching of parts of Plato at the university level has been forbidden—you can’t make this stuff up.

At my favourite commercial gallery, a young lady enthused about an exhibit at the SAAG: Southern Alberta Art Gallery. So off I drove to the city of Lethbridge, under two hours away. I found coloured translucent panels suspended from the ceiling. I looked through them. The exhibit was nice, but… 

Back home at my local gallery, I sheepishly confessed to the lady that I wasn’t thrilled, “I, uh, wouldn’t want them in my house.” 

She said, “Of course! Here we sell things of beauty, for your home, but that art was for new ways of seeing.” Later I reflected on a simple painting in South Africa that infuriated  society—or at least the authoritarian rulers. A simple enough portrait, really. During apartheid, it made the newspapers over here when some artist over there painted an innocent young girl as half black, half white. Split down the middle, as in that 1960’s Star Trek episode, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.  (I wonder if it aired in the US South? Maybe they had to insert a rerun)

That artist’s “way of seeing” sure did raise temperatures. No wonder dictators, freshly in power after a “people’s revolution,” are so quick to imprison, even kill, the people’s artists. This is well before, as in the Shakespeare play, they “kill all the lawyers.” 

Now here I sit, with my red ball cap shading my eyes from a florescent light at my desk, living in “the best of all centuries.” I wonder. Easy to be arrogant, easy for my peers and I to say our society is the “goat”—not the animal, the Greatest Of All Time—smugly asserting that we are so advanced in human rights, the liberal arts and more… Yes, we even appreciate the rock’n roll our parents disliked. 

I wince: in our art, and in our society, what are we still not seeing?

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Sean Crawford

Calgary YYC Airport

January

2026

Blog note: The quotation about me at the top of my home page

(the page showing six essays to chose from, for computer screens)

is a quote from Warren Harbeck, a man who saw things. With a weekly column for the Cochrane Eagle, (which he always sent to me before the paper came out) he walked a beat of neighbours to talk to about nature and indigenous wisdom and goodwill. 

The quote is from an e-mail when he was introducing me to someone.