albionspeak: a draught of language (7.3)
Vision
Sometimes I study my face in the mirror, not to check my appearance, but to find out who I am. Strange things happen. My face starts shifting, melting. Because I'm not projecting an image, but trying rather to receive only the naked, unvarnished photons, no single image sticks. I see many things, none of them credible. How can so many faces be the same person? My masks range from the beautiful and divine to (more often) the deformed, grotesque, and absurd. I try to see an objective me. How do I appear to others? Clearly, objectivity is a myth. Others see me as they wish—as a stable image, yes, but one they invent spontaneously, instantaneously, and continuously, solely from recognized wave patterns in light & shade & motion & color. Really?
Recall NASA's great gnashing of teeth, when the Hubble space telescope radioed back its first photos? They were horribly wrong, flawed, blurry. The main mirror, NASA concluded, was polished too flat, fucked up with no way to fix it. In light of the program's history-making success, few today remember how for several years things looked very grim. Hubble was a failure so costly there might not be another. So yes, whew!, when astronauts heroically replaced the mirror with spacewalks worthy of spectacle; and yes, better still, when years later the satellite got a second facelift right on public television. And while the story ends in pictures—artifacts that have literally altered our image of the universe—remarkably NASA managed to achieve a taste of this triumph even before the mirror was corrected. That is, even with a bad mirror, Hubble still produced startling and important photos (particularly of brighter objects). Using a process called deconvolution, NASA's computer programmers undid much of the initial blurriness by mathematically correcting for the flaw. They rearranged the raw light data, following the applied geometry of rays passing through a warped lens, to fit a usable, testable model of expectations. While many claimed this was analogous to giving Hubble a pair of spectacles, it's not analog at all. It's digital, which is much more like correcting for near-sightedness with brain surgery or gene therapy. It can be done.
So what do we see, and what, if anything, is actually real? I know what I experience when photons excite my retina, but I have no idea what a photon looks like. Vision, for most people, is our primary sensory modality. The amount of brain space devoted to sight is huge compared with the other senses. And here I'm going to provide a small token of what we humans do all the time when we see with our eyes. This is not intended to be a scientific summary, nor do I mean to highlight anything new. I just want to state the obvious, so obvious, in fact, that we rarely consider the implications.
Imagine we meet in a park. You see me walking toward you. Since
you know my face (let's say), you recognize me from a distance. That is,
your eyes quickly identify a number of key features: my light hair and pink
skin, a rounded bump for a nose and imperceptible mouth slit, glasses.
Immediately, of course, you know I'm not Barack Obama (among others),
though you might take a moment more to distinguish me from my brother,
who presents the same awkward features. As I approach, my face isn't
shifting or melting, because your brain has now retrieved from memory the
image you have stored of me—perhaps from an entirely different setting,
let's say indoors—and you actually have turned your visual attention from
the raw light data to your mental image.
You're watching me on mental TV.
You walk toward me. If you held me in a camera lens, my image
would jiggle and bounce with every step, where just turning your head might
trigger motion sickness. But even if you jog or dance your way toward me,
somehow your inner gyroscope maintains the illusion of continuity. This is
not ocular. It's your brain airbrushing and streamlining and maintaining an
image that isn't based on light. As long as the new photon stream coming in
through your eyes doesn't sharply disagree with your mental image of me,
everything's fine. The shadow of a tree branch passes over my face. You
don't mistake it for an animal or melanoma. You don't even notice it. My
face gets bigger as we get closer, at first by fractions too small to consider.
Suddenly, as a percentage of the entire scene, it grows quite rapidly,
inversely proportional to the square of the distance between us. No big deal.
The brain has already done the math, has, in fact, predicted the huge
increase. There's no reaction. Imagine how you'd feel if we drew closer and
my face didn't suddenly get big.
As I've stated already, I'm extremely non-visual. Here's an interesting statistic, little known probably because it's so sad: About half of all sighted people who go blind eventually lose their mental visual world as well. They lose their visual imagination (present & future), and slowly they watch their (past) visual memories fade too. Eventually they dream without seeing. I already have non-visual dreams (some). If I lose my sight, I'm sure to lose my mental perceptions rather rapidly; and, after the initial distress and grief, I would expect to adapt rather well, since I depend on my sight for relatively little—that is, compared to most people, especially my wife and Scribe, who each represents the opposite extreme of the mental spectrum and whose rich visual worlds are wholly inconceivable to me.
Here's the funny part: I used to think I was a visual person. It wasn't until my mid-thirties that I started to realize otherwise. Two activities opened my eyes (so to speak) to my extreme deficit. I started teaching high-school (honors) level Geometry (to whiz-kid 8th graders); and, in a different realm, I was given a handful of visualization exercises by my teachers, at which I utterly failed. How could I be so blind?
Here's why I thought I was a visual person: Let's return to soccer. While I now wear blended trifocals, I have always possessed superb peripheral vision, to the point that I was blessed with the proverbial "eyes in the back of one's head." No one on the pitch surprised me from behind, and no-look passes flowed from me unconsciously. This acuity also makes me (still) an excellent classroom disciplinarian and highway driver, though many other skills and attitudes are needed as well (including humility). Another strong aspect of my vision concerns color (though most of this I've discovered since age 40). I know color on a deeply abstract level, colour not associated with or connected to physical objects or reality (more on this later). In painting I am particularly gifted at choosing exactly the right combination of paints to achieve exactly the shade I've envisioned. I have no inkling how I know what colors to mix (often three or more)—I never second-guess myself—and can only explain this as flight. Finally, when it comes to maps and navigation (my greatest talent) or geometric figures, I can memorize such drawings instantly and take a map or figure and put it through numerous transformations effortlessly (rotations, reflections, dilations, etc.). I can just as easily place myself within a map, alter the plane & vantage, and follow it to a given destination. I thought this was seeing.
I found right away when teaching Geometry that many of my brightest students couldn't do this. Initially I assumed that unlike me, they just weren't visual thinkers. I offered them tips and coping behaviors: Try rotating the textbook until what you see makes sense. Use a ruler & protractor and draw the picture to scale (despite how it might appear). Or, in solid Geometry, Try drawing the shape from different perspectives. These tips achieved more success for some kids than others, though I'm left with the belief that not all ducks should swim. Ask a pig to fly…
But I could swim, at least in Geometry, so wasn't I visual? I forget what my teachers first had me visualize. It might have been a planet (not of our solar system). I had the hardest time. After a couple of other rather basic shapes, I was finally asked to visualize a simple circle. Again, I can take all sorts of geometric figures and mentally toss them about like basketballs. Or so I thought. It turns out what I actually picture is a partial circle, generally an arc of about 100-120º. Then I mentally run (clockwise) around the circle and trace it over and over again—rather as a series of still frames can create a motion picture—and I achieve an illusion of a circle, one good enough to fool me. It took my teachers' exercises to show me that I really don't see the whole even for a full second. Very strange.
These defeats naturally led to some soul-searching and further explorations on my own. The next breakthrough came when I realized that I don't see faces, including those of my wife and daughters, nor even my own. Now this is not the prosopagnosia that afflicts certain people, who tend to grow up shy and embarrassed and develop a host of coping techniques for identifying people. Recognition is not my problem, and I can describe what I see. I can see, strangely enough, Barack Obama's face (sort of), because I'm so used to seeing his face in a certain way, probably as campaign posters depicted him. My family's faces are the hardest to pin down, because I know each individual as so many different faces: happy, sad, different angles, different haircuts, young, older, zits, no zits, etc… If I am given a photo, I can stare at it for a while. Then looking away, I will struggle to call up all the pieces with accuracy. But assembling the whole is all-but impossible for me. I learned additionally, of course—as my teachers wished me to learn—this is not how others experience the world. My wife, for one, is unable to think of our daughters without seeing their faces.
And how do I explain what I do see well? Geometric figures and maps are, in fact, very simple compared to a human face. And it turns out rotating such a figure or, in the case of maps, following a set of city streets, let's say, to a cathedral or harbor, is only partly visual and actually involves a different kind of sensing altogether, a geospatial understanding localized in a different region of the brain. I now realize that I know where other cars are around me on the road, because my brain is great at trajectories and math, not because I'm seeing them. All I need is a direction, a relative speed, assumptions about obstacles, lane changes, etc.—all these factors are calculated as equations. I always check my mirrors and blind spots, but generally no picture needed.
So what does Hamlet look like? Laurence Olivier? Kenneth Branagh? Mel Gibson? (Oh God.) It's a fair question. Does Scribe, as visual as he is—but as one who knows the poetry of Shakespeare far better than any film—still see a prince holding a skull, chastising his mother, or dueling with Laertes? Does Hamlet hold his sword in his right hand? Yes, he's wearing black, but do his boots have buckles or laces? Somehow a visual picture has to fill in all sorts of details Shakespeare never mentions. I read Shakespeare and see nothing at all.
And then there's the problem of color. As I write this essay, the Hubble space telescope celebrates its 25th anniversary.[1] Marking the event, the New York Times carried a fun article asking scientists involved in the project to pick their all-time favorite photos. What great pictures! Yet, let's be clear, all of these photos have been altered, dressed up in colors that aren't visibly "there." Still, while the choices of color are arbitrary and could just as well be different, the relations among the colors correctly preserve the relative differences in electromagnetic radiation that Hubble receives, including many frequencies we can't see with our eyes. Thus, what appear initially to be black & white photographs, when dressed in the emperor's new clothes, actually contain far more information (and are much cooler to look at).
So it is with our eyes as well—to the degree that scientists debate whether colors actually exist. Of course colors are real is my answer, just as the shadows on Plato's cave walls exist as shadows. But do they exist in physical reality? More to the point, I would ask, does physical reality exist?
Let's start simply. The first color photograph ever taken was created without color film. James Clerk Maxwell achieved it in 1861 with black & white film by taking the same picture three times, using a red, green, and blue filter, then overlaying the photos. These, incidentally, are the three colors that correspond to the cones in our eyes, and cones are simply cell structures that excite neurons in the brain based upon specific light frequencies. Lights go off, and our brain assembles a picture.
The case against color is further strengthened when one understands how surrounding colors and luminosity can drastically affect what we see. A good painter, Claude Monet to name a favorite, paints what he sees—blue haystacks, not yellow or brown—because in the context of sky & light & nearby objects, our minds (not our eyes) will turn these haystacks into the right shade. If color were physically present—the way a rock, let's say, has a certain shape—then how could it change so? The shape of a rock isn't dependent on the rocks around it.
Let me conclude by jumping ahead a bit, to a very strange reality: Colours exist in eternity. I'll compare them to numbers: Numbers, we understand, are not real. But while they're both abstract and infinite, perhaps most amazing of all, they're incredibly practical. That is, we use these purely abstract notions of quantity to solve all sorts of real world problems. Colours are equally abstract, especially ones like magenta, mauve, pink, or even brown, which aren't in the rainbow, aren't found in the cones of the eye, and yet our minds have no problem calling forth the matching hues.
Or is it just language? William Gladstone, the 19th Century British Prime Minister and great Homeric scholar, determined that the ancient Greeks were colorblind, at least a bit. Is the sea ever wine-dark? Really? Gladstone, through exhaustive study, concluded empirically that Homer depicts so many similar instances of metaphorical overreach (bronze sky, green honey, or the cyan hair of Hector) that colorblindness was the only explanation. Of course, Homer, we are told, was totally blind. But not his whole life, we assume. Maybe he went blind and counted among the fifty percent who lose their visual memories. Or maybe wine can actually appear blue, if you drink enough of it, or if, as some have suggested, you cut with it enough alkaline Greek water and green honey. Bottom line, most scholars today explain Gladstone's empirical observation by saying ancient Greek lacked the word for blue, as some languages still do today, not that Greeks lacked color vision. All languages have words for black and white and red, but blue, it seems, often arrives late in cultural language acquisition, the last primary color.
But I'm actually speaking of something much stranger and mystical. Colours exist outside of time and space. Though my teachers had said as much, it took a couple of special dreams to drive this point home for me. In two separate dreams I saw the colour yellow (note the spelling). The dreamweight alone on seeing these colours was enough to change my thinking. When I awoke, I could not conceive of anything so pure. Yellow, incidentally, up to this point in my life, was really the only color I had any emotional feeling toward: I disliked it, finding it even slightly repellant. I certainly wouldn't wear yellow or buy anything colored yellow. Yuck! But this pure colour was so perfect. A few years after having these dreams I took up painting. Try as I might, I could not reproduce this shade, which I named solar yellow. Closest to a lemon yellow, I have never seen this shade awake, in physical reality, and I've looked. I've concluded it doesn't exist—that is, not on these cave walls. Eventually my teachers let me know: Each of us in eternity has, or perhaps is a distinct colour. I am solar yellow, and my past distaste for yellow can be attributed to the fact that every existing, tangible shade falls short of my ideal.
Scribe, incidentally, is vermillion; and, as a kind of twin miracle, each of us separately & independently did locate this precise colour in fact in life, in two separate flowers, both Indian paintbrushes, though on separate mountain ranges and sorted from among countless similar blossoms red & orange. Eventually I would paint my paintbrush, along with a study of the same flower & scene but in its exact complementary colors; and together—finally finishing many years later—these twin paintings would comprise Step 80 of my Nine Men, my penultimate.
I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge here the Lore of Colours, a precise series of steps passed down in our karass as a bodily meditation & practice in time. I leave this lore for what must follow in Volume Two. Technically speaking, however, the Lore of Colours is more about a mode of memory & retrieval and less, as I’ve written above, about visual perception.
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[1] Thus, most of this essay was written in 2015, (I think) in Trujillo, Peru.
The Table of Contents below is too long to display fully. If you click to the right of these Lessons, you'll see the primary source documents displayed under each. These original sessions are a world treasure.