The Labyrinth of Love 02
Seeing is Believing
One afternoon at a friend's home long ago but not so far way, I stumbled into a startling revelation. I was twenty-few, a law-school dropout, and my friend a final-year sociology student living with her mother and three younger siblings in the Diego Martin suburbs. Clowning around in my friend's shared bedroom I tried on her sister's long-discarded pair of eyeglasses that were lying around. They had no arms and had to be worn like goggles - held up by a strip of dirty elastic encircling your head and affixed to the frame with tiny safety pins. I closed my eyes, balanced the contraption on the bridge of my nose and pulled the elastic around my head and, opened my eyes to peer out. Immediately I experienced a sudden jolt.
WTF!
Everything was suddenly and shockingly shiny. In the split second my eyes were closed to settle the specs on my nose, the world had been scrubbed and polished. Colours were made brighter, things jumped out at me like they had only now decided unequivocally to exist. My worldview was renewed.
It was startling how much more I saw through those castoff spectacles, but my epiphany was that other people could and sometimes did see a very different world from me. Discovering your own blindness is the greatest revelation.
I wore those goggles everywhere for months, much to the embarrassment of friends and bemusement of strangers, until my older brother sponsored an eye test and new John Lennon-type rimless specs.
That was in the late '70s, when Trinidad was spending an oil boom that brought women into all spheres of economic and political life, and feminism found a purchase among young, educated middle-class women, including the one in whose bedroom I acquired my new outlook on life. Miss Trinidad & Tobago, Janelle "Penny" Commissiong, had won the Miss World competition and a newly-formed organization, the Concerned Women for Progress (CWP) protested that "Women are not on sale for a penny". Ways of Seeing, which I'd recently read, explained that: "A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies... [it] suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you... By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her... Men survey women before treating them."
Ways of Seeing showed us how to look. Not just at paintings and photographs and the advertisements that used them, which were the main focus of the book and the television series, but at everything. It was as if we'd been shorsighted all our lives without realizing. The details of the world became sharper, its horizons further. In that he taught us how to think. He showed our relationships with women and with ourselves, our desires and our identities, were manipulated for hegemonic control and corporate profit. He pointed out that everything we did admitted other ways of being done, other ways of seeing, of hearing, of feeling, desiring and thinking. Reality was much more, and much more mutable, than biology and personal circumstance. There were other ways of living, and it started with how we saw the world because vision rules. What you see, people believe, is what you get. An eyewitness account is more trustworthy than hearsay, because talk is cheap and a single picture is worth a thousand words - even action speaks louder than them, although those aphorisms are ironically embodied in language, not images.
Look at a flower, a fruit, a saxophone or a motorcycle, any physical thing really - its appearance gives us what we feel is its essence. That's why our metaphors for knowledge are mostly visual. To see it is to know it. I see, means, I understand. To contemplate is to reflect, which brings insight. To create ideas is to imagine or create images in the mind's eye. We'll know with hindsight. Or maybe I'm speculating, which is related to spectacles and inspect. An opinion is a point of view or perspective, which might be enlightened if I'm bright, a visionary or seer. Then, maybe I can foresee what's to come. You can see a therapist, see a new lover, and see the difference between the two. You can even see how an instrument sounds, see what a mango tastes and smells like, and see what I'm saying. Consider how different are the implications when I see what's about to happen, as opposed to the uncertainties of hearing, feeling or smelling it.
Ocularcentrism runs throughout the Indo-European language family. Siehst du das auch so? is how a German might ask if you see (or understand) what he's saying. A Spaniard might answer, Ya veo or I see. In French, to think or conceptuaize something is, concevoir quelque chose, with voir being to see. The Sanskrit dhrishti, meaning sight, also includes foresight and awareness, and is a yoga practice of focussing your gaze to achieve a heightened self-awareness as a path to understanding and seeing wisdom through your third eye.
Vision provides not only the objects around us but also their distances from us. We see the space extending away to the horizon or whatever we look at. I gaze at the trees before me and can estimate how far away they are. The city is about three kilometres away, and to its right the Gulf of Paria stretches to the island's southern peninsula, maybe sixty kilometres distant, and the horizon just beyond that. If the position of an object changes it's because it, or the onlooker, is moving. Clouds drift amiably above my vista.
To see something clearly you cannot be either too close or too far. Those broad parameters vary with the individual, but whatever they are, there must be some distance. That can foster empathy with another creature, or can foster an emotional distance that makes it easier to see it as an object, even if it's a person. "Objectification" occurs when someone is seen as an object: interchangeable with other objects, incapable of feelings, and reduced to a body or body parts and their appearances.
The spatial distance we can see provides the metaphors through which we experience our emotional connections. Someone physically near can reach out and touch you with their hand, just as they can emotionally touch you with a song or a story. We can keep in touch with far-flung friends and relatives, or not. Maybe they cannot be reached or have grown distant. The analogy to physical contact are contained in examples from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's study of Metaphors We Live By: "His mother's death hit him hard. The idea bowled me over. She's a knockout. I was struck by his sincerity. That really made an impression on me. He made his mark on the world. I was touched by his remark. That blew me away".
Emotional affects are central to our unique sociability. As we evolved into it, our neurological systems that register spatial awareness were repurposed to also represent our social relationships. We are all synesthetic, our senses overlapping, which in the case of touch can be misleading. Physical touch is reciprocal, emotional affects aren't. If I sit beside you, you are beside me. When my knee encounters yours, your knee touches mine. If my hand rests on your leg, your leg touches my hand. Then maybe my lips feel yours, or my cheek feels your hand. It's a risk I take. I feel emotionally close to you, hold you in my heart of hearts. Do you feel the same for me? When it seems you don't, it's as if the universe is flouting its own laws of physics. But it isn't. It's just how we are.When we think of what constitutes reality out there, the people and things that surround us, what first comes to mind is what we see. We perceive the external world through all of our senses, but those few wavelengths of the electro-magnetic spectrum (less than 0.0035%) that we know as light seem to give us the most accurate idea of things. Each human eye has around 126 million photoreceptors sending signals to the outer visual layer of your brain that's also responsible for attention, perception, awareness, memory, language and consciousness. We are more sensitive to light than most animals (barring birds of prey). Take your dog for a walk - you can spot another mutt long before Rover does. That's how a hunter wearing a bright orange vest glaringly visible to other gun-toting men, can still sneak up on a deer.
Eyes evolved for one main purpose: to identify things and guide our movement. That's why plants don't see, and a sea squirt does what it does. It starts life swimming around as a tadpole-like larva until it settles on a convenient rock. There it affixes itself like a public servant never to venture forth again. And having abandoned motility, the first thing it does is to digest its eyes and brain.
Motility, which is the ability to move on its own, confronts an animal with choices. It's no longer drifting aimlessly through life - the movement must now be motivated, fuelled by an urge to head in this or that direction, faster or slower. Should it fight or flee, feed or fornicate, fast or slow, forward or backward, left or right, up or down? Vision provides vital information to help make those decisions. Some neuroscientists argue that when fish first clambered onto the land they could see much further, so they no longer just reacted to what was immediately in front of them and developed the mental abilities to plan strategically. Decision-making expanded minds in our case until they now have the capacity for free will that many scientists and philosophers now deny possessing.
Seeing leans into the future. Literally. Your mind projects what is going to happen a fifth of a second ahead of the light hitting your optic nerves. That's what you "see". In contrast, hearing tells of an event that's already taken place: a split second ago something knocked or scraped against something else and produced a sound. You don't hear things, you hear the sounds they make; you don't hear a dog, you hear its bark. And because hearing tells you of something in the past, something that's already happened, its warnings are always urgent: Get away, quick! The startle reflex is faster than conscious thought and is triggered by an unexpected sound, a loss of balance (also in the ears) or an object moving suddenly close to your eyes. The only fears we are born with are of a sudden loud sound and a loss of balance.
Looking to the future, eyes anticipate what's about to take place. When I used to ride a motorcycle I would focus on a spot some distance ahead. As John Berger, in Bento's Sketchbook, anticipates: "You pilot a bike with your eyes, with your wrists and with the leaning of your body. your eyes are the most important of the three. The bike follows and veers towards whatever they are fixed on. It pursues your gaze, not your ideas. No four-wheeled vehicle driver can imagine this."
Our forward-facing eyes provide accurate 3-D depth perception that probably evolved so we could grasp branches, identify ripe fruit and pluck them. Hence our rich colour palette also. Having spotted something we want, our eyes work in close tandem with our hands to reach out and touch. Usually the right hand. When we descended from the trees on to the African plains and adopted an upright, two-legged stance, our vision extended further to more distant horizons.
Open land was more dangerous and we were neither rapid runners nor formidable fighters. But we were very clever and very social and collectively we could handle ourselves. We retained our forward-facing eyes, maybe for scavenging but they are also hunters' eyes - prey have side-mounted, near-360-degree, panoramic vision, almost like eyes at the back of your head. We look straight ahead and, as Hannibal Lector pointed out, we covet first of all what we see. Here, a covetous person is described as having long eyes. He continuously grasps at what comes into sight.
Sight fuels our acquisitiveness, our cupidity. Cupid's arrow condemns you to love the first person you see - love at first sight. And indeed an attractive woman pulls a man through his eyes. Women's sexual impulse is less aroused by the visual than men's, hence the male affection for pornography and our easy fixation on more distant objects of desire. Distance makes Don Juan dissatisfied with the lover he is enjoying. Her closeness seems less attractive than one at a further remove.
Indeed, our eyes are especially drawn to movement, but that's because it stands out against the default, which is the unchanging. A moving object is unchanging and its background is unchanging. We see movement relative to everything else that is unmoving, which in Darwin's words is, "the world, the very emblem of all that is solid." I can run and catch a ball - or at least I used to be able to - calculating all the while my trajectory and that of the ball, because the rest of the world remains stationary. It doesn't bounce around like the images do when you run holding a video camera. Movement is always against a backdrop of the world's stasis - we see both simultaneously.
That's the major characteristic of how we see the world: simultaneously. Look at your surroundings, the room you are in, and everything appears to be there all at once. In my case it's the monitor in front on a desk on which stands a speaker, a coffee cup, external hard drive, flash drive and my hands on the keyboard, Venetian blinds and a window to the left behind the monitor, a roll-top desk against the wall on my left and on my right a closet beside a door to the washroom. Everything of the room before me is there, simultaneous in its entirety. Contrast that with sound or touch. We hear sounds in sequence, like the words of a sentence. So too touch - we cannot touch the entirety of the room, or the elephant in it, but must do so bit by bit, like a story.
Vision also presupposes another continuity - the permanence of things, whether or not they are moving. If I walk outside to the porch the room will remain in my absence. Outside, the parrots that fly squawking across the vista above me, the cars that rush along the highway far below, all are continuously solid and tangible. They will exist whether or not I can see them. The symbols you are reading at this moment, if you spoke them aloud the sounds would only exist and could only be heard during the fleeting moments of their utterance. But writing then changes everything. Language made visual will endure to tomorrow and long after that.
Comparing seeing to hearing, then, is to contrast simultaneity with sequence, permanence with evanescence. Thus, vision elevates static being over dynamic becoming, permanence over temporality. Static, permanent reality best described by nouns, not verbs. The word noun, from the Anglo-Norman nom, is the name of something or someone (eg. pronoun), whereas verb, from the Latin verbum or word, refers to speech (eg. verbal). That way things, objects, are given privilege over events,
Events are transient. Every one must be continuously recreated over and over, like kisses and songs; whereas things are solid, they endure. Because of their permanence things can be collected, hoarded, displayed or exchanged for other things. That's how vision predisposes us to think about reality, the world, as being comprised of lots of things - lots of stuff. Experiences, events, become more real if they are made permanent - photographed, uploaded to social media, written in books. In a world that is stationary and permanent, movement and evanescence grab your attention because they are unusual, they stand out and excite your wonder as Van Gogh clearly saw.
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