Seen and unseen

We never see the world as our retina sees it. In fact, it would be a pretty horrible sight: a highly distorted set of light and dark pixels, blown up toward the centre of the retina, masked by blood vessels, with a massive hole at the location of the 'blind spot' where cables leave for the brain; the image would constantly blur and change as our gaze moved around. What we see, instead, is a three-dimensional scene, corrected for retinal defects, mended at the blind spot, stabilised for our eye and head movement, and massively reinterpreted based on our previous experience of similar visual scenes.  All these operations unfold unconsciously — although many of them are so complicated that they resist computer modelling. 

Consciousness and the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene, 2014

Image: Sinbad the Sailor by Paul Klee, 1928

"I felt as if I were standing on the top of a mountain"

A landscape opened up before me. I felt as if I were standing on the top of a mountain, gazing out over a plain, covered by long, meandering rivers. On the horizon, more mountains rose up, between them there were valleys and one of the valleys was covered by an enormous white glacier. Everything gleamed and glittered. It was as if I had been transported to another world, another part of the universe. One river was purple, the others were dark red, and the landscape they coursed through was full of unfamiliar colours. But it was the glacier that held my gaze the longest. It lay like a plateau above the valley, sharply white, like mountain snow on a sunny day. Suddenly a wave of red rose up and washed across the white surface. I had never seen anything quite as beautiful, and when I straightened up and moved aside to make room for the doctor, for a moment my eyes were glazed with tears.

Karl Ove Knausgaard


Image: Sustina Glacier, Alaska. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via Adventures in Geology

'True philosophy entails learning to see the world anew...'

We witness, at each moment, the marvel that is the connection of experiences, and no one know how it is accomplished better than we do, since we are this very knot of relations. The world and reason are not problems; and though we might call them mysterious, this mystery is essential to them, there can be no question of dissolving it through some 'solution,' it is beneath the level of solutions. True philosophy entails learning to see the world anew and in this sense, an historical account might signify the world with as much 'depth' as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate into our own hands and through reflection we become responsible for our own history...

Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945

In Angel's Care, Paul Klee, 1931

Water

Ask yourself unlikely questions about water, come at it from every angle. What lives in it — beneath its surface? Why is water like our own minds? There are thoughts that flit about on its surface, but the real world of the mind all goes on beneath, in the depths of the unconscious mind, which are like the depths of the ocean. That's the part of us that dreams.

Fragments Roger Deakin


Photo by author

Unfenced existence

Every way one turned, the tundra was laid out like a green sea, sedgy and subtle and glinting with secret melt pools and waterways. It was land relishing its brief summer, open and free to breathe. To west, south and north the land seemed unbounded, but eastward, inland, there rose range after range of low, grey-blue mountains, the source of the river, with shadows in their glens and cores. Above all, the sky. Every hue of sky was present at once, here a shower, there rays of sunshine filtering through, there openings of blue, and every white and grey of cloud. The shadows of clouds drifted over the land. It was a dream vision, a mythic view of land before farms, before towns and roads, unparcelled, unprivatised, whole.

From Upriver by Kathleen Jamie

Not saying

Isaac Asimov famously wrote that the most exciting phrase to hear in science is not 'Eureka' but 'That’s funny.'

He meant funny peculiar. But funny ha ha is also sometimes present in a state of wonder that may (or may not) lead to systematic enquiry. And at such moments wonder can resemble a joke that we don't quite get. Sigmund Freud quoted Theodor Lipps:

a joke says what it has to say… in too few words… It may even actually say what it has to say by not saying it.

Image from kleinbottle.com

In the cave

The most fascinating [question]...is whether we do live in a virtual reality all the time anyway, in some sort of virtual ambiguity... 

The only time I [felt] I was not caught in a virtual reality is when I travelled on foot.

Werner Herzog

Las certidumbres sólo se alcanzan con los pies. (Certainties are arrived at only on foot). 

Antonio Porchia