Quotes and Pictures

Script

How do we see the world? I like to think that "Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do."^[1] Perception is a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole. …

The Southern Gothic writer, Flannery O'Connor, in writing about her own creative process says, "Learning to see is the basis for all of the arts except music, I know a good many fiction writers who paint, not because they're any good at painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things."^[2] I find this statement particularly interesting coming from a writer, as learning to read is often the only formal visual training that most people receive. When you start to really look at things, you realize that what you know and what you see are not always in alignment.

When I was a student at Georgia Tech, if it was nice out on the weekend, I liked to sit by the fountain outside the library and read. The campus was normally pretty quiet, but on one particular afternoon I was interrupted by the sound of a small commotion coming my way. There was a tour with about 20 elementary school-aged children that were being led through campus. As they ascended the staircase up that led up to the library, something unexpected happened (well, unexpected to me). Just as they reached top of the stairs and the fountain finally came into their view, they all simultaneously squealed with delight, ran to the fountain's edge, and plunged their hands into the cold water and started splashing about. It was joyous (pure joy). The chaperones quickly caught up and herded them back together, and they went on their way, but I felt like in that one moment of vicarious sensory rapture, I had just seen the world with fresh eyes.

Now when I was in elementary school, I once had a homework assignment where I had to draw a picture of my soul… (I went to Catholic School) I was a nerdy kid - I liked computers, math and science. This was my half/smart-assed response. This is a weird drawing, but as you can see, my values are a bit skewed, (conflicted between the material and the immaterial) and arguably pretty confused. Obviously my brain and my eyes were of the utmost importance, but other than that, there are only some vestigial traces of a body, and then there's this little halo bit up here to account for any of the insignificant leftover bits. (note: I think that I kinda winged this part)

For some reason, this image from my past came to mind as I was reading this quote from The Book by Alan Watts:

I have sometimes thought that all philosophical disputes could be reduced to an argument between the partisans of "prickles" and the partisans of "goo." The prickly people are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise, and like to stress differences and divisions between things. They prefer particles to waves, and discontinuity to continuity. The gooey people are tender-minded romanticists who love wide generalizations and grand syntheses. They stress underlying unities, and are inclined to pantheism and mysticism. Waves suit them much better than particles as the ultimate constituents of matter, and discontinuities jar their teeth like a compressed-air drill. Prickly philosophers consider the gooey ones rather disgusting–undisciplined, vague dreamers who slide over hard facts like an intellectual slime which threatens to engulf the whole universe in an "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" (courtesy of Professor F.S.C. Northrup). But gooey philosophers think of their prickly colleagues as animated skeletons that rattle and click without any flesh or vital juices, as dry and desiccated mechanisms bereft of all inner feelings. Either party would be hopelessly lost without the other, because there would be nothing to argue about, no one would know what his position was, and the whole course of philosophy would come to an end.^[3]

When you see, what do you see? Are you inclined towards waves or particles? Continuities or discontinuities? What is your true visual experience? Is prickly or gooey? Can you choose one or the other? Pondering the potentials of observation, I would like to turn to perhaps the ultimate observer, Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar. This is from the first chapter, titled, Reading a wave.

The sea is barely wrinkled, and little waves strike the sandy shore. Mr. Palomar is standing on the shore, looking at a wave. Not that he is lost in contemplation of the waves. He is not lost, because he is quite aware of what he is doing: he wants to look at a wave and he is looking at it. He is not contemplating, because for contemplation you need the right temperament, the right mood, and the right combination of exterior circumstances; and though Mr. Palomar has nothing against contemplation in principle, none of these three conditions applies to him. Finally, it is not "the waves" that he means to look at, but just one individual wave: …

Mr. Palomar sees a wave rise in the distance, grow, approach, change form and color, fold over itself, break, vanish, and flow again. At this point he could convince himself that he has concluded the operation he had set out to achieve, and he could go away. *[Projector?] But isolating one wave is not easy, separating it from the wave immediately following, which seems to push it and at times overtakes it and sweeps it away; and it is no easier to separate that one wave from the preceding wave, which seems to drag it toward the shore, unless it turns against the following wave, as if to arrest it, Then, if you consider the breadth of the wave, parallel to the shore, it is hard to decide where the advancing front extends regularly and where it is separated and segmented into independent waves, distinguished by their speed, shape, force, direction. * [Switch to projector]

at each moment he thinks he has managed to see everything to be seen from his observation point, but then something always crops up that he had not borne in mind. If it were not for his impatience to reach a complete, definitive conclusion of his visual operation, looking at waves would be a very restful exercise for him and could save him from neurasthenia, heart attack, and gastric ulcer. And it could perhaps be the key to mastering the world's complexity by reducing it to its simplest mechanism.

* [Add Square] Concentrating the attention on one aspect makes it leap into the foreground and occupy the square, just as, with certain drawings, you have only to close your eyes and when you open them the perspective has changed. Now, in the overlapping of crests moving in various directions, the general pattern seems broken down into sections that rise and vanish. In addition, the reflux of every wave also has a power of its own that hinders the oncoming waves. And if you concentrate your attention on these backward thrusts, it seems that the true movement is the one that begins from the shore and goes out to sea. [Scroll to blank]

Is this perhaps the real result that Mr. Palomar is about to achieve? To make the waves run in the opposite direction, to overturn time, to perceive the true substance of the world beyond sensory and mental habits? No, he feels a slight dizziness, but it goes no further than that. The stubbornness that drives the waves toward the shore wins the match:

Only if he manages to bear all the aspects in mind at once can he begin the second phase of the operation: extending this knowledge to the entire universe.

It would suffice not to lose patience, as he soon does. Mr. Palomar goes off along the beach, tense and nervous as when he came, and even more unsure about everything. [End] ^[4]

References

• back to [1] Action in Perception, by Alva Noë.
• back to [2] Writing Short Stories", Flannery O'Connor.
• back to [3] The Book, by Alan Watts.
• back to [4] Mr. Palomar, by Italo Calvino. (Translated by William Weaver)

Photos

These were taken in my house. Please excuse the thermostat in the background.

How do we see the world? I like to think that "Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do."^[1] Perception is a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole. …

The Southern Gothic writer, Flannery O'Connor, in writing about her own creative process says,

Learning to see is the basis for all of the arts except music, I know a good many fiction writers who paint, not because they're any good at painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things." I find this statement particularly interesting coming from a writer, as learning to read is often the only formal visual training that most people receive. When you start to really look at things, you realize that what you know and what you see are not always in alignment.^[2]

When I was a student at Georgia Tech, if it was nice out on the weekend, I liked to sit by the fountain outside the library and read. The campus was normally pretty quiet, but on one particular afternoon I was interrupted by the sound of a small commotion coming my way. There was a tour with about 20 elementary school-aged children that were being led through campus. As they ascended the staircase up that led up to the library, something unexpected happened (well, unexpected to me). Just as they reached top of the stairs and the fountain finally came into their view, they all simultaneously squealed with delight, ran to the fountain's edge, and plunged their hands into the cold water and started splashing about. It was joyous (pure joy). The chaperones quickly caught up and herded them back together, and they went on their way, but I felt like in that one moment of vicarious sensory rapture, I had just seen the world with fresh eyes.

Now when I was in elementary school, I once had a homework assignment where I had to draw a picture of my soul… (I went to Catholic School) I was a nerdy kid - I liked computers, math and science. This was my half/smart-assed response. This is a weird drawing, but as you can see, my values are a bit skewed, (conflicted between the material and the immaterial) and arguably pretty confused. Obviously my brain and my eyes were of the utmost importance, but other than that, there are only some vestigial traces of a body, and then there's this little halo bit up here to account for any of the insignificant leftover bits. (note: I think that I kinda winged this part)

For some reason, this image from my past came to mind as I was reading this quote from The Book by Alan Watts:

I have sometimes thought that all philosophical disputes could be reduced to an argument between the partisans of "prickles" and the partisans of "goo." The prickly people are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise, and like to stress differences and divisions between things. They prefer particles to waves, and discontinuity to continuity. The gooey people are tender-minded romanticists who love wide generalizations and grand syntheses. They stress underlying unities, and are inclined to pantheism and mysticism. ...

... Waves suit them much better than particles as the ultimate constituents of matter, and discontinuities jar their teeth like a compressed-air drill. Prickly philosophers consider the gooey ones rather disgusting–undisciplined, vague dreamers who slide over hard facts like an intellectual slime which threatens to engulf the whole universe in an "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" (courtesy of Professor F.S.C. Northrup). But gooey philosophers think of their prickly colleagues as animated skeletons that rattle and click without any flesh or vital juices, as dry and desiccated mechanisms bereft of all inner feelings. ...

... Either party would be hopelessly lost without the other, because there would be nothing to argue about, no one would know what his position was, and the whole course of philosophy would come to an end.^[3]

When you see, what do you see? Are you inclined towards waves or particles? Continuities or discontinuities? What is your true visual experience? Is prickly or gooey? Can you choose one or the other? Pondering the potentials of observation, I would like to turn to perhaps the ultimate observer, Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar. This is from the first chapter, titled, Reading a wave.

The sea is barely wrinkled, and little waves strike the sandy shore. Mr. Palomar is standing on the shore, looking at a wave. Not that he is lost in contemplation of the waves. He is not lost, because he is quite aware of what he is doing: he wants to look at a wave and he is looking at it. He is not contemplating, because for contemplation you need the right temperament, the right mood, and the right combination of exterior circumstances; and though Mr. Palomar has nothing against contemplation in principle, none of these three conditions applies to him. Finally, it is not "the waves" that he means to look at, but just one individual wave: ...

Mr. Palomar sees a wave rise in the distance, grow, approach, change form and color, fold over itself, break, vanish, and flow again. At this point he could convince himself that he has concluded the operation he had set out to achieve, and he could go away. *[Projector?]

But isolating one wave is not easy, separating it from the wave immediately following, which seems to push it and at times overtakes it and sweeps it away; and it is no easier to separate that one wave from the preceding wave, which seems to drag it toward the shore, unless it turns against the following wave, as if to arrest it, Then, if you consider the breadth of the wave, parallel to the shore, it is hard to decide where the advancing front extends regularly and where it is separated and segmented into independent waves, distinguished by their speed, shape, force, direction. * [Switch to projector]

...at each moment he thinks he has managed to see everything to be seen from his observation point, but then something always crops up that he had not borne in mind. If it were not for his impatience to reach a complete, definitive conclusion of his visual operation, looking at waves would be a very restful exercise for him and could save him from neurasthenia, heart attack, and gastric ulcer. And it could perhaps be the key to mastering the world's complexity by reducing it to its simplest mechanism.

* [Add Square] Concentrating the attention on one aspect makes it leap into the foreground and occupy the square, just as, with certain drawings, you have only to close your eyes and when you open them the perspective has changed. Now, in the overlapping of crests moving in various directions, the general pattern seems broken down into sections that rise and vanish. In addition, the reflux of every wave also has a power of its own that hinders the oncoming waves. And if you concentrate your attention on these backward thrusts, it seems that the true movement is the one that begins from the shore and goes out to sea. [Scroll to blank]

Is this perhaps the real result that Mr. Palomar is about to achieve? To make the waves run in the opposite direction, to overturn time, to perceive the true substance of the world beyond sensory and mental habits? No, he feels a slight dizziness, but it goes no further than that. The stubbornness that drives the waves toward the shore wins the match:

Only if he manages to bear all the aspects in mind at once can he begin the second phase of the operation: extending this knowledge to the entire universe.

It would suffice not to lose patience, as he soon does. Mr. Palomar goes off along the beach, tense and nervous as when he came, and even more unsure about everything. [End] ^[4]