« stuck kettles | Main | Talking of prepositions... »
November 25, 2004
stuck gauze
Some days it’s as if I’m looking through gauze, and this isn’t simply a case for the optician. It’s not about being unable to look, but being unable to see. We say “see” very easily, and, most of us do indeed see to the extent that we don’t get run over by a bus. In artistic terms this is a function of looking and recognising, not seeing.
We could, most of us, if pushed, make a reasonable stab at scratching such marks on the back of an envelope that would enable a casual observer to remark upon its likeness to an omnibus. [At this point a spokesperson for the Plain English Society states: we can all draw a recognisable bus shape.] There are certain shapes and details that tell us it’s a bus, these may be called signifiers. The signifiers trigger a response in our memory and we retrieve a picture from our mind that fits the responses and BINGO! It’s a bus. We recognise it.
However it is far more difficult to draw the particular, individual, bus that we avoided being run over by. [Spokesperson for the Society of Theoretically Correct Grammar interjects with the notion that one shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition, see above post.] To draw the particular we need more detailed signifiers, we need to look in more detail, we need to begin to see.
In everyday life we are bombarded by images, millions and millions of bits of information. For our brains to cope and make some sense out of it all we ignore millions and millions of bits of information. We have a system of recognition that means that if an object resembles something we have seen before we ignore all the details and just see the stored image. This saves us immense effort in the long run, but when it comes to painting a portrait for instance it is a great handicap.
Some days I can see better than others, there appears to be no tangible reason, just some days the gauze isn’t so thick.
Posted by john at November 25, 2004 09:45 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.deletetheweb.com/unstuck/mt/mt-tb.cgi/191