I’ve been engaging in a bit of an experiment of late. I’ve made it a goal to perceive absolutely everything at once. What I do is take a walk. Specifically, I take my usual lunchtime walk through the Loop in Chicago and I try to see everything all at once. This requires a complete lack of actually looking at anything.
Try not looking at anything some time. I dare you. It takes an extreme amount of effort, since the human eye simply doesn’t not look at things.[1] Oh, and try doing that while your eyes are open and you’re walking through a major metropolitan area during the lunch hour.
I actually got pretty good at it after a few tries. I find that I sometimes actually drop into soft focus by accident.[2] I notice things, though. For one, I blink less. Part of it is because it’s really hard to re-not-focus after blinking, but part of it is because the part of the brain required for blinking seems to kind of turn off. For another, I notice how not smooth bipedal locomotion really is. I think that when I focus on things I tend to automatically rule out the natural sway in my field of vision. Fixing on a specific point will do that. But when I stop focusing I become far more aware of the edges of my vision and the edges of my vision are constantly shifting.
The most interesting aspect of the whole thing, though, and why it matters that I’m doing it in the Loop, is that people are a constant source of potential distraction. I’ve noticed that some people tend to grab my attention. People who are wearing bright colors or that are behaving in a way that’s out of the norm seem to result in a sudden, unwelcome focus.[3] Overall, though, it’s not actually necessary to look at people directly to figure out what’s going on. This is true even for people who are walking directly at me.
I can figure out anything I need to know about a person by where they are in relation to me and their direction of travel. I can, in fact, know nothing about another person save that necessary information about where they are and where they are going. Once I figure that out, even with someone who is walking directly towards me, I can let them slide away and become part of the background. I don’t need to know anything else about them: their clothes, their mood, even their gender. It is, in short, possible to know a person only and entirely by their velocity.
I’ve developed, thanks to my odd little experiment, a sort of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle of human interaction. It’s possible, in short, to know someone or to know where that person is going, but it’s not really possible to know both. This is, ultimately, the least surprising revelation I’ve ever had about human nature.
Think about yourself for a moment. Where were you five years ago? Would the you of five years ago hear about where you are and say, “Yeah, I saw that coming?” Does the you of now know exactly who the you of five years from now will be? Can you answer “Yes” to those questions in relation to your friends, your spouse, your parents?
Some people are incredibly predictable. Even predictable people can surprise you from time to time, though. On many occasions the unpredictable moments are based on either an incomplete understanding of the other person or a lack of awareness of what that person is really thinking about at the time they do the unpredictable thing.
This last bit, of course, is because it’s impossible to actually perceive everything at once. This goes beyond eyesight. There are some things that simply can’t be seen or heard or tasted or smelled or felt. There are people who pop in and out of our perception, but who have been living their own lives in the interim. We only see them for brief moments in time. We can only perceive where they are or where they are going. We might be able to briefly modify their course, but all we’re doing is getting in the way or trying to get out of their way.
I’ve decided it’s profoundly weird to try to label people. I’ve realized this because I don’t know how to label myself anymore. I figured this out a month or two ago when discussions of religion caused me to refer to myself as, “Whatever it is I am these days.” At first I thought it was because I was wimping out and trying to avoid allowing people to pin any particular label on me. Then I realized that it was really because I don’t know what my religious views are anymore.
After that I realized that it’s profoundly weird to think that anyone knows what their religious views are. There was a time in my life when it mattered deeply whether or not the person I was talking to had compatible religious views. Now I find I can go for months without bothering to care about the religious views of a new companion. In addition to that, I find that most people I’ve met in the last couple years seem to be able to go for long stretches without bothering to ask about my religious views.
What I’ve realized, ultimately, is that I grew up in a weird place where religious views were all that mattered. It was like, say, being in a group where only people with brown hair could join. If that’s your main criteria for group membership the first thing you’re going to do with anybody is look at their hair when you meet them and try to determine if they’re a brunette or not. You’re then going to try to decide if that brown haired person over there is really a blonde with a bottle of hair dye.
It’s hard to leave a group like that and not look at the hair of the new people you meet. It’s also hard to fathom that you might end up leaving the brown haired group and then meet a blond and a redhead who are really cool and just be able to get along with them because nobody really cares.
It’s all a matter of perception. Is this person walking alongside me or is this person going to get in my way? Is this person crossing my field of vision or overwhelming it?
That’s what matters. We cannot know a person by anything but their velocity, after all.
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[1]Weirdly, I conceived of this idea while reading Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing is Forgetting…, which is about Robert Irwin’s attempt to take labels and figure out of art. Since that point I’ve started re-reading Lawrence Weschler’s True to Life, which is David Hockney’s counter-argument. Hockney makes the point in one of the earliest essays that comprise the book that the human eye is always darting around and focusing on different parts of the whole it is attempting to see. I can tell you from direct experience that he’s absolutely right.
Either way, the idea came up because of one book and now seems like an exercise in futility because of the other. I’m totally okay with that.
[2]I call this “soft focus” based on, of all things, a character in an old sci-fi novel who was a forward scout for a military unit. She would walk around not looking at anything and then suddenly recognize and focus in on a threat. I always thought that was cool and would play around with trying to do it from time to time. As such, it doesn’t surprise me that my little experiment was my immediate response to reading a book about Robert Irwin.
[3]Blondes. I also tend to find myself looking at blondes.
Try not looking at anything some time. I dare you. It takes an extreme amount of effort, since the human eye simply doesn’t not look at things.[1] Oh, and try doing that while your eyes are open and you’re walking through a major metropolitan area during the lunch hour.
I actually got pretty good at it after a few tries. I find that I sometimes actually drop into soft focus by accident.[2] I notice things, though. For one, I blink less. Part of it is because it’s really hard to re-not-focus after blinking, but part of it is because the part of the brain required for blinking seems to kind of turn off. For another, I notice how not smooth bipedal locomotion really is. I think that when I focus on things I tend to automatically rule out the natural sway in my field of vision. Fixing on a specific point will do that. But when I stop focusing I become far more aware of the edges of my vision and the edges of my vision are constantly shifting.
The most interesting aspect of the whole thing, though, and why it matters that I’m doing it in the Loop, is that people are a constant source of potential distraction. I’ve noticed that some people tend to grab my attention. People who are wearing bright colors or that are behaving in a way that’s out of the norm seem to result in a sudden, unwelcome focus.[3] Overall, though, it’s not actually necessary to look at people directly to figure out what’s going on. This is true even for people who are walking directly at me.
I can figure out anything I need to know about a person by where they are in relation to me and their direction of travel. I can, in fact, know nothing about another person save that necessary information about where they are and where they are going. Once I figure that out, even with someone who is walking directly towards me, I can let them slide away and become part of the background. I don’t need to know anything else about them: their clothes, their mood, even their gender. It is, in short, possible to know a person only and entirely by their velocity.
I’ve developed, thanks to my odd little experiment, a sort of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle of human interaction. It’s possible, in short, to know someone or to know where that person is going, but it’s not really possible to know both. This is, ultimately, the least surprising revelation I’ve ever had about human nature.
Think about yourself for a moment. Where were you five years ago? Would the you of five years ago hear about where you are and say, “Yeah, I saw that coming?” Does the you of now know exactly who the you of five years from now will be? Can you answer “Yes” to those questions in relation to your friends, your spouse, your parents?
Some people are incredibly predictable. Even predictable people can surprise you from time to time, though. On many occasions the unpredictable moments are based on either an incomplete understanding of the other person or a lack of awareness of what that person is really thinking about at the time they do the unpredictable thing.
This last bit, of course, is because it’s impossible to actually perceive everything at once. This goes beyond eyesight. There are some things that simply can’t be seen or heard or tasted or smelled or felt. There are people who pop in and out of our perception, but who have been living their own lives in the interim. We only see them for brief moments in time. We can only perceive where they are or where they are going. We might be able to briefly modify their course, but all we’re doing is getting in the way or trying to get out of their way.
I’ve decided it’s profoundly weird to try to label people. I’ve realized this because I don’t know how to label myself anymore. I figured this out a month or two ago when discussions of religion caused me to refer to myself as, “Whatever it is I am these days.” At first I thought it was because I was wimping out and trying to avoid allowing people to pin any particular label on me. Then I realized that it was really because I don’t know what my religious views are anymore.
After that I realized that it’s profoundly weird to think that anyone knows what their religious views are. There was a time in my life when it mattered deeply whether or not the person I was talking to had compatible religious views. Now I find I can go for months without bothering to care about the religious views of a new companion. In addition to that, I find that most people I’ve met in the last couple years seem to be able to go for long stretches without bothering to ask about my religious views.
What I’ve realized, ultimately, is that I grew up in a weird place where religious views were all that mattered. It was like, say, being in a group where only people with brown hair could join. If that’s your main criteria for group membership the first thing you’re going to do with anybody is look at their hair when you meet them and try to determine if they’re a brunette or not. You’re then going to try to decide if that brown haired person over there is really a blonde with a bottle of hair dye.
It’s hard to leave a group like that and not look at the hair of the new people you meet. It’s also hard to fathom that you might end up leaving the brown haired group and then meet a blond and a redhead who are really cool and just be able to get along with them because nobody really cares.
It’s all a matter of perception. Is this person walking alongside me or is this person going to get in my way? Is this person crossing my field of vision or overwhelming it?
That’s what matters. We cannot know a person by anything but their velocity, after all.
--------------------
[1]Weirdly, I conceived of this idea while reading Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing is Forgetting…, which is about Robert Irwin’s attempt to take labels and figure out of art. Since that point I’ve started re-reading Lawrence Weschler’s True to Life, which is David Hockney’s counter-argument. Hockney makes the point in one of the earliest essays that comprise the book that the human eye is always darting around and focusing on different parts of the whole it is attempting to see. I can tell you from direct experience that he’s absolutely right.
Either way, the idea came up because of one book and now seems like an exercise in futility because of the other. I’m totally okay with that.
[2]I call this “soft focus” based on, of all things, a character in an old sci-fi novel who was a forward scout for a military unit. She would walk around not looking at anything and then suddenly recognize and focus in on a threat. I always thought that was cool and would play around with trying to do it from time to time. As such, it doesn’t surprise me that my little experiment was my immediate response to reading a book about Robert Irwin.
[3]Blondes. I also tend to find myself looking at blondes.
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