The power of names
Jan. 22nd, 2014 10:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteI'm currently reading an interesting book, On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, by Alexandra Horowitz. There are many insights that will add interesting support for the points I'm making in an article that I'm writing on learning how to see (and how to teach what we see).
The prompt for today's article, though, is one of her comments about what she calls the "safari effect": you go on safari in Africa, you see one of your checklist animals, and you stop seeing the animal and start seeing the name. That reminded me of a decision I made quite a long time ago for a related reason: I decided to stop looking up names and picture of things like plants and birds in reference textbooks before I left on vacation.
The original notion of doing that research was to provide details and context that would enrich my seeing. But when I started paying attention, I discovered to my dismay that quite the opposite was happening: rather than seeing more deeply, I found that I was seeing less. I suspect the problem is that, as a writer and editor, so much of my world revolves around seeing abstractions (i.e., words) rather than the world in which those abstractions live. Ignoring the words let me pay closer attention to the realities they circumscribe in their tight little etymological cages, and I found I was seeing many fascinating details I would otherwise have missed.
There's a related phenomenon that occurs when you see the world primarily through the eye of a camera: that (literally) circumscribed view eliminates all of the context that your unaided eyes take in automatically. The photo may well become an important souvenir, but it can replace the richer memory that should lie at the root of the word "souvenir" (literally, a "memory"). Focusing on framing the photo in the viewfinder detracts from my ability to hear, smell, and touch what's going on around me. I still take enough photos to frustrate Shoshanna at times, so that I can share what I've seen with family and friends, but I make sure to spend more time engaging with the scenery with my eyes than with my camera.
[Several days later...] XKCD says something similar in its own unique way.
The prompt for today's article, though, is one of her comments about what she calls the "safari effect": you go on safari in Africa, you see one of your checklist animals, and you stop seeing the animal and start seeing the name. That reminded me of a decision I made quite a long time ago for a related reason: I decided to stop looking up names and picture of things like plants and birds in reference textbooks before I left on vacation.
The original notion of doing that research was to provide details and context that would enrich my seeing. But when I started paying attention, I discovered to my dismay that quite the opposite was happening: rather than seeing more deeply, I found that I was seeing less. I suspect the problem is that, as a writer and editor, so much of my world revolves around seeing abstractions (i.e., words) rather than the world in which those abstractions live. Ignoring the words let me pay closer attention to the realities they circumscribe in their tight little etymological cages, and I found I was seeing many fascinating details I would otherwise have missed.
There's a related phenomenon that occurs when you see the world primarily through the eye of a camera: that (literally) circumscribed view eliminates all of the context that your unaided eyes take in automatically. The photo may well become an important souvenir, but it can replace the richer memory that should lie at the root of the word "souvenir" (literally, a "memory"). Focusing on framing the photo in the viewfinder detracts from my ability to hear, smell, and touch what's going on around me. I still take enough photos to frustrate Shoshanna at times, so that I can share what I've seen with family and friends, but I make sure to spend more time engaging with the scenery with my eyes than with my camera.
[Several days later...] XKCD says something similar in its own unique way.