We
woke up this morning, Boxing Day, to the scene above, as far as the eye
could see. As soon as I got up I had to get outside, get everyone else
outside, take pictures. I just stood out there with my mouth open. As
soon as I'd shoveled the walk (the kids & grandkids stayed
overnight and had to leave at noon today) I went back inside, got the
camera, and just wandered around, staring. I felt as if I was seeing
the world as an artist. It was pure sensation. There was no
intellectualization -- "that's a lamppost", "that's how I should frame
this shot". I was seeing only with the right side
of my brain -- seeing dark and light, spaces and shadows, not
processing what I was seeing and iconizing it. I watched a downy
woodpecker fly across the yard and land on the pole of our snow-covered
bird feeder, and then do a double-take -- "this is not a tree". A pair
of wild rabbits scrambled through the snow, running in circles around
the trees.
What pulled me outside was pure emotion, pure sensation, and it was that emotion, that feeling, not some 'object' I wanted to 'capture' with the camera.
All
my senses were alert, blurred into synaesthesia (in the scientific
sense of integrated, rather than the psychological sense of jumbled). I
was sensing profoundly, viscerally, like an animal. And it occurred to
me that, just as our mental processing of objects begins to interfere
with our artistic ability to represent them authentically, our mental
processing abstracts our entire reality. Our ability to perceive authentically is diminished as our ability and inclination to conceive increases. The more we think, the less purely we sense, and the less we really feel.
This
is an arguable and completely unsupported hypothesis, of course, but it
'makes sense' to me. The correlation between intensity of sensation and
intensity of emotion (we even use the ambiguous word 'feeling' to
describe both) seems to me instinctively obvious. Animals with
minimally-conceiving brains live their entire lives synaesthetically
(perhaps with the exception of rare moments when they are 'rationally'
fearful -- when they 'conceive' that their, or their loved-ones', lives
are in danger). It must be a wonderful, constantly astonishing, richly emotional
life. No wonder that, despite their 'inability' (or lack of need) to
conceive of the idea of their own mortality or purpose in life, they
seek so passionately to live!
We humans were definitely
short-changed when in comes to acuity of senses. We have only a few
evident senses to begin with, and they're pretty dim compared to those
of other creatures -- many birds and animals see better than us, and differently
from us, and most hear and smell better than we do, and sometimes seem
to have senses we lack entirely. If our lives are sensually poorer than
other creatures', it seems sensible to me that our lives are also
emotionally emptier, shallower. We were endowed by nature instead with
a bigger and more complex brain than most other creatures, a
compensatory advantage. But I wonder if as our ability for abstraction
increases it also further
diminishes our ability to feel, distances us from our senses and
emotions by putting a conceptual veil between the real world and the
representational theatre of it that plays continually in our heads.
The
first one to follow me outside this morning was our grand-daughter
Cassandra. She's a natural athlete and I watched to see how much of her
attention would be captured by the amazing panorama that greeted her
eyes as she stepped outside. Although it's unfair to judge, and I have
no doubt that children are more synaesthetic than adults, it seemed to
me that she was immediately taken by the athletic promise of the snow
-- she had the 'flying saucer' type toboggan in her hand as she came
out. I watched her as she slid down the front hill of our lot, and she
seemed much more excited by the speed than by the natural wonder all
around her. She went to retrieve her dad when she became impatient with
my shoveling. I sent them around to the more obstacle-free back hill
with the faster aluminum toboggans, and followed soon after with the
camera in hand. I took some photos that were memorable in a different
sense:
A
half hour later the tobogganing was followed by a snowball fight, and
then I returned to my nature photography. I just missed the rabbits in
this shot but I still like it:
I
thought it was curious that this experience followed less than a week
after my story about the skunk, and my article about closing your eyes
and imagining. I sometimes think anything can happen, and will only happen, when you're ready for it.
(more pictures on my Flickr page) |
9:07:15 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
