Surprise is an enabler of seeing

Monday, August 9, 2021

In Alan Jacobs’ latest newsletter, he tells a story of literally stumbling into the Pantheon and San Lorenzo in Lucina while wandering around Rome. (It’s so delicious to think about actually being able to flaneur and wander around a foreign city again one day.) Alan points out how different it felt to happen upon them by chance vs. actively seeking them out.

“Surprise is the great enabler of seeing,” Alan writes.

He points to a passage in Walker Percy’s essay, “The Loss of the Creature” (collected in The Message in the Bottle) in which Percy explores how education and classification systems blind us, essentially, to the reality of things we’re trying to see. For example, a man taking a trip to see the Grand Canyon:

Why is it almost impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon under these circumstances and see it for what it is — as one picks up a strange object from one’s back yard and gazes directly at it? It is almost impossible because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind. Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head on. The thing is no longer the thing…. it is rather that which has already been formulated—by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon.

In another newsletter that hit my inbox this morning, Oliver Burkeman posted an excerpt from his forthcoming Four Thousand Weeks, about his problem of trying to “live in the moment” while trying to take in the Northern Lights.

The more Burkeman tried to take them in and be in the moment, the more he failed. In fact, he got so far away from being in the moment by trying to be in the moment that he had a thought that still makes him squirm: “Oh, I found myself thinking, they look like one of those screensavers.”

The attempt to “be here now” feels not so much relaxing as rather strenuous – and it turns out that trying to have the most intense possible present-moment experience is a surefire way to fail. […] To try to live in the moment implies that you’re somehow separate from “the moment,” and thus in a position to either succeed or fail at living in it.

Part of the problem is that the brain only really registers what it doesn’t expect to see.

When we think of seeing, we imagine the eyes sending a bunch of data to the brain and then the brain interpreting all that data.

“It turns out, however, that the brain does not work like this at all,” Carlo Rovelli writes in Helgoland. “It functions, in fact, in an opposite way. Many, if not most, of the signals do not travel from the eyes to the brain; they go the other way, from the brain to the eyes.”

What happens is that the brain expects to see something, on the basis of what it knows and has previously occurred. The brain elaborates an image of what it predicts the eyes should see. This information is conveyed from the brain to the eyes, through intermediate states. If a discrepancy is revealed between what the brain expects and the light arriving into the eyes, only then do the neural circuits send signals toward the brain. So images from around us do not travel from the eyes to the brain—only news of discrepancies regarding what the brain expects do.

This, Rovelli points out, is actually a very efficient way of functioning: no need to worry the brain with what it already knows is there.

The implications for the relationship between what we see and the world, however, are remarkable. When we look around ourselves, we are not truly “observing”: we are instead dreaming of an image of the world based on what we know (including bias and misconception) and unconsciously scrutinizing the world to reveal any discrepancies, which, if necessary, we will try to correct.

Surprising the brain, however, is almost impossible to plan or strategize! You can’t really will surprise, you can only put yourself in situations where you have a better chance of being surprised.

It’s easy to surprise your brain by looking around a foreign country, but much harder to do in your everyday environment. (In Rob Walker’s excellent The Art of Noticing, he suggests trying to be a tourist in your own town, and to “Spot Something New Every Day.”)

An artist makes the ordinary extraordinary, but if we only really register what we aren’t expecting to see, a great part of the artist’s job is to try to estrange his mind from the ordinary things he’s trying to see.

“Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.”

I am fond of drawing tricks as tools for estrangement: drawing something upside down, drawing something without looking at the paper, etc.

But seeing with fresh eyes is never a simple task.

I suppose all one can really do is keep your eyes peeled.

Take me back to the canyon

Monday, February 22, 2021

Three weeks ago, my family and I spent a short weekend at Laity Lodge. I’ve been dreaming about it ever since.

We splashed in the Frio. Hiked in the hills. Watched the sun paint the canyon orange then go dark until the moon climbed up over the side. Gazed at the stars.

Ate wonderful food. Played the old Steinway. Explored the library, found one of my books next to Alan Jacobs and Kierkegaard. Stared at the campfire. (“It looks like the fire is trying to tell us a story!” Jules exclaimed.) Laid around and listened to the birds and read books.

There’s no cell signal on the property, so you’re just blissfully cut off from the outside world. I found it didn’t take very long at all for my mind to clear out there. Part of this, I suspect, is the 3-hour trip through the hill country and driving through the river before you get to the property. It’s a cleansing.

With free headspace, I thought a lot about my new book. I didn’t anticipate writing at all, but I filled a bunch of notebook pages with maps like this.

After we left, I texted Alan and asked him, “Once you leave the canyon, how do you not spend every day wishing you were back in the canyon?” He texted back, “I totally and absolutely miss it every day.”

Thank you to Gate, Steven, Grant, and the rest of the crew who showed us such wonderful hospitality and gave us such a good gift in a rotten time.

Back in Texas

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

cacti and texas sky
“Once you are in Texas it seems to take forever to get out, and some people never make it.”
—John Steinbeck

Our Lake Erie Sabbatical is officially over, and we’re back home in Austin, Texas, living just a few blocks south of where we first landed a dozen years ago.

I find it annoying how the older I get the more the clichés ring true. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. (Luckily, you can always turn around.)

We see every pattern except our own David shrigley — David Shrigley

I never gave this place the credit it probably deserved. People would say to me, “Oh, living in Austin, that must be so creatively inspiring!” And I’d say, “Well, I don’t know about that. It’s just a nice place to live.” But all my books and sons were born here, and the minute I got back, I started itching to get started on The Next Thing.

Jeffrey Gibson's Amazing Grace — Jeffrey Gibson, *Amazing Grace*

Every morning walk in the past two weeks has made me thankful for our return. We visited the Blanton this weekend, and this Jeffrey Gibson piece said it all for me. (I didn’t even look at the title. Every year has its theme.)

Good to be home.

On (not) climbing the mountain

Friday, June 28, 2019

“The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there.”
—Henry David Thoreau

Debbie Millman told me she asked Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth what it was like to be the biggest rock star in the world.

He said when you get to the top of the mountain it’s cold and you’re alone and the only way back is down.

(As sage an answer as that is, one of the weakest chapters in DLR’s otherwise excellent Crazy From The Heat is the one about mountain climbing.)

I’m not a mountain climber and I never will be, but yesterday in Edinburgh I climbed up an extinct volcano called Arthur’s Seat. (Robert Louis Stevenson described it as “a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design.”)

There are a bunch of ways to get up up the hill, some more popular than others. The whole time I was hiking, I would stop, turn around, and admire the view. As I got higher and less-winded, I kept thinking, “This seems good enough. Do I really need to get to the top?”

When I got to the top, my suspicion was correct: The view, while majestic and panoramic, wasn’t really any more interesting than many of the other spots going up the hill. And, worse than that, it was crowded. There were people everywhere scrambling up the rocks to get selfies.

I stood there maybe 5 minutes then climbed back down to a more deserted grassy area and had a picnic with a seagull as a companion.

I thought about that photo of climbers waiting in line to get to the top of Mount Everest:

It’s an obvious metaphor, but people kill themselves for the view on the top of the mountain.

(I hate lines and nothing would turn me into an angry ghost more than dying while waiting in one.)

I walked down an easy grassy slope to the east and walked past the Dunsapie Loch, which looked, from the angle on foot, like it continued out to the sea:

A little further, I found a path by a stone wall that took me all the way through a wooded area back to Queens Road. I was alone the whole walk.

I came across these beautiful foxgloves:

And I felt happy.

Later, I walked through town and along the Water of Leith a few miles to the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art. It was even better than climbing up the crags.

No more climbing mountains for me. There are more interesting views in the foothills.

Off the road and back at it

Thursday, May 30, 2019

The cruel irony of book tour is that I go around talking about creativity when I myself am at my least creative. Tour leaves me underslept and exhausted, bereft of any kind of reliable routine or workspace, barely able to concentrate on a book… pretty much the opposite condition of the one I need to be in to sustain any kind of decent work.

Here’s musician Brian Eno on why he quit touring:

I noticed that touring — which is wonderful in some ways — is absolutely confining in other ways. It’s so difficult… you just can’t think about anything else. You try your hardest: You take books with you and word processors, and you’re definitely going to do something with the time. And you never do. It’s so easy for it to become your exclusive life, this one and a half hours every evening that you play. And I just thought, “I’m losing touch with what I really like doing.” What I really like doing is what I call Import and Export. I like taking ideas from one place and putting them into another place and seeing what happens when you do that. I think you could probably sum up nearly everything I’ve done under that umbrella. Understanding something that’s happening in painting, say, and then seeing how that applies to music. Or understanding something that’s happening in experimental music and seeing what that could be like if you used it as a base for popular music. It’s a research job, a lot of it. You spend a lot of time sitting around, fiddling around with things, quite undramatically, and finally something clicks into place and you think, ”Oh, thats really worth doing.” The time spent researching is a big part of it. I never imagined a pop star life that would’ve permitted that.

How wonderful it is, now, to be off the road, and back home, not just isolated in my bliss station, but surrounded by my favorite artists, my boys, six and four, who are churning out all sorts of wild work all day.

(Above: Owen photoshopping an album cover. Below: Jules’ comic of the Three Little Pigs.)