Raw Perception
Sunday, 24 June 2007.
My dog can often be found standing at the window. He is quite tall enough to see outside comfortably while sitting or standing, and for sometimes hours each day will simply stare out the window, still as a stone, taking it in. You really have to get his attention to pry him away, by calling his name several times, by offering him a snack, or by pouncing on him and scaring him witless.
I always wondered if he saw deeper than we do; by staring out that window he could deconstruct reality, see it for what it really is.
This reminded me of an essay by Canadian artist David Rokeby, which an art class of mine once required me to read. In The Construction of Experience: Interface as Content, he writes:
The input from our senses generally reaches our awareness only after passing through the powerful filters of our perceptual systems, but we can also open ourselves to raw sensuality. There is something profoundly important about the fact that the base of our human/reality interface is raw and uncoded. We can, to some degree, bypass our own perceptual filtering.
I had an experience in art school that brought this home in a very direct way. One of my professors told us one day that we would be looking out a window for the whole three-hour class. I was incensed. I'd been willing to go along with most of the unusual activities these classes had entailed, but I felt this was going too far. I stood at my assigned window and glared out through the pane. I saw cars, two buildings, a person on the street. Another person, another car. This was stupid! For fifteen minutes I fumed, and muttered to myself. Then I started to notice things. The flow of traffic down the street was like a river, each car seemingly drawn along by the next, connected. The blinds in each of the windows of the facing building were each a slightly different colour. The shadow of a maple tree in the wind shifted shape like some giant amoeba. For the remaining hours of the class I was electrified by the scene outside. After fifteen minutes, the ‘names’ had started separating from the objects.
It seems that we stop seeing, hearing, smelling as soon as we have positively identified something. At that point, we may as well replace the word for the object. Since identification usually happens quickly, we spent most of our time not really sensing our environment, living in a world of pre-digested and abstracted memories.
This explains our attraction to optical illusions and mind-altering experiences (chemically-induced or not). Those moments of confusion, where identification and resolution aren’t immediate, give us a flash of the raw experience of being. These moments of confusion are also the fulcra of paradigm shifts. It’s only when our conventional way of dealing with things breaks down that we can adopt another model, another way of imagining and experiencing a scenario.
Would it not be sad indeed if a mere dog could see at a deeper level than we humans could? While the abstraction of thing to concept gives us greater reasoning powers, would it be a waste of life if we didn’t take special precaution to enjoy life simply for being life?
