mills

I regretted not being able to see any JMW Turner while in London, particularly as I tried to imagine the Houses of Lords and Commons burning, as it is in his painting above. To conjure the image was difficult, for two reasons. First, the facade of the buildings strikes me as almost perfectly beautiful and suitably stately, and secondly it has, through reproduction over the years, become as iconic a symbol of immutable governance as any structure outside of Greece. To an American, the depth of European history seems almost eternal in comparison to our own brief efforts.

The effect such scale has on one is interesting, and reminds me of what Distorte’s post on Turner called to mind some time ago: the relationship between scale, perception, and cognition. While in London, I spoke briefly with the groom of the wedding about the problem of cyan and noted that in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, one never encounters the color blue; it is as though the Greeks simply didn’t see it, describing the sea as “wine dark” and focusing their descriptions on “rosy-fingered dawn,” for example. Blue, I have read, is one of the last colors we have come to differentiate mentally, while red, black, and yellow were among the first.

The groom, a classicist among other specialties, mentioned too that hues are never the focus of ancient texts; intensity is, so that darkness and lightness are described without reference to actual color. Of course, it is not biological change that has altered our perception but the development of our cognition: an amazing thing to consider.

One often hears that dogs “see in black and white,” which is of course nonsensical: dogs’ eyes do not perform the rather artificial conversion of the visible light spectrum to grayscale; only recent inventions like chemical photography, television, and digital processing do. Instead, their eyes take in the same wavelengths that ours do but their brains do not seem to differentiate between them: just as your mind effortlessly fills in the gap left by true cyan on your monitor, theirs papers over the various hues and focuses on intensity (and other sense perceptions).

The processing of sensory data, itself raw and natural, in the brain is driven less by biology than by something else, but it is hard to say just what: why did humanity become attentive to blue some thousands of years ago? Why were we previously not? It is as though the sky and sea in their infinity were too dull to differentiate: better to focus on the colors of the Earth.

It is worth considering how visual art both reflects and alters the development of our perceptual capacities. Reading how people of the past related to their painting is astonishing: what to us seems flat and mannered and false to them seemed as real as a film; without a doubt, people after us will regard the succession of thirty still images each second, flashed two-dimensionally, as an absurdly unconvincing depiction of reality. What is impossible to imagine is what else, if anything, there is to see, what other gaps remain in our sense cognition, what colors remain perceived but unseen, taken into the eye but unassembled into the synthetic idea we experience as color.

At the British Museum, there is a wonderful exhibit of clocks from various periods in history, some older than I thought possible; the mechanical brilliance of their construction attenuated, to a degree, notions of our contemporary technological supremacy.

They also brought to mind one of my favorite metaphors: Karl Popper’s description of “clouds and clocks,” the two representations of determinacy and indeterminacy, which he uses to illustrate how those concepts interrelate in forms other than pure contradiction.

I used to quote Popper often, and probably should get back to his work. Some of his assertions rank among the most important ideas I’ve encountered: simple, subtle, profound, and never in need of obscuring lexical complexity.

GPOYW. It emerges that it is not, in fact, an international tradition to wear light, summer suits to country weddings in June. Additionally, the men above and the women also present were among the most impressive people I’ve met: astonishingly accomplished academics and entrepreneurs and artists, warm and engaging and thoughtful, easygoing but capable of casually assembling a beautiful wedding, kind, witty, charming, and never dull.

Ordinarily, around manifestly superior people I flush with awareness of my own disastrous flaws, but they were so friendly that they succeeded in temporarily tricking me into feeling comfortable around them.

More photos to come.

(See also).

I can confirm, based on my experiences at the wedding in England and my meeting with John Brissenden, Mr. Error Gorilla, and Michelvis, that it is indeed a national characteristic of the British to be ludicrously generous in their estimations of others, indecently nice in their interactions, and astonishingly funny. I think I could perhaps cease therapy were I able to live there.

As it is, I’ll have to content myself with visiting as often as possible and passing time with people who are as brilliant and delightful as their writing suggests, and who moreover believe that smoking isn’t a habit so much as a calling. The joy of being one of four serious smokers at lunch is hard to convey.

In addition to being excellent conversationalists and game for some truly aimless itinerancy, they also helped me in a clutch moment find some suitable shirts after I’d mispacked my luggage, which I wound up leaving in London anyway. After seeing a bit of Westminister with John, I can say that I envy his students greatly. In addition to his erudition and insight, he is impossibly funny; so too were Mr. and Mrs. Gorilla (who are also masters of t-shirt style), and the three of them were as pleasant a set of companions as I’ve had.

I regretted only that I had so little time. I hope to see them again, here, there, or elsewhere.

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It seems of note that we are generally incapable, in recollection or in recreation, to capture the entirety of what we perceive. What is as notable and is often demonstrated in amusing optical illusions is that our brains seem determined, almost like gently doting parents, to spare us from recognizing what is absent: diligently, the mind fills in blind spots and assigns depth and texture and calculates values not present, and this sort of automatic assistance accompanies everything from perception to cognition to emotion.

Above is one of my favorite optical phenomena; the result is stunning and the gap it exposes almost embarrassing, particularly if you like to take photographs: called “The Eclipse of Mars,” it demonstrates that monitors, no matter their caliber, simply do not display any color like pure cyan. This iteration comes from Skytopia:

1. “Stare at the white dot in the centre of the red circle for at least two minutes; stay focused on the white dot.
2. You’ll start to see a thin rim of light around the edge. Don’t stop staring at the dot! Wait another minute, keeping your head perfectly still.
3. After two minutes, very slowly move your head backwards, making sure to keep your eyes focused on the dot. The circle’s rim will glow brilliantly with true cyan! [Rephrased a bit]”

The fact that there exists this color that your monitor cannot display (note the chart of ordinary cyan-to-blue below) is a mystery: have you ever looked at a photograph online and thought, “No, that’s missing a key color?” Don’t the landscapes and skies all seem totally complete, marvelous, rich, full? And yet they cannot have this crucial color, and your mind simply fills in what your medium lacks!

This seems to me more than amusing. One’s mind is determined to conceal gaps in perception, thought, and emotion with whatever is at hand and to do so without, as it were, alerting you. Doesn’t this seem incredible, almost like a metaphor for pure ignorance and our natural aversion to it, proof that we cannot be relied upon to meaningfully see through, so to speak, our technologies and media?

(From Photophobia, I-10, larger here).

I had a friend named Adam who wrote nice songs, and after I’d stopped playing music with him I’d occasionally listen to his albums while driving; we’d driven a lot together, to Phoenix once, and his voice always brought those trips to mind. A girl I dated in New York really loved his lyrics, too, and while visiting me once many years after the last time we’d seen one another she recalled a verse of his; her recollection stunned me, and I wondered if all those hours we spent together driving through the New York winter and supplanting our perhaps modest connection with music had meant more to her than I’d insecurely thought then. It seemed incredible that she remembered this fragment of time, though I myself hadn’t forgotten it either.

She seemed excited to see me again, anyway, and spoke the lyric: “I could drive forever and never stop smiling about all the things I didn’t used to know.” I liked that line because I knew that feeling, and I am ready to know it again.