it’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open (...) Specialists can find the most incredibly well-hidden things - Annie Dillard
i don’t have a lot of red things.
or better:
i think i don’t have a lot of red things.
my eyes and brain are just constantly mixing them all. the colors. and inside my eyes they seem to be kind of blueish. “they” are my things, my stuff, all of them, and the colors they hide until the light reaches them every morning. My eyes account for less than one percent of the weight of my head; I’m bony and dense; I see what I expect, says Annie Dillard about the things she can’t see until she’s actively looking for them. maybe i’m just never expecting to see red.
what i did not understand, until now, is that it is a matter of making the color visible, of actively looking for it. as if it had been hiding from my perception. i bring this element, the Red Attractor, which -surely not randomly- is shaped and colored like an old magnet -white with a red tip-, and it magnetizes, visually, all the red. it’s like the photons that were hitting my red objects before needed a push outside of the objects on which they landed. the red attractor acts like a magnet, physically attracting the photons that randomly -or maybe not so randomly- land on red objects. it brings them to the surface, makes them clear, until my eyes finally tell me “dude, you’re surrounded by red”. i am. fooled by my own brain. all small things, all shapes of red, waiting patiently for me to discover them, to be introduced, magnetically, to their existence.
there’s a chapter of the book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, titled Seeing that i’ve been reading at the same time the Red Attractor spends some time in my studio -again, surely not randomly-. Annie says: Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: "This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is." oh, how i’d like to be a simple animal after spending some time with the Attractor. how would the world look like if my brain did not edit it into thinking that i don’t have a lot of red things, but a blob of blueish color that surrounds me constantly? does my brain really need a magnet to perceive things, because it’s not constantly actively looking to perceive them? what else is my brain hiding from me?
i enjoy taking the Attractor out of its box and placing it somewhere i think i have no red stuff. like challenging the magnet to bring forward something that i believe is not there. and i think “aha! i got you”. and then time passes. and if i keep looking, red things start popping up. the photons cannot be tricked so easily, they just need some seconds -time is crucial in this experiment-. a letter in the right top corner of that book is red, a drop of red ink i did not remember to have used, the wrapping paper of my fortune cookie. red everywhere. it’s there, always, surrounding me.
Comments