Steve_Bamlett_blog

How would you describe yourself to someone who can’t see you?

Seeing is an important word in our culture and so it was in Ancient Attica too. In Euripides play, The Phoenician Women, about the collapse of Thebes as it is subject to civil war by Oedipus’ warlike sons, it is associated with people who assert power over others rather than a desire for cooperative understanding (but that’s another blog since the Oedipus plays are nearly always all about sight and power).

‘Seeing’ is so often the word or its variants that we use so easily to mean understanding , comprehension or coming to terms with, but it is neither sufficient nor necessary in acts of understanding. True understanding comes from the aggregation of data from every sense – hearing, smell, taste and touch. Even visualising is more than this. Painting has often, instance Van Gogh or Titian, sought to make us feel we can touch what we are seeing; even when we cannot. We call it haptic vision. The synaesthetic can hear colours or feel sounds or sometimes taste them. We rush to call these delusions at our peril. For that ignores the many neuronal links between the senses at different stages of data processing in the brain.

Anil Seth, the neuroscientist has much to say on this. Some of it I cite in a blog on the synaesthetic art of Yayoi Kusama recently viewed and reviewed by me in Manchester. But it isn’t only about the associating links between brain inputs we need to think of. There is also the multiple and intersecting products of complex integrated sensations to take into account. These products are multiform and overlap too in equally complex associations of thought, emotion (affect) and action; together with, sometimes, a recreation of the playful sensations involved including the taste of someone. The way the word ‘taste’ has been refined out of connection with the visceral is an interesting case in point.

So why would I want you to think you need to see me, even in description, if you don’t also want to hear and smell and touch me. We usually reserve those latter senses to intimate connections between people, or as a way of typifying those to which we refuse intimacy because they are loud people, without the boundaries appropriate to bourgeois notions of spatial distance, or because they stink. As the working classes or underclasses are still often said to do by those who see them as best kept at a safe distance, so that their sense of ownership of things and self is not compromised.

In intimacy we sometimes choose to know each other in the darkness and discover new insight in the process. But the inhibition of sight responses can have numerous causations and variations of degree, even in what we name ‘blindness’. Blindness has an appalling historic use in terms of denoting those who fail to understand on purpose or because of incapacity: ‘there is none so blind as those who will not see’ is a phrase indicative of the former common belief, common enough to require this axiom anyway.

But sensory deprivations of vision are thus misunderstood anyway, for much of the problem with some eye condition that lead to deprivation is other sensation at these organs, such as intense discomfort from light and or internal.pressure from other neuronal or muscular functions.

Now I would not just rush to ask someone to just hear me, although description might imply an oral communication of what one could see, let alone touch or smell me up close, but I certainly would want to deny that I am only what they would see if they could see me. No. I would want them to assess too the relative warmth of my responsiveness, the refusal of the cold distance that makes me just what the display rules of our oppressive society expects. Am I neat, tidy, clean looking, slim, well dressed? Well, all that varies but rarely in a way that is led by the desire to appear as our society prefers people to appear – discrete, unobtrusive, private.

No. I cannot answer this question for the usual reason that it assumes far too much about the acceptable answers to itself. Anyway beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but in the processed interpretations in different forms (affect, thought, image, feelings, actions toward to me and vice-versa) of different input of sensations, some compensating always for others when more salient to the reason we want to know the person in the first place.

Will I ever answer straightforwardly in these prompted blogs. Not b…y likely.

All love

Steve