Ways of Seeing

I often write & talk about metaphorical ways of seeing. Ostensibly metaphor includes one’s senses, but I don’t often focus on the senses. Actually, those very senses help we writers create metaphor: smell, taste, heard sounds, the visual antidote to basic life—these all generate associations that get us to use one thing to describe another.

Do any of us focus on our senses who have use of each? Perhaps not often, anyway. We take for granted their at-the-ready use-ness they provide. I certainly do too often, as I yet have full use of each. This is not the case for the blind, deaf, and I suppose mute … even those mildly so. I can’t comment on their experiences, only my subtle renditions of those afflictions when I walk around in the dark, or my ear gets plugged with water, and perhaps also when I’m set speechless at the sight of something that boggles the mind.

When I go to sleep each night, I place a glass of water on a side table for that middle-of-the-night thirst that attacks. I turn off the lights, and there disappears one sense. Or does it fully disappear? Ray Charles spoke of remembering colors, mostly, before he went blind at age four or five. He told also how his boyhood home had a wood chopping block, a washtub in the yard, and pine trees. These are memories, of course, but they are also seeing. Seeing in the mind, a way we recall or remember the past, but also how we can invent story as well. In fact, without seeing in the mind, we often could not perform everyday tasks.

That glass of water on my night stand. In the middle of the night, with darkness around me, I reach out to grasp the glass, but not sure of distance, I have to feel for the night stand edge, and in that movement, I see in my mind its shape, approximate distance from my already reaching hand, and where on its surface I placed the glass. The memory of putting that glass on the table before sleep and turning out the light was enough, I suppose, to link the thought with the action.

This seems almost too obvious to care about, but think of a seeing in the mind act you perform often, even daily. Let’s stay with the idea of a darkened room. With the lights off, you need to get across the room, maneuver through furniture, find a light switch or doorknob, just to get to the bathroom, or the refrigerator. So you make your way through the room, knowing somewhat where your couch is in relation to your body, how many steps to the end of the couch, the turn through the space between couch and table, then across a stretch of carpet or floor (onto a rug?), close now to the light switch, feel the wall at the edge, the correct height, and click, you’ve got lighted vision again. Easy, right? Sure.

Now think about that one time where you needed to walk in the dark, but through a completely unfamiliar room. You step like a baby, your arms stretched out, feeling, groping for a chair or sofa back, something that’s familiar in shape anyway; you knock things over, stub a toe, walk into the wall, even. Here lie the differences between seeing in the mind without promptings or memory, and what we experience every day in our own homes.

Most people call this, I guess, “visualization.” What does that really mean, though? “I ‘visualized’ it.” Huh? No. We say “I see” when someone is explaining an event, telling a story, or working through a thought. Seeing is the word; seeing in the mind the concept behind the words. This phrase is at our fingertips, and it was used in the methodology within the writing program at Columbia College Chicago, where I earned my MFA and also taught for several years. It is the way writers write, painters paint, and even how photographers “see” a shot (or set it up in their minds) before finding the moment to release the shutter. Perhaps, even, seeing in the mind is one way musicians put together a tune. Well…can they only hear the notes in their heads? Guitarists, pianists, flutists, violinists, all must place their fingers on the instrument before anything auditory happens.

Perhaps then, seeing in the mind is our way to structure the world. Our first world, of course, is our minds. All those thoughts bring so many sights that we have to somehow organize them, even as one quickly jumps (or melds) into another.

Memory. Seeing. Speech. Aroma. Associative elements. Metaphor. They play integral roles in many the creative minds’ lives. Philosophers have spoken about one from another. And as a last thought, I’d like to say something to the legacy of that famous philosopher who asked the question, “When I leave a room where a chair sits, is that chair still in the room?” Here’s my answer: If you leave the room, you no longer see the chair, and therefore cannot prove that the chair exists. Well then, if you turn out the lights, you have just as much ability to question the chair’s existence. So turn out the lights, walk across the room, and when you kick that chair and fracture a toe, your scream will tell you the truth about that chair’s existence.

Tags: Literature, Seeing in Progress, Visual Arts //