On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (34 page)

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That was only the first half-block of my final walk around the block. A simple walk had become unrecognizably richer. In the nineteenth century, skilled anatomists might boast of being able to identify an animal—and even reconstruct it—from the evidence of a single bone. The animal that is the city is similarly traceable from small bits of evidence. Part of seeing what is on an ordinary block is seeing that everything visible has a history. It arrived at the spot where you found it at some time, was crafted or whittled or forged at some time, filled a certain role or existed for a particular function. It was touched by someone (or no one), and touches someone (or no one) now. It is evidence.

The other part of seeing what is on the block is appreciating how limited our own view is. We are limited by our sensory abilities, by our species membership, by our narrow attention—at least the last of which can be overcome. We walk the same block as dogs yet see different things. We walk alongside rats though each of us lives in the dusk of the other. We walk by other people and do not see what each of us knows, what each of us is doing—captured instead by the inside of our own heads.

My original block—and every block—is impossibly dense with sights and sounds. What allowed me to see the bits that I would have otherwise missed was not the expertise of my walkers,
per se; it was their simple interest in attending. I selected these walkers for their ability to boost my own selective attention. An expert can only indicate what she sees; it is up to your own head to tune your senses and your brain to see it. Once you catch that melody, and keep humming, you are forever changed.

My initial walk now felt like the imprimatura for an oil painting: the very first layer of paint on a canvas, which lends something to future layers but will eventually be obliterated by them. In some paintings, even heavy, Rembrandtian oil paintings, there are gaps where the base layer spread on the new canvas shines through, where it has not yet been altered by layers of oils and inks and colors. Those peeks at the imprimatura are not moments of laziness; the meaning of the gaps changes because the context around them has changed. The bit left unpainted is now surrounded by smears of pinks and reds that form the nose, or the ear, or the eye of the subject of the portrait; the unpainted bit becomes the nostril, or the inner ear, or the corner of the eye—and will never be just a base layer again. My initial walk was this negative space changed by layers of walks hence.

The result of these walks on my head is tangible: they refined what I can see. My mind can prepare my eyes to spontaneously find a leaf gall, to hear an air conditioner’s hum, to smell the sickly sweet smell of garbage on a city street (or the fragrance of my own soap on my face, instead). It can tune to the sounds of my own breath, the feel of my heartbeat, or the shifts of my weight as I walk and negotiate sidewalk space. I can feel my hip bones rotating in their sockets as I walk, my arms swinging in rhythm with my legs. I can hear the conversation behind me, in front of me, in a passing car—or just the jingle of my dog’s tags as he strides alongside me down the street. For me, walking has become less physical transit than mental transportation. It is engaging. I have become, I fear, a difficult walking companion, liable to slow down
and point at things. I can turn this off, but I love to have it on: a sense of wonder that I, and we all, have a predisposition to but have forgotten to enjoy.

There could be an exhaustion in being told to look, to pay attention, to
be here now
: one might feel put upon, as though being chastised for being neglectful. Nearly all the people I walked with—some of whom were, in essence, professional attenders or lookers—reproached themselves for not paying good enough attention.

Do not sag with exhaustion. There is no mandate; only opportunity. Our culture fosters inattention; we are all creatures of that culture. But by making your way through this book—by merely picking it up, perhaps—you, reader, are in a new culture, one that values looking. The unbelievable strata of trifling, tremendous things to observe are there for the observing.
Look!

“You can observe a lot”:

Y. Berra,
The Yogi Book
(New York: Workman Publishing Company, 2010).

“To find new things”:

This is widely attributed to Burroughs, but I have yet to find the original source. An early variant published in
Nature,
vol. 42, 1949, goes “If you would see new things under the sun, the way to go today is the way you went yesterday.” The sentiment is the same, but which words he said remain a mystery.

“To see is to forget”:

via L. Weschler,
Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008).

“The world is full of obvious things”:

A. C. Doyle,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
(Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2006), p. 75.

“’ tis very pregnant”:

W. Shakespeare,
Measure for Measure,
act II, scene I.

“It matters not where or how far you travel”:

H. D. Thoreau,
The Journal, 1837–1861
(New York: New York Review of Books, 2009), entry on May 6, 1854.

“We must always say what we see”:

Le Corbusier,
Le Corbusier Talks with Students From the Schools of Architecture,
trans. P. Chase (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).

“What is life but a form of motion”:

G. Santayana, “The Philosophy of Travel,” in
The Birth of Reason and Other Essays
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 5.

“look, with all your eyes, look!”:

J. Verne,
Michael Strogoff
(play) (New York: Samuel French & Son, 1881), p. 57.

“Sound comes to us”:

H. Schwartz,
Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond
(New York: Zone Books, 2011), p. 50.

“The only true voyage”:

M. Proust,
In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 5: The Captive
(New York: Random House, 1993), p. 343.

“You know my method . . .”:

A. C. Doyle, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” in
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
(New York: Penguin, 2001).

Fechner and James on attention:

W. James,
Principles of Psychology,
vol. 1, ch. 11, “Attention” (New York: Dover, 1890/1950).

“hold the image still as one would with a camera”:

S. Carson, M. Shih, and E. Langer, “Sit Still and Pay Attention?”,
Journal of Adult Development 8
(2001): 183–188.

“blooming, buzzing confusion”:

William James’s famous words, in
Principles of Psychology
(p. 488). In his later
Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy
(New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1916), though, he attributes them to someone else (unnamed).

on attention generally:

R. Parasuraman, ed.,
The Attentive Brain
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); and S. Kastner and L. G. Ungerleider, “Mechanisms of Visual Attention in the Human Cortex,”
Annual Review of Neuroscience 23
(2000): 315–341.

selective attention:

S. Yantis, “The Neural Basis of Selective Attention: Cortical Sources and Targets of Attentional Modulation,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science 17
(2008): 86–90.

on the experience of childhood:

A great stab at imagining this is attempted by developmental psychologist Charles Fernyhough, in
A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist’s Chronicle of His Daughter’s Developing Mind
(New York: Avery, 2009).

synesthesia:

R. E. Cytowic,
Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses
(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989) and
The Man Who Tasted Shapes
(New York: Putnam, 1993).

“gloomy” 3:

A. R. Luria,
The Mind of a Mnemonist
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

“drab shoelace” of h, “weathered wood” a:

V. Nabokov,
Speak, Memory
(New York: Putnam, 1966).

sensorium commune:

U. Muëller, “The Context of the Formation of Heinz Werner’s Ideas,” in J. Valsiner, ed.,
Heinz Werner and Developmental Science
(New York: Plenum, 2005), pp. 25–55.

curly lines as happy:

J. Valsiner, ed.,
Heinz Werner and Developmental Science
(New York: Kluver Academic, 2005).

theory of synesthesia:

Since individual synesthetes’ subjective experiences are rarely identical (Nabokov thought the colored alphabet blocks he was given to play with were colored “all wrong”), some researchers think that the notion of loss of differentiation is insufficient to explain synesthesia. Cytowic, for instance, suggests “polymodal combination” in the limbic system.

on natural synesthesia:

F. Gonzalez-Crussi,
The Five Senses
(San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989).

aboriginal sensible muchness:

James,
Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy
(New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1916), p. 50.

Cézanne on spheres, cones, and cylinders:

L. Birch,
How to Draw and Paint Animals
(London: David & Charles UK, 1997).

Froebel on spheres, cones, and cylinders:

Pratt Institute Monthly,
1904.

on the coherence of the natural world:

D. L. Ruderman, “The Statistics of Natural Images,”
Network: Computation in Neural Systems 5
(1994): 517–548.

neophilia:

J. S. Bruner, “Nature and Uses of Immaturity,”
American Psychologist 27
(1972): 687–708.

“whelp(ing) whole litters of new objects”:

L. Halprin,
Cities
(New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1963), p. 51.

standpipes:

C. Delafuente, “It’s no hydrant, but this hardware plays a critical role in fires,”
New York Times,
August 26, 2007.

on animism:

J. Piaget,
The Child’s Conception of the World
(London: R. & K. Paul, 1926/1951).

on animate-inanimate distinction in childhood:

G. Hatano, “Animism,” in R. A. Wilson and F. Keil, eds.,
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 28–29.

keeping flowers company:

Piaget,
The Child’s Conception of the World.

hexagonal Roman roads:

M. G. Lay,
Ways of the World: A History of the World’s Roads and of the Vehicles That Used Them
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

Clochán na bhFómharach:

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/giants-causeway/history/
.

weathering of buildings:

M. Mostafavi and D. Leatherbarrow,
On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

stair erosion:

J. Templer,
The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls, and Safer Design
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

on gingko:

“Introduction to the Ginkgoales,”
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/seedplants/ginkgoales/ginkgo.html
.

horticulture books: