On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (4 page)

 • • • 

I was just getting used to the idea that we lived, apparently, on a block with an epidemic of
O
s. But I was unprepared for the triangles. We were heading west down the street, only fifty yards (but dozens of minutes) from our front door. Since we had not gotten far, I was hurrying my son along, gently tugging his arm instead of balancing between my left step and right step to wait for his little legs to catch up between long Mama-sized steps. But he was pulling back and I finally let him follow his magnet. I was on the street side of the sidewalk, and he was angling away from me. I looked in the direction he pulled. I saw . . . nothing.

While the
O
s were a linguistic tic displaced onto the world, in the physical world my son was drawn to edges, linings of routes, and low railings. On the corner of the block beamed a large building, of the typical prewar size and gravitas for Manhattan. The street travels up a steep hill, and the building’s easternmost apartments seem to tower above the westernmost. At a glance, I had the feeling of the sort of apartment building it was, having visited or lived in dozens of them in my life. I studied the building for any personality in its facade that would allow me to see beyond the foreknowledge I had of it. I was coming up blank. While I was doing this, my son was bearing down his weight, pulling my hand harder to slow me to a stop. He had found a railing, of a sort. The building had a prewar moat: a basement-level cavity surrounding the building, more likely to allow storage of trash bags than to
keep armies at bay. The moat was edged with a foreboding railing, anchored by heavy balusters. I had certainly attempted not to notice this. It was not a lovely part of the building.

My son had noticed it. He was blessed with the ability to admire the unlovely. Or, I should say, he was blessed with the inability to feel that there is a difference between lovely and un-. The balusters were planted on a parapet just wide enough for a toddler to fit on. He tiptoed along the low wall, hopped down, and clambered up the next. It was in this way that I learned of the triangles. As my son’s route intersected with the sidewalk, the two paths created a long, sharp triangle between them. It was a small step up, and a big step down. Were the triangles friendly? I asked. Yellow? “Green. Bubbly,” he said, solemnly, as I looked at the very nonbubbly, nongreen triangles. I nodded. Who am I to snip that synapse?

 • • • 

Part of normal human development is learning to notice less than we are able to. The world is awash in details of color, form, sound—but to function, we have to ignore some of it. The world still holds these details. Children sense the world at a different granularity, attending to parts of the visual world we gloss over; to sounds we have dismissed as irrelevant. What is indiscernible to us is plain to them.

We humans share our understanding of “what is out there” in the world, but we are not entirely born into it. We all begin in a kind of sensory chaos—what William James called an “aboriginal sensible muchness”: a more or less undifferentiated mass of sounds and lights, colors and textures and smells. When we are growing up, we learn to bring attention to certain elements and to ignore others. By adulthood, we all agree on what is “out there.” But let’s focus on what we ignore: so much! The patterns of pebbles
embedded in asphalt, the pitch of a radiator’s hiss, our own heart beating tangibly in our fingertips and temples. The infant has a mind untrammeled by experience: he has no expectations, so he is not closed off from experiencing something anew.

Neither is he a blank slate, of course. Humans have built-in mechanisms that improve the chances that even in those precarious first moments of life outside the womb, an infant will find his mother (by the smell he’s been entrained on in utero; by the orientation of his eyes to her face; by the bull’s-eye that is a nipple on a breast). Still, the infant does not yet know to ignore the sound of crumpling paper in the hand of the person across the room, or the jangle of a full-body shake of a dog rising. In not knowing what is interesting and what to attend to, he also does not know what we all consider uninteresting: whatever the bottom of the chair looks like; a blank stretch of wall; the corner of a picture frame. We don’t stare at each other’s knees—they just aren’t terribly fascinating—but the baby doesn’t know that yet (and is, of course, at knee height). He ogles away. An infant’s brain is still very early in sorting out what is a whole object and what is only a part: what the edge or limit of an object is. Nor is he yet inculcated in where one is “supposed to” look and where one is “not supposed to” stare. He doesn’t know that the triangles formed between the balusters and the sidewalk are not the least bit interesting.

Or are they? Cézanne suggested that all natural forms are at essence combinations of cubes, cylinders, cones, and spheres. My son’s
O
s are just cross sections of cylinders or spheres; his triangles are lopped-off corners of cubes. Cubists did a lot with these simple structures, deconstructing and reconstructing the shapes we have become familiar with and forget to notice. The infant toys that Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten, designed for his charges were all variations on these shapes. For a baby, even a soft ball delights: it rolls, but it can be caught. For an older infant, a hard ball
represents the moving of things away from them and
by
them—and the cube stands in contrast, resistant to rolling, but pushable, stackable, pileable. Imagine the possibilities when a cylinder joins the party. For my son, the blue cylinder is easily a pretend cup, hat, or fleeing mouse; a “smushed” ball or “too big” marble.

As adults, we are conspirators in designing—
asserting
—what we see in the world. My son was still seeing the shapes of the world that I had stopped seeing. I missed the parapet triangles for the building behind it; the cylinders and cubes that make up the body of a mouse, for the mouse himself.

This is not to say that the world can be seen in infinitely many ways. There is a logic to the images we see; but the logic the child sees is as yet uninfected by the logic of the world seen through an adult’s eyes. Though William James invoked the “blooming, buzzing confusion” a newborn faces in the visual world, the blooming forms a pattern; the buzzing beats a rhythm. Researchers in signal processing who try to reproduce the work of a natural visual system in an artificial (computer) system are faced with the question of just how to represent the world. It turns out that natural images are not at all
random
. That is to say, you could not concoct a natural-looking scene by throwing paint at a wall. This non-randomness means that natural images are fairly predictable: you can guess what is in the next “pixel” of visual space by looking at the pixel right in front of you. The world is highly structured, coherent, with large correlations between what is in one place and what is in the next. So it is not exactly visual white noise that we need to make sense of when we first turn our eyes to the world. Instead, perhaps that simple geometry of cubes and spheres—or pyramids—serves as the structure for building all other things that we will see in our lives.

 • • • 

It took us a good long while to move away from those triangles. I traveled back and forth beside them as my son traveled up onto and down off of them. I took the lead in alternating held hands and smiling apologetically when passersby were forced to weave around us. Each trip between balusters he walked “up, up, up!”—imagining climbing mountains, scaling to the top of unthinkably large vehicles like fire trucks and trains, or clambering all the way up from Mama’s toes to her tip-top. Many people smiled at our game. These people, I determined, were parents.

Finally, for no reason I could see, he tired of the repetition and we headed on our way.

For four steps. Then he stopped, agog. I already knew that my son was extraordinarily keen on finding the “new” thing in a scene. Bring in the mail while he is napping, and he beelines for it on awakening. If I slip a watch on my wrist while he is looking away, it gleams brightly in his eyes as he turns back. On many occasions he has found—and brought to me with the gravity of an investigator at a crime scene—the speck of fluff left on the carpet after vacuuming, an impossibly tiny crumb alighted on his cuff, or another microscopically small particle. I know that cancer-sniffing dogs are in vogue, but I feel confident that any unusual growth on my skin (“dot!” he proudly proclaims) would be found by my son before our pup.

And here, too, he dropped my hand and pointed at the ground, and I knew that there was something new.

“Pebbles!”

An elm tree had disgorged hundreds, maybe thousands of small green seeds on the sidewalk. They looked like flat, circular petals dyed the faintest spring green. “Many, many!” he cried, sweeping his hands back and forth excitedly. They colored the sidewalk cracks, traced its edges, defined the five-inch altitude change from curb to street. From my son’s enthusiasms, I knew when
these petal-pebbles had arrived from their branchy haven: overnight. My son’s neophilia—love of the new—was strong enough that he would have seen and announced them had they arrived earlier. It was through his eyes that I began to see how the sidewalk and street are refreshed, each time we leave or arrive home. There is a constant rearrangement of things on the street and in the air that is seen only by those who do not know that gazing at the cars parked on the street is boring.

In childhood, all is new. With age, we see things as familiar. We have
seen it all before
: in our daily lives, we are sure what we will encounter, and in a city, the cool resident will not even bother to slow his stride for the crowd of people gathered around some unusual occurrence on the sidewalk. Vacations are the adult exceptions. There, two things happen: we actually do see new places and second, we bother to look.
²
I suspect that some of our fondness for so-called vacation locales (which are, after all, someone else’s home—as your home may be someone else’s vacation) is due to this
simply looking.

Soon, though, we acclimate. Familiarity begins following us around. Before we know it, we have become entirely accustomed to how that vacation spot looks. We have routines, we know the way—and we stop looking. Still, that vacation has changed us temporarily. Returning home, we have a small window in which we can use our newfound vision to see our old environment anew. When I travel outside my home in New York, the streets just
feel
different. It is on returning home that I can identify why. Compared to the width of the streets where the primary mode of transport is automotive, and where there is space to provide a generous sidewalk, my familiar sidewalks and streets suddenly look terribly
narrow when I come back from a drive outside the city. When I have returned from abroad, they seem comfortably wide, compared to the much more ancient sidewalks that always force you to step into the street when people are passing. An ordinary street scene now appears crammed with uncountable objects on which the eye could fall. The sidewalk is temporarily unnavigable; I bump into people, fall out of step. Even the slope of the street surprises. In the Midwest, streets are designed to grade gently downward near the curbs to lead rainwater into gutters and avoid puddling. My, how non-gently-descending my NYC streets are!

This new perception of the peculiarness of my hometown lasts exactly one viewing. After seeing my block once, my visual system is rebooted and restored to its ordinary self. Same old block. Seen it all before.

In childhood, then, attention is brightened by two features: children’s neophilia and the fact that, as young people, they simply
haven’t
seen it all before.

Exhibit A of this convergence was about to appear.

“Dump truck!”

We had turned off our residential side street onto the avenue. Broadway. For me, the avenue meant waves of pedestrians, noise, and grocery stores. For my son, it meant
trucks
. Now that he had called my attention to it, I had to admit it was quite a truck. I admired the dump truck, out of scale with the city, its tires curling taller than my child stands and its dumper bright blue and enormous. Having a number of scale models of dump trucks on my dining room table at that very moment, I felt qualified to say that this one looked quite sound.

My son gaped at the truck, pointing redundantly. Trucks were his newest love, but he had long been vehicularly inclined. The first “new thing” he had noticed, many months prior, was airplanes: each one was unaccountably exciting. I quickly learned
that planes appeared in our skies, flying north along the Hudson River lining the city, every three to five minutes, descending for their landings nearby at LaGuardia Airport. This reliability had air-traffic-controlling significance, but for me it was deeply satisfying, as it provided periodic but ever-increasing pleasure to him to spot them.

After planes, my son expanded his transportation interests broadly. Helicopters were fabulous, but even cars would do. Motorcycles! The thrill of finding a motorcycle parked on our block was surpassed only by the thrill of a motorcycle roaring down our block. He would not let a bus pass without comment. Now, trucks. One might think he had been bred for vehicular spotting, given the sensitivity to and alacrity he had in locating and identifying a truck in the greater New York City area. No sooner had he discovered the category “truck” than he identified subcategories, highlighting what made each one different and new and glorious. With his current vocabulary the categories included “big,” “little,” “dump,” “fire,” “garbage,” and, a catch-all which was surprisingly apt, “funny.”