Getting it

Reminder to think about issue of the feeling of understanding, how really getting it is a feeling, and if you don’t have the feeling, you don’t really “get it ” I think. Wertheimer: “What happens when a problem is solved, when one suddenly “sees the point? Common as this experience is, we seek in vain for it in the textbooks of psychology.”

Surfaces

Human appearances are such a tricky issue. The philosophical or moral cleavage between surface and substance, vs their more or less profound emotional, attentional, cognitive effect. Not skin-deep, but brain-deep.

Form is converted into perceived qualities; qualities have an affective valence; and this effect is attributed to the object (I think Santayana discusses something like this). Every appearance has a psychological character. The modification of the qualities conveyed generally by appearance may, as Proust describes, be modified by experience with an individual’s behavior, and the qualities conveyed by it. But I think the interaction between appearance and personal qualities is two-way.

The power of the visual arts is based on the power of images to convey qualities with affective value. (Using the term affective very loosely).

What wise thoughts have I had? Not many.

What wise thoughts have I had? Not many. Working on manuscript, though, and the functional and physical and physiological dimension of visual representation seem to be coming through nicely. 

Strange, though, to think how irrelevant understanding the process is to the experience itself. Relevant to understanding writ large, in a way, but in another way just another layer of experience. 

Practicing drawing faces a bit, which (drawing in general) can be such a struggle. I think what eventually happens is that, in addition to the fact that you get better at realizing by what means relief happens, seeing shapes flat and all that, the image becomes a little more stable in your mind (perhaps b/c you have learned to concretize its shape/shading aspects) and that image is transferred to the page. Then it becomes a matter of sketching out what you mentally already see on the page. 

Lack of discontinuity indicates convexity, lines and shadings modify this. Drawing on a white surface is like sculpting in that you remove material by darkening an area. 

Not feeling inspired. 

Edward Snowden has disappeared!

Visual stress

Isn’t it kind of interesting how the visual tension of italics results in linguistic emphasis? I think so. I wonder who discovered italics. The Italians? 

Challenge: devise a symmetrical projection that is consistent

Challenge: devise a symmetrical projection that is consistent with a more compact but asymmetrical volume. Probably impossible. 

On the other hand

The physiognomy itself evokes an impression of a specific character and personality. It is amazing how lines on a page can do this, and how large a change in the impression even a small alteration may make. This ability of a drawn or painted surface to elicit these feelings proper to the view of an actual person is what caused Indians to think that the painter was stealing their soul (according to Catlin, if I remember correctly). There must be an interaction between the personality, which as Proust says so nicely, becomes aligned with the contours of the face, and the face itself- which may also color the perception of the personality. This is a subject I would love to experiment on. 

“Meme l’acte si simple que nous appelons “voir”

“Meme l’acte si simple que nous appelons “voir une personne que nous connaissons” est en partie un acte intellectual. Nous remplissons l’apparence physique de l’etre que nous voyons de toutes les notions que nous avons de lui, et dans l’aspect total que nous nous representons, ces notions ont certainement la plus grande part. Elles finisse par gonfler si parfaitement les joues, par suivre en une adherence si exacte la ligne du nez, elles se melent se bien de nuancer la sonorite de la voix comme si celle-ci n’etait qu’une transparente enveloppe, que chaque fois que nous voyons ce visage et que nous entendons cette voix, ce sont ces notions que nous retrouvons, que nous ecoutons.” Marcel Proust, Du cote de chez Swann.

 

Et ca va de meme pour les objects – les vetements, par exemple – qu’on associe avec quelqu’un.

Hmmm….

Waiting for the next IED from GG and the Guardian. Good times for news junkies. Who’d have thought that Obama would outdo Nixon in scandalosity?

Gestalt – thinking about how something may not make sense until you have the last piece of the puzzle, which rationalizes and stabilizes what came before. Our brains are not designed to collect random bits of info, but to construct organized wholes. This is similar to the whole schema script thing in memory. Occurred to me in the context of reading Le Hasard et la Necessite, and thinking that I’ll remember the details better once I’ve completed and grasped the whole argument. And then the details, which are the scaffold for the concept, become incidental; episodic vs semantic, chance vs necessity. The main idea then seems to manifest as a feeling or an attitude, which we may again clothe with illustrative details, and make explicit to ourselves and others.

“Chance and necessity” is such a core concept, in philosophy, in psychology, in physics, in everything. As Monod quotes Democritus, “Everything in the world is the result of chance and necessity”.