Tag: perception

  • Lost in reality

    When as a child you look into the world
    the magic of reality is there.
    The world is fluid,
    boundaries – weak,
    cause and effect – unclear and remote…
    The world is full of patterns to discover,
    it’s varied and exciting to behold,
    but also frightening…
    and you begin
    the job of organizing your impressions
    in surfaces and colours,
    when collected,
    they can define the things;
    you give them names,
    the names are then collected once again
    and through another level of abstraction
    form into language –
    so much more useful
    than spots and lines,
    but so much more rigid –
    the magic’s almost gone…
    You look again,
    look carefully –
    it’s bleeding through the edges,
    it’s seeping in through places of confusion,
    creating chaos,
    giving you the option
    to see new things,
    to name them, change the rules,
    expand the language
    and the world we live in…
    The spiral turns again.

  • Reflections on Plato

    “To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.”
    (Plato, The Republic)


    Perception is but shadow, forsooth,
    both images and thoughts – reflected glow;
    You cannot tell illusion from the truth.
    Choose prettiest, sit back, enjoy the show.

  • Black and White Thinking

    Black and white thinking –
    a useful evolutionary short-cut for quickly reacting in an emergency,
    an extremely dangerous tool that simplifies experience into lies.

  • Tunnel Vision

    Language is just as much an instrument for seeing as eyes are.
    Look at things – and you will see the world.
    Look for things – and all you will see is the inside of your head.

  • Strangeness

    Sometimes, in the middle of the day on a country road,
    the essential strangeness of the world
    staggers you.

  • Micro-world

    Micro-world – so different,
    where minute forces create different structures,
    where water is spherical and flower petals rough and ribbed…
    so strange and yet so oddly familiar, almost by touch.

  • One rainy afternoon, thinking of contextual nature of perception

    We see the sky above and call it majestic.
    We see the sky underfoot and call it a dirty puddle.
    The picture is the same.

  • Symmetry

    Symmetry.
    It is so fascinating because it creates the illusion of predictability,
    because at some level we confuse similarity in space with continuity in time…

  • Discernible differences

    The spaces in our lives are seen in context,
    framed against the background of the familiar
    and noticed when they differ from it –
    but not too much…

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