From what I can tell, the people of the United States are in general agreement that the shortest day of the year took place yesterday, Monday December 21. This might not seem so remarkable, considering that the same thing has happened on December 21 for at least the past century.
But then again, it might seem very remarkable, in a country as divided and pissed off and depressed as America has seemed in 2020, that people can agree on anything at all. (I would not be surprised to get a letter from one of our readers, advising me that the Solstice celebration was part of a conspiracy by the “Deep State”.)
Anyway, since we appear to be on a path into the depths of winter — and towards spring and summer, somewhere off in the future — I’d like to spend some time ‘thinking out loud’ about perception. As with many of my editorials and essays here in the Daily Post, I have no idea as I begin this essay where it will end up. But I know we’re in the middle of difficult times — difficult on many levels — and we are perceiving the world differently. Why would that be the case? How could we have such different perceptions of the same situations?
Aren’t our different perceptions the very cause of our discord and strife? And if so, is there anything we can do about it?
So, just thinking out loud.
I spent most of my life working as a graphic artist and art teacher. Many of my perceptions about the world come from that experience.
My mother realized, when I was very young, that she could keep me happily occupied and out of trouble, sometimes for hours at a time, if she provided me with a big stack of blank paper, a fat blue #2 pencil, and a box of crayons.
Later in life, I found myself wondering why some people seemed to be naturally ‘artistic’ — able to render ‘accurate’ pictures of the real world, and even pictures of imaginary characters, places and situations — while other people seemed to lack artistic talent.
This struck me as odd. Unless they suffer from a handicap of some type, every child learns — by age five — how to walk and run; to ride a bicycle; to speak a highly complex language; to sing simple songs; to negotiate agreements; and to have a rudimentary grasp of their culture’s underlying moral beliefs.
Why doesn’t every child learn ‘how to draw’? How can it be that some grown adults appear incapable of rendering anything more intricate than stick figures?
I have a theory about that.
The first ‘thing’ a child typically learns to draw — the first recognizable shape that appears, usually accidentally, on their sheet of paper, or on the bedroom wall, or wherever they happen to be applying a crayon — is a circle. (Squares and triangles and other shapes usually come later.) A circle is an amazing revelation, because it’s shaped something like a human face… and a human face is the most important shape in the life of a young child. Almost all of the information and rules and lessons provided to a child come from the faces of the people in the child’s life, via words and facial expressions.
When we adults notice that a young child has drawn a circle, we get an irresistible urge to show the child how to make the circle into a ‘face’. We might even go so far as to show how the child how a circle can have arms and legs.
Children are typically delighted to be shown this process. A circle, two dots for eyes, a curve for a mouth, and lines for arms and legs… and they’ve drawn a ‘human being’. How simple can success be? Of course, the drawing looks nothing like an actual human being. It’s basically just a symbol. A circle only hints at the correct shape of a human face. The eyes look nothing like actual human eyes. The mouth looks nothing like an actual human mouth.
Meanwhile, here’s what a trained artist would be more likely to draw, if you asked for a human face:
This drawing looks quite a bit more like an actual human being. It’s still a symbol, but a much more complex symbol, recognizable as a specific person.
How did this drawing happen?
When most people draw a face — and I am including most grown adults — they are rendering on paper a translation of ‘words’ that they have in their mind. Typically, they first draw a ‘circle’. Then they draw ‘two eyes’ and a ‘mouth’ and perhaps a ‘nose’. Maybe some ‘hair’ and a couple of loops for ‘ears. A couple of ‘eyebrows. Each individual element of the face is its own symbol, representing a corresponding ‘word’. For most people, a drawing is a rendering, not of what they see with their own eyes, but of certain English words they have in their own heads, as individual symbols.
Most people are, in essence, drawing ‘words’.
When a trained artist draws a realistic head, however, the artist is not using verbal language. The artist is pretty much leaving verbal language completely out of the equation. The artist is using a ‘non-verbal’ language, which is a language of shapes, shadows, highlights that cannot be rendered in verbal English. Yes, the elements in a realistic drawing can be described using words — head, eyes, nose — but the trained artist is not relying on ‘words’ while making the drawing.
The act of creating a realistic drawing or painting is essentially non-verbal.
We adults do many things that don’t require access to the verbal part of our minds. Driving a car is largely a non-verbal activity, for example. Opening a beer bottle. Eating a hamburger. Walking the dog. Sure, we might be ‘thinking’ while doing these activities, but the activity itself doesn’t requires us to translate ‘words’ into ‘actions’. We can be thinking about something completely unrelated while doing these activities.
When we become engaged in an activity that requires us to translate verbal language into a non-verbal language, however, we can easily feel incompetent, or completely incapable.
I believe this ‘translation’ problem explains why many people cannot render a realistic drawing of what they see with their own eyes. I would additionally suggest that many people are continually translating what they see, hear, feel, smell, taste, and experience into ‘words’… and later, instead of remembering the actual experience itself, they are remembering the words they picked to describe their experience to themselves.
Verbal language is often a useful tool. But in some situations, it’s actually counter-productive.
Words can get in the way.