Notes on Seeing

Siri Hustvedt
November 20, 2009
1. To look and not see: an old problem. It usually means a lack of understanding, a inability to divine the
meaning of something in the world around us.
2. Cognitive scientists have repeatedly conducted the following experiment and, without fail, they come up
with same results. An audience is asked to watch a film of two teams playing basketball. They are given a
job to count the number of times the ball changes hands. I have done this, and one has to be very attentive
to follow the motion of the ball. In the middle of the game, a man wearing a gorilla suit walks onto the
court, turns to the camera, thumps his chest and leaves. Half the people do not see the great ape. They do
not believe that he was actually there until the film is replayed and, indeed, a gorilla strolls in and out of the
game. Nearly everyone sees the gorilla if he is not given the assignment. This has been named inattentional
blindness.
3. Writing at my desk now, I see the screen but this sentence dominates my attention. In fact, my
momentary awareness that there is much around the words distracts me: the blue screen of the computer
beyond the white edge of the page; various icons above and below; the surface of my desk cluttered with
small Post-it squares which, when I turn my head, I can read, “Habermas 254-55”, “Meany et. al,
implications for andrenocortical responses to stress” scrawled on pink paper (residue of arcane research); a
black stapler; and countless other objects that enter my awareness the moment I turn to them. What is
crucial is that I don’t turn to them. For hours every day, I have little, if any, consciousness of them. I live in
a circumscribed phenomenal world. An internal narrator speaks words and dictates to my fingers that type
automatically. There is no need to think about the connection between head and hands. I am subsumed by
the link. Were another object suddenly to materialize on my desk and then vanish, I might well have no
knowledge of either its appearance or disappearance.
4. Once, in an unfamiliar hallway, I mistook myself for a stranger because I did not understand I was
looking in a mirror. My own form took me by surprise because I was not oriented in space. Expectation is
powerful.
5. There are days when I think I see an old friend in the street, but it is a stranger. The recognition ignites
like a match and then is instantly extinguished when I understand I am wrong. The recognition is felt, not
thought. I can’t trace what created the error, can’t tell you why one person reminded me of another. Was
the old friend a subliminal presence in my mind on that particular day or was the confusion purely external
—a jut of the chin or slope of the shoulders or rhythm of a walk?
6. We do not become anesthetized to horrible photographs of death or suffering. We may choose to avoid
them. When I see a gruesome image in the newspaper in the morning, I sometimes turn away, registering in
seconds that looking too long will hurt me. People who gorge on horror films and violent thrillers do it, not
because they have learned to feel too little, but because they indulge in the limbic rush that floods their
systems as they safely witness exploding bodies. It seems that these viewers are mostly men.
7. We feel colors before we can name them. Colors act on us pre-reflectively. A part of me feels red before
I can name red. My cognitive faculties lag behind the color’s impact. Standing in a room my eyes go first to
the vase of red tulips because they are red and because they are alive.
8. My mother once told me about coming home to find our cat dead on the lawn. She saw the poor animal
from many yards away, but she said she knew with absolute assurance that it was dead. An inert thing. An
it.
9. Photographs of the beloved dead draw me in. I am fascinated. There is the good, dear face, one that
changed over time. It is the picture that preserves the face, not my memory, which is befogged by the
many faces he had over the years. Or is it the single face that grew old? Sometimes I cannot bear to look.
The image has become a token of grief. And yet, there is nothing so banal as the pictures of strange
families. After my father died, I found Christmas cards with photographs of unknown people among his
papers—happy families—grinning into an invisible lens. I threw them away.
10. Galvanic skin response registers a change in the heat and electricity passed through the skin by nerves
and sweat during emotional states. People in white coats attach electrodes to your hands and track what
happens. When they show you a picture of your mother, your GSR goes up. Meaning.in the body.
11. Is our visual world rich or poor? There are fights about this. People do not agree. Philosophers and
scientists and other academics ponder this richness and poverty question in papers and books and lectures.
Human beings have very limited peripheral vision, but we can turn our heads and take in more of the world.
When I’m writing, my vision is severely limited by my attention, but sometimes when I let my eyes roam
in a space, I discover its density of light and color and feel surprised by what I find. When I focus, say, just
on the shadows here on my desk, they become remarkable. My small round clock casts a double shadow
from either side of its circular base, one darker than the other, a gray and a paler gray. There is a spot of
brilliant light at the edge of the darker oval. As I look, this sight has become beautiful.
12. Why is a face beautiful?
13. If an image is flashed too quickly to be perceived consciously, we take it in unconsciously and we
respond to it without knowing what is happening. A picture of a scowling face I can’t say I’ve seen affects
me anyway. Scientists call this masking. Blindsight patients have cortical blindness. They lose visual
consciousness but not visual unconsciousness. They see but don’t know they are seeing. If you ask them to
guess what you’re holding (a pencil) they will guess far better than people who are truly blind. Words and
consciousness are connected. How much do I see of the world that never registers in my awareness? When
I walk in the street, I sometimes glimpse a scene for just an instant but I cannot tell you what I have
witnessed until a fraction of a second later when the puzzling image falls into place: that furry thing was a
stuffed animal and a little boy was dangling it from his stroller. The lag again.
14. We are picture-making creatures. We scribble and draw and paint. When I draw what I see, I touch the
thing I am looking at it with my mind, but it is as if my hand is caressing its outline. People who stopped
drawing as children continue to make pictures in their dreams or in the hallucinations that arrive just before
they go to sleep. Where do those images come from? I dreamed grass and brush and sticks were growing
out of my arm, and I got to work busily trimming myself with a scissors. I wasn’t alarmed; it was a job
handled in a matter-of-fact way. If I painted a self portrait with bushy arms, I would be called a surrealist.
15. Some people who go blind see vivid images and colors. Some people who are losing their vision
hallucinate while awake. An old man saw cows grazing in his living room, and a woman saw cartoon
characters running up and down her doctor’s arm. Charles Bonnet syndrome. Just before I fell asleep, I
saw a little man speeding over pink and violet cliffs. Once I saw an explosion of melting colors—green,
blues, reds, and then a great flash of light that devoured them all. Hypnogogic hallucinations. Freud said
dreams protect sleep. At night the world is taken from us and we make up our own scenes and stories.
When you wake up slowly, you will remember more of that human underground.
16. Deprived of sight, we make visions. Seeing is also creating.
17. There are things in the world to see. Do I see what you see? We can talk about it and verify the facts.
Through my window is the back of a house. One of its windows is completely covered by a blue shade. But
if I tell you I see a flying zebra you will say, Siri, you are hallucinating. You are dreaming while awake.
18. Sometimes artists can make a hallucination real. A painting of a flying zebra is a real thing in the world,
a real thing to see.
19. Why do I not like the word “taste” when applied to art? Because it has lost its connection to the mouth
and food and chewing. I don’t like the way this picture tastes. It’s bitter. If we thought about actual tastes,
the word would still work. It would be a form of synesthesia, a crossing of our senses: seeing as tasting.
But usually it is not used like that anymore so I avoid it entirely when I talk about art.
20. Looking at a human being or even a picture of a human being is different from looking at an object.
Newborn babies, only hours old, copy the expressions of adults. They pucker up, try to grin, look surprised,
and stick out their tongues. The photographs of imitating infants are both funny and touching. They do not
know they are doing it; this response is in them from the beginning. Later, people learn to suppress the
imitation mechanism; it would not be good if we went on forever copying every facial expression.
Nevertheless, we human beings love to look at faces because we find ourselves there. When you smile at
me, I feel a smile form on my own face before I am aware it is happening, and I smile because I am seeing
me in your eyes and know that you like what you see.
21. I am looking at a small reproduction of Johannes Vermeer’s Study of a Young Woman, which hangs in
a room at The Metropolitan Museum here in New York. It is a girl’s head and face. I say girl because she
is very young. From her face I would guess she is no more than ten years old. When I look up the picture in
one of my books on Vermeer, I see that there it is called Portrait of a Young Girl, a far better title. We
should not turn girls into women too soon. She is smiling, but not a wide smile. Her lips are sealed. My
impression is that she is looking at me, but I cannot quite catch her eye. What is certain is that she is
answering someone else’s gaze. Someone has made her smile. She is not a beautiful child; it is her looking
that is beautiful, her connection to the invisible person. There is shyness in her expression, reserve, maybe
a hint of hesitancy. I think she is looking at an adult, probably the artist, because she has not let herself go.
She looks over her shoulder at him. I have great affection for this girl. That is the magic of the painting; it
is not that I have affection for a representation of a child’s head that was painted some time between 1665
and 1667. No, I feel I have actually fallen for her, the way I fall for a child who looks up at me on the street
and smiles, perhaps a homely child, who with a single look calls forth a burst of maternal feeling and
sympathy. But my emotion is made of something more; I remember my own girlhood and my shyness with
grownups I didn’t know well. I was not a bold child and in her face I see myself at the same age.
22. In some of Gerhard Richter’s painted-over photographs, he painted over his wife’s face and parts of her
body. He covered the bodies of his children, too, in snapshots of them as babies and growing children. In
these gestures, I felt he was keeping them for himself, keeping the private hidden. Other times, he framed
them with swaths of color, turning them into featured subjects. I love those pictures.
23. Mothers have a need to look at their children. We cannot help it.
24. Lovers have a need to look at each other. They cannot help it.
25. Several years ago a friend sent me a paper on mirror neurons. They were found in the brains of
macaque monkeys. When one monkey makes a gesture, grabs a banana, neurons in his premotor cortex are
activated. When another monkey watches the gesture, but doesn’t make it, the same neurons are activated
in his brain. Human beings have them, too. We reflect each other.
26. Looking at pornography is exciting but loses its interest after orgasm.
27. Reading the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses when Molly Bloom is remembering is erotic because she
gives permission, gives up and gives way, and this is always exciting and interesting because it is personal
not impersonal. Isn’t it strange that looking at little abstract symbols on a white page can make a person
feel such things? I see her in his arms. I am in his arms. I remember your arms.
28. When I read stories, I see them. I make pictures and often they remain in my mind after I have finished
a novel, along with some phrases or sentences. I ground the characters in places, real and imagined. But I
always remember the feeling of a book best, unless I have forgotten it altogether.
29. I do not usually see philosophy with some exceptions: Plato, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche
because they are also storytellers.
30. Some people cannot make visual imagery. They do not see pictures in their minds. They do not turn
words into images. I didn’t know such a thing was possible until a short time ago. They see abstractly.
They remember the symbols on the page.
31. “I see” can also mean “I understand.”
32. There is a small part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus that is crucial for recognizing faces. If you
lose this ability your deficit is called prosopagnosia. It happens that a person with brain damage looks at
herself in the mirror, and believes she is seeing, not herself, but a double. It seems that what has vanished is
not reason, but that special feeling we get when we look at our reflections, that warm sense of ownership.
When that disappears, the image of one’s self becomes alien.
33. I look and sometimes I see.
Siri Hustvedt