Welcome to the blog site for CO 200 E: Writing the Environment.
This blog is designed as an online conversation space for members of this class. While your responses to questions need to be in standard written English, you are welcome to add to your posts with videos, images, and links to other pages. Use this blog as a chance to explore, analyze and question your perceptions and understanding of the readings and of your own connection to the environment.
Prior to each class I will post at least two questions related to the reading for the next reading assignment. You should compose a 250-500 word response to one of the questions. Your response can be written as a "comment" to my post or, if you so choose (simply click on the comment link underneath my post). You need to write a total of 14 blogs over the course of the semester. Blog posts are due by 9:00 pm the night before class.
Enjoy the blog!
This is in response to:B. What does Dillard mean when she says: “If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light” and later “seeing is very much a matter of verbilization?” What does it mean to “see?” How can one “see?”
ReplyDeleteThere is a reason that the popular saying "ignorance is bliss" is so commonly used. We become so consumed by our never-ending quest for knowledge that most of us quickly forget how to simply look at things as we see them without analyzing. We are trained to lose this ability soon after we're born, and most people never get it back.
We are blinded by light much more so than by darkness. In a dark space, visual stimuli are greatly reduced. If one can resist imagining what may be lurking in the darkness, then they may be rewarded by entering relaxing state. Without a constant stream of visual images to interpret, a whole section of the brain is freed, and used for better things. Maybe this is why so many people report doing their best thinking when they are lying in bed at night, in the dark.
Seeing is like verbilization in that it allows us to form a sort of language around the things that we see. In the same way that we attach
words everything so that we can understand each other, our minds attach words and feelings to things that we see. Even if we don't know the name of something, we know what it looks like, and know how to recognize it over and over. That is what language is all about. It's like that story with all the blind people groping different parts of an elephant and asserting that it is all sorts of different things. They do not "speak" the language of sight, they simply do not have the vocabulary, and so much different means of sensation are used to identify things.
To see is to take looking to another level. When the blind patients that Dillard describes open their "cured" eyes for the first time, they look at the world, and what emerges is a confusing, two-dimensional screen of lights and colors. For that split second, before anything begins to take shape, they are simply looking. As soon as their eyes seek to make sense of their surroundings, and they begin to draw inferences, then they are seeing. Seeing cannot be completely objective. As soon as one is "seeing", they are analyzing.