Song of the Curve-Billed Thrasher

(Photo from last spring)

Often, as the Artist and I are riding along in the car, a question arises that neither of us can immediately answer. The question may concern the geology of the passing scene, some plant or animal species, a question of history, or a writer or actor’s name temporarily just beyond our combined memories’ reach, to mention only a handful of examples out of the infinite number of inquiries that arise between us in conversation on the road. Either of us could, of course, “look it up” instantly (whatever “it” is) on one of our phones, and once in a while we do that — but more often we simply continue our conversation, speculating, critiquing each other’s speculations, and continuing to question each other and, when pertinent, our surroundings. Many would find these conversations of ours pointless and annoying. Well, that’s why we are with each other and neither of us with anyone else.

There are times when we are laughably wrong and only discover our error much, much later. I’m going to confess a truly idiotic belief we came to hold — and held for far too long — because it’s quite funny in retrospect. It has to do with the Kansas Settlement Gin Company, south of our winter home highway on the historically-and-oh-so-evocatively named Kansas Settlement Road.

During the early explorations of our first Cochise County winter, we were surprised to see the gin company there in the middle of the Sulphur Springs Valley. There didn’t seem to be much activity around it then, so we weren’t sure it was still in operation, but the question of operation was secondary. Gin? A company here in southeast Arizona distilling gin? When a visiting Michigan friend inquired, as we three were on our way down to Bisbee that day, we shrugged and told him, well, there are juniper trees in nearby mountains. Which is true….

Was it only this past December that we saw at last how wrong we’d been, or did light dawn in our addled brains the year before? Cotton is grown on land along the Kansas Settlement Road! The company is not distilling alcohol but ginning cotton! I think it was the name that led us astray: Kansas Settlement Cotton Gin would have been clearer. Please note, however, that we finally figured out the right answer all by our previously ignorant selves, chagrined over our earlier leap to a false conclusion but very satisfied to have landed, finally, on what is obviously the real story. And yes, we could have had the solution instantly, back in 2015 … but then we wouldn’t have had to think at all … and we certainly wouldn’t have had the satisfaction of solving the mystery ourselves … and I wouldn’t have any kind of story to tell you, either.

Here’s another example: Just the other day, in an interchange with a Mexican woman in a parking lot, my very rudimentary Spanish fled in the first moment of the encounter, leaving me blank and tongue-tied. The woman and a partner were selling tamales, and I wanted to ask how much they cost, but, as so often happens to me, the first language other than English that came to mind was French, and I grabbed at it desperately, trying to pronounce Combien with a Mexican accent. To me, it sounded good and made sense. But a blank, astonished look came over the woman’s face, and I knew I’d put my foot in my mouth. A language app on my phone would have eliminated any hesitation, but, except for weather and identifying plants, I don’t do apps. Then it came to me: Cuanto! I tried it, and it worked. All right! Embarrassing as my first attempt had been, I felt good about hitting on the right word on my second try. I think embarrassment can be part of a learning experience and does not have to be an occasion of shame. Next time I’m sure I will remember the right word immediately, prompted by my memory of the occasion of not remembering.

The first example, the gin company, is one of two people beginning in ignorance and thinking something through over time. The second has to do with my own memory. (I have a lot more Spanish words and phrases in memory than I can instantly recall, recognition being a much easier task than recall.) What the two  examples have in common is exercising brains instead of looking to a device for an instant answer. Many people prefer the instant answers. I prefer mental exercise.

Then there is the song of the curved-bill thrasher. Winter after winter we have been hearing a beautiful avian songster outside the cabin and trying to spot the bird to identify it. I kept wanting to say it must be a mockingbird. What else could sing so melodiously, produce that lovely, liquid song? And yet, complicated as the song was, it didn’t have the repetitions of a mockingbird. Finally, sitting out behind the cabin and watching birds in a scruffy little netleaf hackberry tree where I’ve hung a couple of suet feeders, I recognized once again the beautiful, mysterious song and could see the singer clearly. It was not the house finch and certainly not the ladderback woodpecker. It was the curved-bill thrasher! There he was, and the song was coming from him! 

Again, a birdsong app would have given me an instant answer, but, even with as long as it took me to connect bird and song, I have no regrets over lost time. What I gained, I feel, is the personal experience that will lock the identification much more solidly in my memory than the instant answer would have done. And time spent sitting and watching birds, like time spent sketching trees, is never “lost time.” It is all about being there, being taken out of myself and merging for a timeless while with bird or tree. And as I say, I do think I will remember the curved-bill thrasher’s song better and longer because I was sitting still, mountains off in peripheral vision, and seeing and hearing together so that everything around me formed a seamless and unitary context. 

The morning I began drafting this post, non-news came from the Iowa caucus: A reporting app had had issues, and the results that (some) people stayed up late to hear (glad we did not) were still not in the next morning. “We wanna know right away,” said one commentator, adding that the very desire for immediate results often drives failure or error. “We’d rather wait and have accurate results,” he said. 

Let me shift the scene here—

A mobility invention designed as an alternative, for some, to a wheelchair has been taken up by fully able-bodied persons using it for recreation. One stands on a platform and leans this way and that to propel oneself forward on a flat surface without having to walk. Why people who can walk want to avoid walking baffles me. They do not rejoice in their bodies’ movement? Don’t want to exercise physical independence and prolong it as long as possible? I don’t understand. But — sigh! — once again, “I am not the target audience.” 

There is a book on artificial intelligence (so-called) that I need to read. Human Compatible, by Stuart Russell (co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach), argues that AI and how (if?) we control it in the future may be the most important question facing the human race. The author is concerned that AI would give governments unlimited surveillance and control capability. (What about corporations? I ask, but maybe that’s in the book, too.) If AI can come to match or surpass human intelligence, what will become of human freedom? 

But now— now I want to take all the ideas above and put them together, adding into the mix young people (not all, but too many) who exercise no muscles other than their thumbs (to text and post on social media). Will our body parts atrophy if we no longer need to use them? That’s one question, but I want to stretch to a further question: Will our very brains atrophy if we stop exercising them to think for ourselves, to sharpen and rely on memory? 

Recently I was trying to find (via online search) something about the split-second delay between any sensory impression and the brain’s receiving that impression, a margin that aids us in decision (or so I vaguely remember reading years ago), actually making choice and decision possible at all. I welcome anyone who can refer me to a helpful citation on the subject, but what alarmed me in my search was that, using the phrase “reaction time,” all I got were results calling fast reaction time good, slow reaction time bad, with lots of suggestions for improving, i.e., speeding up, reaction times. 

Of course, there are plenty of occasions where fast reaction time is crucial. Avoiding a road accident is an obvious example, and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking gives many other examples. But quick reaction time plus lack of experience can lead to bad results, even in this simple case: To avoid a deer in the road, a driver quickly swerves and hits another vehicle, a tree, or turns over in a ditch. 

Take another example: A stranger knocks on a door, and the person opening the door and seeing a stranger, perhaps someone from a different ethnic group than his own, feels threatened and draws a weapon, killing the stranger — who, let’s say, only wanted directions. Fast reaction time leaves no time to think, to reflect, to question, or to examine a broader context. Experience helps, but what kinds of experience? Experience driving in different conditions is one thing; a human being living in a confusing, complex, and ever-changing world needs a much broader array of experiences to keep trigger-fast reactions from causing tragedy. 

What does reaction time have to do with thinking for ourselves, with working through problems and situations, with exercising memory? You tell me. Think about it. Or not. No one can force you.

I Miss the Old Days! (A Decade Ago)

Here ensues a lengthy reflection.

Do you, my reader, read with less attention and perhaps even less memory for what you have read? Do you notice when reading on a screen that you are increasingly reading for key words and skimming over the rest? Has this habit or style of screen reading bled over to your reading of hard copy? … Very important, are you less able to find the same enveloping pleasure you once derived from your former reading self?

• Maryanne Wolf, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

It was in the fall of 2007 that I first began writing “Books in Northport,” and while I have no intention of leaving this writing medium, which I have taken with me far from Northport, to Florida for a few winters and, more recently, now to southeast Arizona, as well as posting after the fact about a trip last January to Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, I have to confess that I miss my early days of blogging. 

In those early days, I truly had — not always, but often — the sense of initiating a conversation with some of my posts. Comments from readers let me know that people “out there” were connecting to my words and images. On occasion and over time, often with intriguing blogs of their own that I followed, those who commented became my friends, and once in a while our posts and comments intertwined. One of my readers and someone whose blog I followed was a young woman in China whose parents were young enough that I could have been (in some other life) their parents! Neige (she blogged in French) and I loved our visits to one another’s lives.

In those days, from my yellow leather chair, my morning perch that fall and winter when my dial-up connection was so slow that I kept a book by my side to read while waiting for downsized images to upload, I felt like a world traveler, meeting new people, exploring their worlds, and inviting them into mine. Although we were meeting only in digital space, the leisurely nature of blogs tended to slow and concentrate our online attention. In other words, we spent time with each other.

Priceless!

After a while, though, the snake entered the garden. Two snakes, actually. The first was spam. 

I recall the first spam I got, one I initially (naively) took for a real comment, from a real person, until a friend clued me in. The apparent comment went something like this: “Interesting content. I’ll be back to visit again.” Followed by a link. Ah, yes, those links! There was no person on the other end of what looked like a comment, but only a roaming “bot”-snake, planting links wherever it could slither in, links to lure people in to order flowers online, book cruises, and worse. Ugh! Spam threatened to take the fun out of blogging for me. My solution, suggested by a veteran blogger, was to moderate comments. 

Rather than allowing anyone to leave a comment that would appear instantly, as soon as someone (or something) on the other end posted it, I changed my blog settings so that I received notification when a comment was left, and then it was up to me to publish, delete, or mark as spam. For a while, the solution seemed to work okay for most of my readers, though right from the start some were confused by no longer seeing their comments immediately, with the result that they might leave the same comment three times and then e-mail me to say they were unable to post. It was a period of adjustment for us all.

But that was only Phase 1 of problems with moderation. 

Phase 2 developed when the platform upped the ante for people wanting to comment, requiring a Google password and insisting that people wanting to join the conversation jump through visual hoops to prove “I am not a robot.” Good friends told me they tried and tried and finally gave up. 

(At the end of this post, I will come back to address the comment-moderation problem, but the end is — sigh! my poor, patient reader, if you exist at all out there in digital space! — still still quite a way down the line.) 

Need for moderation and problems readers had with moderation: that was the first snake. The second snake was Facebook — and this connects to my opening quote from Reader, Come Home, written a Tufts University professor and researcher whose expertise is in the cognitive neuroscience of reading. Here is a passage from the beginning of her book:

…[W]hen I was a child learning to read, I did not think about reading. Like Alice, I simply jumped down reading’s hole into Wonderland and disappeared for most of my childhood. When I was a young woman, I did not think about reading. I simply became Elizabeth Bennett, Dorothea Brooke, and Isabel Archer at every opportunity. Sometimes I became men like Alyosha Karamazov, Hans Castorp, and Holden Caulfield. But always I was lifted to places very far from the little town of Eldorado, Illinois, and always I burned with emotions I could never otherwise have imagined. 

When I read the blog of the young woman in China or that of the older woman up in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, or even those by someone in the U.P. or right in my own Leelanau County, I too was “lifted to places very far” from my own  old farmhouse. You might think that Facebook does the same thing, since there I can see friends’ posts from all over the world, but while I appreciate those picture windows on distant places, I don’t feel as if I am entering those worlds. The depth isn’t there, and there isn’t time, because one person’s set of photographs from a Caribbean island is only one set in an endless “news feed.” They are postcards rather than letters. As I see it, not every form of online reading and writing is “the same,” any more than any writing that ends up in a physical book to be read is like the content of any other book. Some speed us up, others slow us down.

Facebook relates to the world of blogging not only because both are online, but also because I am not the only blogger who posts links to my blog on Facebook, hoping to bring in readers who would otherwise not seek me out in the longer, more leisurely medium. The results? Not always what I’d hoped. 

Some very good friends, real friends, people I know and even love in my face-to-face world, tell me they have “no time to read blogs.” When I hear that from someone trying to limit his or her online time in general, I understand it better than when the same apologetic excuse — and believe me, no excuse is ever necessary! My blog is there for anyone interested in my world and thoughts, but it is not required reading for anyone! — comes from someone who seems to be, when I do my once-a-day check-in, on Facebook 24/7. Their phones they have always with them! Notifications come with sound alerts whenever a friend posts, and it takes only a moment to “like” or leave a few words of comment on Facebook. To follow a link, on the other hand, and to read an entire newspaper or magazine article or essay or blog post, makes a deeper and lengthier demand. 

And so it happens that most Facebook friends scroll past my links. An altruistic few may “like” or leave a comment based on the link’s image but without following the link to read the blog post. Fewer still are moved to follow the link and read what has sometimes (not always, I admit) taken me quite a while to put together carefully and thoughtfully, occasionally revising over a few days before posting — and I am grateful to everyone who does so! But here the first snake circles back with his poisonous bite, because those readers are the ones most likely to want to leave comments and also most likely to be stymied by moderation roadblocks! Curses!

Cottonwood in Willcox, AZ, a week ago

My meandering, desultory blog suits my musing philosopher’s mind, and I have no desire to leave the slow lane that is my preferred world: books in print — real books! — and reading silently or aloud those books in print; lengthy, thoughtful, exploratory blog posts; walks in woods or fields or deserts with my dog; face-to-face, side-by-side conversations with the Artist and our friends and family; exploring the larger world in search of horses and wildlife, mountains and lakes; thinking about and exploring, also, day to day, my thoughts and those of others, wherever encountered. In short, I do not want my mind to transform itself into a grasshopper, unable to concentrate, impatient with silence, too impatient to follow a complicated narrative or argument!

But I feel bad about restricting the conversation and keeping others out. That’s another problem with Facebook, too, by the way: what’s posted there becomes a conversation among people who have already designated each other as friends. What about potential friends, such as those I met in my first years of blogging? 

Well, so here is my experiment for the beginning of the new year. I am going to change my settings back to eliminate moderation of comments. That should also (I hope) eliminate hassles. I hope so, anyway. Results of the experiment will decide how long I decide to forego moderation. If no one comments — or if there is a tsunami of spam — I may just heave a sigh and concede failure. But let’s try it, eh? 

Now, for starters, has anyone else read Maryanne Wolf’s book or anything else on the subject of how digital reading is changing our brains and our reading habits in general? How many books do you read, how many print news articles, and how much time to you spend reading online? How did you answer Wolf’s questions at the top of this post? Do you worry about the time your children or grandchildren or students are spending on digital media? And what else would you like to read about here on “Books in Northport”? Suggestions welcome.

Happy new year, friends! May peace, health, and happiness be yours!

A New Course of Study: Your Own Mind!

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes,

by Maria Konnikova

NY: Penguin, 2013

$16 pbk.

First Impressions:

When it comes to stories of the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, you’re either a fanatical follower or you’d pick up almost anything else before the desperation of a rainy evening alone in someone else’s remote cabin would tempt you to open A Study in Scarlet or The Sign of Four. Holmes fans simply cannot get enough of the master, while the rest of us politely cover our yawns when when a fan mentions his name. Yes, I admit it: I’m in the latter group. I don’t even like the movie versions much.

But hand me a book on how the mind works, and I’m as eager as a puppy with a new toy. Hand me Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational or Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow or anything by Temple Grandin, and I’ll be opening the book while you’re still talking. How we human beings perceive and remember and reason and draw conclusions, including our making of egregious errors, never fails to fascinate me. The promise of Maria Konnikova’s book on the mental processes of Sherlock Holmes is that we, the readers, can learn to remember better, think more clearly, thinking less like Dr. Watson and More like Sherlock Holmes. Okay, I'm in.

Because who – I ask you, who? -- wants to stand there like a chump (or like Dr. Watson), mouth hanging open, in reverent awe of Mr. Holmes? Don’t we want to come up with the solution to the mystery? I’m not out to collar murderers, but I would certainly like to know where the charger to my cell phone is hiding or figure out where the Farberware Dutch oven has disappeared to.

The “scientific method” of observation, though, doesn’t sound like my way of being in the world. It sounds so cold, so detached, so objective. Quite anti-social, in fact, don’t you think? The skepticism the author cites as fundamental to scientific observation reminds me of Descartes’ radical doubt thought experiment. Is it really possible – would it even be desirable – to go through every minute of every day doubting before believing? What could that possibly mean?

When the author makes the distinction between fast and slow thinking, I’m more comfortable. My husband says of my decision process in general, “She grinds exceeding slow, but she grinds exceeding fine.” I’m a slow thinking by nature. But not always, of course, slow enough: the default setting Konnikova calls “System Watson” is always poised to jump in quickly. Like the left brain when the person holding the pencil is asked to draw a house, “System Watson” is there jumping up and down and waving its hand in the air and saying, “I have the answer!” The left brain wants to draw “what it knows” without bothering to see what’s in front of the eyes at that moment, and “System Watson” wants to go only on the evidence of its eyes in that moment, without reference to further observation or salient memories.

My favorite way of conceptualizing Konnikova’s “System Holmes,” in fact, is to think of it as the calm, quiet, open receptiveness of meditation. In our drawing class, we learned techniques to frustrate the noisy, know-it-all left brain so it would get out of the way and let us draw what we were seeing – really to let us see. Holmes uses ‘seeing’ in a pejorative sense, but in the lexicon of drawing class Holmesian ‘seeing’ is ‘knowing,’ the left brain running forward with answers before true observation has taken place.

Here’s a true story: I had been looking for my “lost” cell phone charger for two or three days before I started reading Mastermind. Arriving at page 22, I closed the book, sat calmly for less than 60 seconds, got up and went right to where the charger had been all along.

What’s the secret? My parents had emphasized throughout my childhood and adolescence that “retracing your steps” from the last place you can picture in memory having the lost object was the key to finding it. That isn’t a new idea to me. Purging the search of panic and frustration, setting aside judgment (e.g., “I’ve already looked there; it can’t be there”), I’m discovering, is as important as the retracing of steps.

Caveat!!! Beware!!! Konnikova does not promise instant results. She might even be dismayed by my story of finding a lost object before finishing the first chapter of her book! To improve our thinking, we need, she says, to be interested and motivated. She also emphasizes that it will take practice, practice, practice to retrain our minds. Interest, motivation, practice? That sounds like learning to draw, too! I’m hooked!

Summary and Conclusions

I finally had to give up hope of keeping the pages of this book pristine. If a book is to be more than entertainment for the time it takes it read it, if it is to be a tool, I have to make it my own in some way. A library book, then, would be bristling with Post-Its, and those slips of paper would have scribbled notes on them, and there might be additional folded sheets of paper inside with more notes and page numbers. With a paperback book of my own (this applies generally to nonfiction), I may begin with Post-It notes, but the more there is to remember and keep straight, the more likely I am to make, first, discreet little dog ears, then light pencil check marks in the margins, and finally – throwing all caution to the winds – underlining madly. My copy of Mastermind went through all these stages.

The book might have been written differently, and then I might not have resorted to underlining, or at least not as much, but Konnikova makes no allowances for chatting or tweeting attention spans. This is a book, with paragraphs are long and discursive. There are occasional section headings but no numbered or bulleted lists and no graphic displays illustrating the “brain attic” in states of order vs. disarray. Shorter and fewer sentences, with more signage along the way, may have improved this book’s chances at bestsellerdom. It would certainly have made it faster and easier to read. – But would it have made the book better?

What might first seem an unfortunate shortcoming can appear as a virtue in a different light. Just as there is no shortcut to thinking like Sherlock Holmes (you don’t read this book one evening and wake up a problem-solving genius the next morning), just as leaping to conclusions can prevent consideration of important evidence, and just as stopping to reflect on how much we actually know (as opposed to everything we’re tempted to think we know), just so a book that forces thinking to slow down and forces it over the same ground again and again may be the book best suited to fulfilling the author’s promise to her readers: You can improve your thinking, but you must be interested and motivated, and it will take practice, practice, practice.

 Many of the problem-solving pitfalls cited in Mastermind will be familiar to readers of literature going back to Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s work on heuristics and biases in the 1970s and 1980s, work that has been amplified since by many other scholarly studies and popular books. Konnikova’s genius, if you will, is not only to draw all this work together but to present it in a familiar literary frame, so that the well-known characters of Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes exemplify, respectively, error-prone and largely accurate and error-avoiding thought. Examples from Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories that illustrate her points are well chosen.

I have a few minor quibbles. One concerns deductive logic. Konnikova is accurate when noting that formal logic is something different from what Holmes means by deduction. She is on less firm ground when explaining formal logic, which is not, as she seems to say it is, limited to Aristotelian syllogisms. The syllogism is one but not the only valid deductive form. In the same chapter she gives an example of an invalid form without explaining why the true statement in the conclusion cannot be relied on, only saying there is a problem with the reasoning. If formal logic is to be brought in at all, a paragraph or two might be added to clarify the difference between valid and invalid forms. Otherwise, it were better left out entirely.

Will this book find the audience it deserves or only the audience deserving of the book? “I’m not always known for my conciseness,” the author admits candidly in her Acknowledgements. But I have already admitted myself that too concise a Holmesian program might lead astray more minds than it improved.

Do Arthur Conan Doyle readers grab at studies by Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely? Maybe not, and this may be exactly the strength (in addition to the charm) of Konnikova’s book. A new audience for works on reasoning!

-- And then, on the other hand, maybe it will nudge me in a direction I’ve long resisted, back to Sherlock Holmes! 

Seeing the World or Only the Insides of Our Own Heads?

Vase of purple asters

My six-week beginning drawing class is over, but I’m going to keep drawing. Drawing for me is diary and meditation and vacation and conversation, all rolled into one slow, low-key, low-tech activity. Paper and pencil. Or paper and pen. Enough light to see. That’s all it takes.

The drawing I did of my son during his visit I posted on Facebook as well as here on my blog. Reaction from many people (including my son) is often, “I can’t draw at all” or “I can’t even draw a straight line.” Honestly? I have trouble with straight lines myself, but that’s what rulers are for. The contours of most of the things I want to draw, it turns out, do not have straight edges.

What about you? Do you think you can’t draw?

Our instructor remarked the first evening of class that no one would expect to sit down at a piano and rip off a Beethoven sonata without advance study and practice, but people think they should be able to pick up a pencil and right away dash off a good drawing the first time around. Anyone can learn to draw, Elizabeth Abeel, our instructor, told us, but it is something to be learned, and it does take practice.

Classic book!

Abeel uses a lot of techniques from Betty Smith’s classic Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence, the book that convinced me long, long ago that I (or “even I,” as I thought then) could learn to draw with a teacher using these methods. Whether you take “left brain/right brain” terminology to be strict physiological description of brain anatomy or a metaphorical distinction between two different ways of interpreting the world, the big lesson in drawing is this:

"DRAW WHAT YOU SEE, NOT WHAT YOU KNOW."

Betsy said this to us over and over, and here’s an example of what it means: If someone is told, “Draw a flag,” most beginners will have recourse to their mental symbol set. That first flag drawing, therefore, will begin as a rectangle, with stripes, stars and whatever subsequently filled in. The drawings will look pretty much like this section of a page from an atlas, only without color and without the slight wave in the lines of these flags:

Flat flag symbols 

But how often do we see a flag stretched out flat? The lesson is to resist pulling out a mental symbol and, instead, to look at a real flag, hanging on a pole. Here are a couple of my efforts to draw a flag in front of me. The first is a hurried first-night sketch (I had read the book long ago and had spent time one winter and all last year drawing, so my first sketch wasn't quite as flat as is the usual with beginning students), the second our “final exam” on the last night of class.

Quick sketch, first night of class

Slow, careful study of artfully draped flag

Getting from the flat symbol to the complex rendering of reality is not instant. One of the first exercises we did was to draw “vase faces,” as our instructor and Betty Edwards call them. (This is in Chapter 4 of the Edwards book, the chapter titled “Crossing Over: Experiencing the Shift from Left to Right.”) First we drew a simple contour of a face seen from the side – forehead, indent for the eye, nose, open mouth, chin, neck. Then we drew lines extending out from the top and bottom of that curved line. Finally, we began the curved line again on the opposite side. The result is either two faces looking at each other or a single vase, depending on how you look it, but the point of the exercise is that one’s “left brain” (verbal, symbol-using, fact-obsessed) will be frustrated and give up, allowing the “right brain” (visual, intuitive, loving complexity) to take over. The “left brain” hates complexity, and the “right brain” loves complexity. You can see why it’s necessary to make that shift if you want to draw what you see and not what you know.

Another exercise was drawing upside-down, copying a drawing which we were also looking at upside-down. Again, the aim was to frustrate the left brain so that it would give up and get out of the way. Instead of the left brain being able to look at a hand and say, “I know what a hand looks like” and pull a clumsy, flat, iconic mitten out of its symbol set, the right brain was given time to concentrate on lines and relationships, without putting nametags on any of the parts. 

(Drawing, the mind bypasses names and symbols and reasons and arguments and causal chains and settles down in the moment. That’s what makes drawing such a meditative experience.) 

Another exercise was doing "pure contour" drawings. In my mind, I call them "blind" rather than "pure," because what you're doing in this kind of work is drawing an object -- say, your own hand -- while looking only at the object and never at your paper. Also, you put the pencil to the paper and don't lift it until you've finished the drawing. The idea is not to reproduce the object perfectly but to give your eye time to follow all the complicated ins and outs of the object's contour and have your hand translate its movement directly from that of your eye.

You can see all these exercises in the Betty Smith book, and in it you'll also find many examples of student work showing exciting and vast improvement in the course of a very few weeks.

A question I have – a hope I have – is whether/that what can be done for seeing can also be done for hearing. What would it take to quiet the chattering, knowing-everything voices in our heads and truly hear what other people are saying? For them to quiet their minds enough to hear us in return? For all of us to slow down and talk to, not past, each other?

Can we translate the lessons of meditation into everyday life?

The Eye of the Whale

As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! Throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right. – Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 73: “Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk over Him”

Their talk was of the devil. Stubb, the Pequod’s second mate, called a “dog” by Captain Ahab early in the story, is convinced that one of the strange men who only appeared on board long after the ship was at sea is, in fact, the devil, the immortal devil, on board to win Ahab’s soul in return for the capture of the white whale. But it is not this talk of the devil that I want to relate to John Locke and Immanuel Kant, giants of Western philosophy, but Ishmael’s lecture to readers in the following chapter, and in particular that section of the chapter focused on whales’ eyes and the difference in their vision from our own.

Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of the eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power so as to produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts.

Skipping the rest of that paragraph and Melville’s analogy to sash windows (I am more taken by the picturesque two valley lakes separated by the mountains, although the windows speak more directly to seeing), we come to this:

A curious and puzzling question might be started concerning this visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a hint. So long as a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one’s experience will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any two things—however large or however small—at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other.

We human beings, Melville is pointing out, can only look at two things by looking first at one and then at the other, back and forth. This brings to my mind a very strange discovery I made in the fourth decade of my life. I had gone to a new eye doctor for an exam, and he made some casual, passing remark about my “crooked eye.” I was in a state of shock for days. Crooked eye? What crooked eye? It was true I’d noticed something odd in snapshots but dismissed the oddity by accepting that I was not photogenic. When a neighbor made a pencil drawing of me—I was in my early teens at the time—and my eyes in the portrait did not quite match up, all I could think was that she was “not a very good artist.” Now here was a physician telling me—but not telling me, because he assumed I’d always known—that I had a crooked eye! You may imagine how closely I examined my face in the mirror. And that was when I realized for the first time the limitations of binocular vision: I could only look into one of my eyes at a time, not both at once.

“Did you know I had a crooked eye?” I asked my mother. “Oh, yes, we knew,” she replied. “But”—still incredulous—“you never mentioned it!” “We didn’t want you to be self-conscious.” Well! Well, all right! That was long ago now, and I’m over it (except for noticing, with benevolent fellow feeling, crooked eyes in others I meet or see in movies or whatever), but try it yourself if you are skeptical. And now, back to Melville--.

How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it [Melville is saying that it is, not asking a question] as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison.

Well, now what about that business of listing between the empiricism of Locke and the idealism of Kant? If we had whale vision and whale brains, would we have to choose between Locke and Kant, or could we examine both simultaneously and be convinced by both in the same moment? Would we have to choose between Plato and Aristotle or Paris and Venice or even Democratic and Republican, or could we hold all oppositions of belief and view and preference at once?

It is often pointed out that human beings do believe contradictions in many areas of life. We say we want to achieve a certain goal, and yet we speed nonstop in the opposite direction. All too often, our mouths speak one set of values, and our lives demonstrate another. Are we so different from our mammal relatives in the sea, after all? Or is the human being, each individual’s thought, divided against itself, “very like a whale”?