The Clutter Problem
19th December 2016
The Clutter Problem
“Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.”
Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
How do we interpret and therefore understand the landscape?
The 'Clutter Problem' described as part of the 'X-Ray Vision Hypothesis' argued humans have evolved with eyes located on the front of our heads to enable out early ancestors to see food, or noegotaite an easy route through the dense arboreal landscape.
How this works, describes theoretical neurobiologist Mark Changizi, is "when you hold up your finger vertically and fixate your eyes on something far beyond it, you perceive two copies of your finger, and both copies of your finger appear transparent." Therefore, with our eyes placed as they are, we can see beyond the woodland clutter.
However, this is an all too simplistic and purely biological viewpoint on our interpretation of the landscape. We develop a multilayered, complex map of our landscape and an even more diverse and multi faceted imagining of our world. Our cumulative interpretation, physical, mental - reasoned, believed, start to transform 'us' and 'us' it - entwined in experience, dreams, hopes and memory. Or, as Rebeca Solnit more effectively describes; "They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.”
"It is true there are places which stir the mind to think that a story must be told about them. But there are also, I believe, places which have their story stored already, and want to tell this to us, through whatever powers they can; through our legends and lore, through our rumors, and our rites. By its whispering fields and its murmuring waters, by the wailing of its winds and the groaning of its stones, by what it chants in darkness and the songs it sings in light, each place must reach out to us, to tell us, tell us what it holds.”
Mark Valentine (The Axholme Toll)
Despite the obvious physical design, we are not just a faceward viewing animal, as we understand the world in a 360 degree, multidimensional, multisensory way.
Not only do we decode our immediate landscape in 'wrap around' manner (sensing the ground below, the sky above and sublimely absorbing what we passed and left behind) we also understand the world through a combination of our senses and memory. We smell, we feel the environment but we also remember the past, recall previous visits and therefore craft and shape ideas that immediately form our present and futures.
In fact, I believe if we only looked forward (in the biological sense) we would only understand a narrow perspective of our world. We would still believe to be living on a flat, disc world, at the centre of a small universe that rotated around us. Our minds would be limited in our interpretations, only able to determine the anthrocentic view that 'it' had all been designed for our purpose. We would only see our fingers held in front of our eyes.
When I am standing on some lonely hill, the landscape stretching away to a distant horizon, with layers, I see more than the oncoming tide of rolling hills. I sense the use of the land past and present, I detect all manner of wildlife busy. Busy surviving, growing, propagating. I cannot help sense the overal melody and be absorbed into the dance 'of things'.
Just maybe, if we truly are a 360 degree/multimemory/multisensory perceptive animal, we may collectively become to understand our true place in the universe and eventually gain a greater appreciation of the complexity of our environment and how life is not shaped in our image, to serve and be placed here for our advantage, but to realise that our fellow world companions are here's for their own, completely separate reasons.
We not only see the immediate landscape through the means of a primal, survival trickery, but as place filled with complex layers of wills, needs, patterns and perceptions. We see beyond the clutter.
"Only when people know will they care.
Only when they care will they act.
Only when they act can the world change."
Dr. Jane Goodall
“Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.”
Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
How do we interpret and therefore understand the landscape?
The 'Clutter Problem' described as part of the 'X-Ray Vision Hypothesis' argued humans have evolved with eyes located on the front of our heads to enable out early ancestors to see food, or noegotaite an easy route through the dense arboreal landscape.
How this works, describes theoretical neurobiologist Mark Changizi, is "when you hold up your finger vertically and fixate your eyes on something far beyond it, you perceive two copies of your finger, and both copies of your finger appear transparent." Therefore, with our eyes placed as they are, we can see beyond the woodland clutter.
However, this is an all too simplistic and purely biological viewpoint on our interpretation of the landscape. We develop a multilayered, complex map of our landscape and an even more diverse and multi faceted imagining of our world. Our cumulative interpretation, physical, mental - reasoned, believed, start to transform 'us' and 'us' it - entwined in experience, dreams, hopes and memory. Or, as Rebeca Solnit more effectively describes; "They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.”
"It is true there are places which stir the mind to think that a story must be told about them. But there are also, I believe, places which have their story stored already, and want to tell this to us, through whatever powers they can; through our legends and lore, through our rumors, and our rites. By its whispering fields and its murmuring waters, by the wailing of its winds and the groaning of its stones, by what it chants in darkness and the songs it sings in light, each place must reach out to us, to tell us, tell us what it holds.”
Mark Valentine (The Axholme Toll)
Despite the obvious physical design, we are not just a faceward viewing animal, as we understand the world in a 360 degree, multidimensional, multisensory way.
Not only do we decode our immediate landscape in 'wrap around' manner (sensing the ground below, the sky above and sublimely absorbing what we passed and left behind) we also understand the world through a combination of our senses and memory. We smell, we feel the environment but we also remember the past, recall previous visits and therefore craft and shape ideas that immediately form our present and futures.
In fact, I believe if we only looked forward (in the biological sense) we would only understand a narrow perspective of our world. We would still believe to be living on a flat, disc world, at the centre of a small universe that rotated around us. Our minds would be limited in our interpretations, only able to determine the anthrocentic view that 'it' had all been designed for our purpose. We would only see our fingers held in front of our eyes.
When I am standing on some lonely hill, the landscape stretching away to a distant horizon, with layers, I see more than the oncoming tide of rolling hills. I sense the use of the land past and present, I detect all manner of wildlife busy. Busy surviving, growing, propagating. I cannot help sense the overal melody and be absorbed into the dance 'of things'.
Just maybe, if we truly are a 360 degree/multimemory/multisensory perceptive animal, we may collectively become to understand our true place in the universe and eventually gain a greater appreciation of the complexity of our environment and how life is not shaped in our image, to serve and be placed here for our advantage, but to realise that our fellow world companions are here's for their own, completely separate reasons.
We not only see the immediate landscape through the means of a primal, survival trickery, but as place filled with complex layers of wills, needs, patterns and perceptions. We see beyond the clutter.
"Only when people know will they care.
Only when they care will they act.
Only when they act can the world change."
Dr. Jane Goodall