Perspective

One of my favorite songs is Nanci Griffith’s “From a Distance.” From a distance, she sings, problems shrink and everyone looks like a potential friend. The song celebrates a peculiarity of human vision, because things do not get smaller the farther away they are. Things only seem to diminish because the eye does not see reality. Reality is three-dimensional. The eye is two-dimensional.

The retina of the eye, where perception occurs, is almost as flat as an artist’s canvas. On a flat surface objects are distorted. Lines converge. Shapes bend into ovals or trapezoids. Distances become bluer, blurrier, softer.

Our eyes see poorly, so our brains do the real work of seeing by translating this garbled information. The brutal brain is so strong that it will not let us even comprehend our own misperceptions. Most of us can’t draw because knowledge of reality is too powerful. We simply cannot see the illusions we see.

Renaissance painters had to develop perspective to understand two-dimensional distortions. The irony, of course, is the more these artists succeeded in recording the eye’s distortions, the more real the paintings looked. Our brains may translate, but they need the misinformation first.

I think I’ve been trying to heal by trying to comprehend reality. But maybe I’d be a better master of healing if I tried to perceive the illusions instead. Lines converge. Things get smaller. Colors soften. Suffering ends. Discomfort diminishes. Fear softens.

Above: Tangents. Digital drawing, copyright 2005 ptw.