The Blind Eye

Such a beautiful park.

I sit upon a set of stone steps, borrowing them as a chair, and look towards the mist rising from a fountain on this windy day. Waves travel across the pond: turbulent at first, then gradually disciplined into a cleaner wavefront, and finally weakened until the surface appears still again.

There is beauty in the water. Yet I wonder: why were the mist and the waves the first things to enter my attention?

Why not the green of the pond? Why not the sun against my face, the readers upon nearby benches, or the sound of trees moving behind me?

The tempting answer is to explain why I noticed what I noticed. I could trace the waves back through my interest in physics, through previous memories, and through whatever concern happened to occupy me as I entered the park. But there is a more important question:

What did I not notice?

The scene before me exceeds what I can receive from it. Even vision alone offers more detail than I could examine at once. My attention selects. It brings the mist forward and lets countless other features dissolve into the background.

This does not mean that attention is defective. Without selection, perception would be unusable. We see by failing to see everything.

The danger begins afterwards, when we forget that a selection occurred.

The pond does not suffer when I reduce it to mist and waves. A person does.

A human being contains opinions, memories, fears, ambitions, habits, rationalisations, private contradictions, and an entire history of interactions that did not include me. Yet I still encounter a fraction and quietly promote it into a whole. A sentence becomes a character. An awkward silence becomes indifference. One action becomes an intention. My first model of the person hardens, and each later observation is invited to confirm it.

At that point I am no longer merely failing to see. I am casting a mirage of myself upon somebody else.

I know this because I have done it. I once became so confident in my image of another person that I stopped looking for anything outside it. When evidence appeared that did not belong to the image, I treated it as an exception rather than as a reason to look again. Only after something had been lost did I understand how much of the person had remained outside my field of attention.

Perhaps my later image was also incomplete. Recognition of blindness does not magically produce sight.

The lesson cannot be that we should see people without bias, in their totality. That is another impossible image. We will always select, interpret, and compress.

The lesson is to remember that we are doing it.

Our first impression should be treated as a hypothesis, not a discovery. Our confidence should remain smaller than the person before us. We should return, ask, and look deliberately for what our current image cannot explain.

I look again at the pond.

The mist remains. The waves continue travelling. But now I also notice a reader turning a page, sunlight breaking upon the green water, and a bird standing so still at the edge that I wonder how long it had been there.

For a moment, the lesson appears complete. I looked again, and by looking again, I saw more.

But this reassurance does not last.

Why did I notice the reader, the sunlight, and the bird? What selected them from everything that still remained unseen? The second act of attention was still an act of selection. I may have widened the image without escaping the mind that made it.

Perhaps I am still just as blind as before.

The scene did not change.

The difference is that now the blind eye can feel its own closure.