From a Journal

1 February 2007

The visible appearance of objects, Thomas Reid states in his Inquiry into the Human Mind in 1764, is hardly ever regarded by us, because visible appearances are intended by nature only as signs or indications. The mind is accustomed to pass instantly through them to the things signified, without making any reflections on the sign itself or even noticing that there is a sign. It is, he says, like listening to a language, not noticing its sounds but passing at once to the things signified by the sounds. Michael Baxandall cites this, in his excellent book about shadows, Shadows and Enlightenment. He closes his discussion of shadows by remarking that to assess shadows accurately we would need clearer ideas than we do have about our inattentive perception, which is always an active complement to our attentive perception. It isn't as if shadows didn't exist, or that we don't pay any attention to them so that, for us, they might as well not exist, or even that we discount them at once, having registered what objects are producing them. Consciousness plays in a field where the inattentive is an active force.

Driving to Sotterley this morning in winter sunshine, down lanes lined by so many big trees, it seems that shadows are the definitive elements in the experience, laid over the road so dashingly, and, when you look up into the bare branches, often more assertive than the twigs that are casting them, or wrapped round the curvatures and complexities of trunks so crisply that they dissolve the limbs they fall on or are thrown by. The twigs and branches themselves seem to be discounted in an airy solution of warm orange, afloat under the firm manganese blue sky, and hatched emphatically by black shadows. Maybe I have decided to look at them like that. So, at Sotterley itself; over the field amongst the ancient oaks, the shadows over the wet grass mark out my way, and, as a startling sign, a drop of moisture on a distant metal fence, set, momentarily as I pass along, against a dark trunk even further away from me, flames out as a blazing chip of French ultramarine, signifying nothing. No sign at all.

I suspect that one sort of perception in which I take delight begins when there stop being signs, when you pay attention to them as if they were not signs at all. The oak, out in the middle of the ploughed field here, shines floodlit with white sun, every groove in its bark shown up, the canopy spread, fully shaped and static, in full illumination, but the whole tree distanced, faded just slightly, in a mist, a suggestion of blue, that I can't quite claim to be able to see. It is more felt than seen. The big ploughed field lies under my inspection, also shining, Mars brown, perhaps, or, if I hesitate about that, catching as more telling, maybe, the other sides of the turned clods, then, perhaps, a grey. As I lift my binoculars there are agitated rooks and jackdaws sweeping over, and a larger bird than they are amongst them. A compact bird. A wide bird. Wide but compact. Light underneath, with dark wingtips and carpel patches. With a white beak and yellow feet. It wheels round the field, flinching from the rooks, coming directly over my head, and planing, as it curves over, with its wings lifted just above the horizontal. I did not read off and register 'buzzard'. Partly because I've never seen a buzzard here at Sotterley before, or hereabouts. I expect them more to the west. So I saw this one. Seeing a buzzard. Letting it slide smoothly into attention from inattention. Something there to be seen but no need to translate it at once. Fine to let it seep in and multiply, fine to stand here in the warm sun in this brown and grey and blue until my arms begin to speak up with an ache that records the effort of holding the binoculars so high. A great pleasure. In spite of Thomas Reid, and enjoying the scope provided by not being in 1764 agreeing with him. Enjoying the interplay of attention and inattention which is filling the place with so much that there are, I guess, no gaps. Something more will be there to catch you.