A Perception of Things

I am a big person on perceptions. I also analyze a lot. Too much in fact.

If a young girl in some old fashioned setting is walking home with a small market basket of freshly picked apples, what happens next? Everyone who might see the scene and related to the apples assume they will eaten when they arrive at their destination. But how will they be eaten? As fresh fruit, as a pie, as apple sauce or as apple butter etc.? The possibilities are not endless but varied.

So too the human race in general might see apples and all agree that apples are present. But of late most people want to think that their assumption about consumption of the apples is the one and only answer. Why do we sometimes shut ourselves off into only one answer to a thought, problem or way to travel down life’s roads?

Everybody may see things the same way on the surface of the situation. Few really know what is going on beneath or around the surface of the matter.

September 22 is Autumn Equinox. At a certain time of the day, light is equal in night and day along the equator. Ancient cultures recognized the shadows of the sun, measured them and they always came back to zero so to speak and twice a year. From ancient culture’s observation of the sun came calendars. I rather think the Julian calendar with exact markings on a paper was a breakaway point from nature. Although phases of the moon used to be important to some, when Caesar said “march” on a certain date on his calendar, the army marched. Over time the west except for some lunar calculations for Easter has set itself along a certain perception of time in terms of days on a calendar alone.

If it wasn’t for the news casts telling me it was the first day of Autumn I probably would not notice. We no longer to any great extent follow nature or farming cycles anymore.

The Chinese have their calendar, the Muslims theirs etc.

Some crazies say that the world will end in 2012 according to the Mayan calendar. Of course, nobody has really looked to find the place to replace the batteries on the Mayan Calendar so to speak. The Mayans and their defunct time schemes have nothing to do with us.

There are many ways to look at and perceive time. There are almost as many ways to look at time as there are people. Go figure it.

Getting back to an example of perception, I pick a famous visual – a work of art.

Without going too deeply into anything in particular I often put myself in somebody’s shoes or try to see what they might see. One thing I find surprising is how in this visually orientated world how everybody accepts too easily what they see as real or do not question the narration on a news cast that goes along with the pictures.

The image above is of course the famous head of Christ from the DaVinci mural The Last Supper. Funny thing is that I have reversed the image of the traditional snap shot angle.

I have done so to see if you have noticed. Are you really in good memory of a iconic world class image that is five hundred years old?

Leonardo was supposed to be dyslexic, meaning he saw most things backwards for lack of a better way of describing it. So which leads me to one final observation. Which is the better pose for the art – the way the world sees something for five hundred years – or is what the artist saw five hundred years ago just as important?

Each of us perceive and follow through on many things everyday. Do we all see and perceive the same things below the surface image of things? Food for thought.