They say that cattle are colorblind, so it's not the shade of the cape you are waving that makes a bull mad but the fact of the waving at all. It's just us that need a signal for what is about to happen, that shortly there will be something dangerous. Otherwise we might miss all of the action.
I dawdled home yesterday in the waning parts of the afternoon, thinking about Stendhal and an article I read recently about a neurological basis for crystallization, how our brains re-wire themselves to find perfect what would otherwise be something less. I read a book last year that is basically how our creative actions predict what it turns out our brains already know and this seems to me to be obvious, how inside of our heads are universes that our bodies struggle to mimic. Often I get distracted by the every day and now and again, but sometimes alone in the soft evenings everything draws back enough for me to remember looking at the moon last summer, hanging like a jewel up there all this time. I talk a lot about the moon but that was the first time I slowed down enough to examine it rather than its motions and the ways that it draws on everything else. Everything changed then, lightly, turned just a little toward something new, and my brain reconfigured itself to recognize as beautiful something that had always just been there. Colorblind, or moonblind, or both.
No comments:
Post a Comment