Drawings and photos

Sometimes, it's necessary to try and explain to people how the world looks to me: how I see it, how I interact with it. Why I can get lost for hours staring at the sand.

Part of it is the difference between a drawing and a photograph.

When you draw, you take a blank piece of paper and fill it. You usually start with whatever your focus is - the thing your drawing - and add in whatever details or surroundings you think are appropriate. Nothing goes on the paper that you didn't intend, that first wasn't in your head.

When you take a photograph of an object, it's different. Either you take the picture in whatever environment it occupies, or you place it in some setting. However, while you can somewhat control the context of the photo, you can't completely do so: often times, you simply have to deal with what's there. Good photography is about the way the subject interacts with the environment as much as it's about the subject itself.

That's an important difference: in drawings, you're adding context, but in photos you're subtracting or filtering it.

Most people, in their minds, are drawing. If you ask them to consider something - say, a tree - they first wipe everything out, then place the tree on the blank space of their minds. They may add some context as they see fit, but only as they see fit. They also don't generally realize they're doing it, or that there are other methods. It's a phantom negation - a "ghost not", as Alan Carter calls it - that takes place on a level before they think they're thinking.

I have trouble thinking of something outside of context. That first step - wiping the slate clean - I can only perform with conscious effort, and even then it's difficult. I can do mental abstraction with concepts, but only by using multiple contexts, not by eliminating all context: rather than thinking of an isolated "tree" on an empty set, I think of trees in various settings - parks, beaches, yards, conservatories, whatever - and kind of "overlay" them to find the commonalities. It's an average, rather than a true abstraction.

Another example that happens a lot: most people look at a bunch of people moving through, say, a crowded club and tend to focus on individuals. I see a the same bunch of people and see the crowd, as a single dynamic entity. I can plot interactions, projections on where individuals will move and how they'll interact - but ask me to focus on a single person, and I'll often lose the thread unless I can keep it in the context of the whole.

I can't stare at the stars without knowing that the sky isn't flat, that space isn't a black slate but is instead nearly infinite depth. The moon, in my eyes, is a sphere, not a circle. It isn't a perspective I have to bring to mind, it's my normal perspective and always has been.

I know I'm not the only one who does this - it's a level of observation that, while not held by the majority, is certainly semi-common. I am, however, one of the few people I know who do it natively and the only person I know who can't "turn it off", so to speak. It's like wearing polarized sun glasses: while you can see things others don't, some things are also obscured that others see clearly.

One end result is that I have a higher awareness of (and value in) reality but almost no purely creative capability (anything I try to manufacture in my mind has to be created with complete context, and that's extremely difficult; as a result, I tend to adapt more than create). Another is that I end up having some very strange conversations with people because I start at the top level and filter down, whereas tend to start at the lowest level and build up. Eventually we meet in the middle, but rarely with the same understanding.