How to Use Your Eyes

"Elkins is a writer on art and art history . This book is really not about art per se – instead it is really about the act of observation. I adore his approach. He takes things that we are familiar with but have never looked at closely. He has 31 examples, which include things like x-rays and stamps and maps and the winter ice halo around the sun. One of my favourites is pavements. He is not discussing what the stuff is that pavements are made up of. Instead he is looking at what the movement of pavement tells us about who has driven on that road. For instance he describes “shoving”, which is when warm pavements, over time, create a little crevice and then a hill after it – the pavement has been moved by the starting and stopping of a large force. If you begin to look for this shoved part of the pavement as you cross the street you will see it here and there. What it represents is where a lot of cars, or in New York a very large bus, might have stopped and started repeatedly. At bus stops you will see shoving. I love the idea that you can look at something so familiar that you have never really examined, and see this additional dimension – in this case, of who has passed by before. Yes, it is like a forensic vision. He has another example, which encourages you to look at the inside of your own eye. And that is not through some strange microscopic mechanism. It is through becoming attentive to the blood vessels that run across the front of our eyes. If you look at a diagram of your eye in a biology textbook you see that they are there. We never see them because the brain has learnt to ignore them, so we need to trick ourselves into seeing them again. Then you see the vessels and you can see lots of little floater objects sashaying across your visual field. But for the most part we never see these things even though they are plastered to our eyes. Yes. We have adapted to not see the inside of the eye because you don’t want to be focusing on it all the time. I find it entrancing that you can bring into mind something that through force of habit we have come to ignore."