On Looking Closely

March 4, 2021 6:08 PM

Looking Closely is Everything "The point being: Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh." [via]
posted by dhruva (15 comments total)

This reminded me a little of Alexandra Horowitz's On Looking, an series of essays about walks she took with experts in various fields (including and a dog, and another with a child), all paying attention to different things in the environment that are normally overlooked or unappreciated.
posted by Gorgik at 8:28 PM on March 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

The closer I look at anything, the more convinced I become that reality is best modeled as a ludicrously complex fractal. There is no scale at which asking questions fails to lead to further interesting questions.
posted by flabdablet at 9:20 PM on March 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

I think this is right, but I can't do it right now. My particular brain was already addled with attention and mood struggles that bend me toward catching too much of all the things. Adding some long-covid brain fog and quarantine fever makes me exist in this state, watching some thing with interest as everything surrounding starts to pile and congeal and rot a little. It's question, question, question, question up in this skull with no rest and none of the peace I normally feel when I get to ask about something and a friend nearby can say, "Oh, yeah, and..." with an answer or a different angle or something I hadn't seen yet.

Oh, I think that's what I mean. The real-time thoughts from other heads looking at the same thing, I need those to interrupt the brain spirals and shoot them off somewhere else. For me, it's not so much choosing to look closely that matters; that's gonna happen anyway, at breakneck and exhausting speed. Nothing attaches to anything. I miss getting to look closely with other people nearby. (Please don't worry, though. My mood is as fine as can be expected in pandemic. I'm just kind of at the bottom thickest part of the container of brain solution and no one has been around to stir it up properly for a year or so. The solution is nutrient-rich and usually healthy, but it is tooooo much of it and it's too foggy to see through when it's been settling for so long.)

Maybe this makes any sense? My particular chemical disorderliness already makes it so that I'm a bit unstuck in time in the best of circumstances, but now, whoa howdy. I was just considering sitting for a while on a bench in the cold in the night so I could get the paying attention to slow down a little bit. With any luck, you'll come in here (for any value of you) and add to this to add a bit of sense.
posted by lauranesson at 11:15 PM on March 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

This is wondrous, thank you so much for posting it. I have so many ideas that this is sparking in me but for now I'll just quote the late poet Mary Oliver, one of our steady masts of mindfulness:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
posted by fairlynearlyready at 12:34 AM on March 5, 2021 [4 favorites]

I very much enjoyed the article, thanks dhruva, though in my customary fashion I only skimmed it and ought really to re-read & pay closer attention. Often I feel I'm not looking closely enough at the world, though I daresay there's some elusively happy medium to aim at between workaday obliviousness & "Have You Ever, Like, Really Looked at Your Hands..."

I was reminded of the exhortation "Look with all your eyes, look!", which very aptly serves as the epigraph to Georges Perec's novel Life: a User's Manual. In the spirit of the article I looked a little closer at this phrase, drawn from Jules Verne's 1876 tale Michel Strogoff. «Regarde de tous tes yeux, regarde!», is the title of Chapter V in the second part of Verne's book. Interestingly, in the English version of Michael Strogoff at Project Gutenberg it's rendered as “Look while you may!” In the chapter in question, Strogoff is held captive as an alleged spy by the Tartar Emir, Féofar-Khan, and is witness to an Orientalist spectacle before he is to be blinded "in the Tartar fashion, with a hot blade passed before his eyes". Hence, then, the urgency of the phrase - a reminder that we only have so much time to look, and a finite sum of attention to pay.
posted by misteraitch at 2:21 AM on March 5, 2021 [4 favorites]

I used to work in environmental education, which is big on observation to an extent that I sometimes felt was a little over the top.

I was once at a workshop and the facilitators had us pick a square foot of ground to focus on for a full minute. I was standing there, about 40 seconds in, feeling like the exercise was a little stupid... and then I saw a perfectly preserved dead bat just laying there in the corner of my square foot. It had taken me that long to notice it.
posted by geegollygosh at 4:08 AM on March 5, 2021 [13 favorites]

"There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, and those who do not see." - Fela Kuti
posted by thatwhichfalls at 5:56 AM on March 5, 2021 [4 favorites]

"There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, and those who do not see." - Fela Kuti

I don't quite agree with that. I think many of see different things. For instance, as a former copy editor, I notice a lot of things about writing, text and design. But I don't notice people's eye color, and I don't know different kinds of cars, etc.
posted by NotLost at 6:32 AM on March 5, 2021

Would you see those things if someone showed them to you?
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:56 AM on March 5, 2021

thatwhichfalls I like it. In honor of looking closely, I'm always interested in the stories of these quotes and where they come from. That one has some discussion here:
https://suebrewton.com/tag/there-are-three-classes-of-people-those-who-see-those-who-see-when-they-are-shown-those-who-do-not-see/
that looks like it's ultimately from Machiavelli's The Prince somewhere in chap XXII. Pretty wild!
posted by adekllny at 8:00 AM on March 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

In my view, there is. huge difference between looking closely as an amateur (in the original Sens e of the term) and as an expert. The same point that Alexandra Horowitz's book deals with , two people can see the same thing but because of their prior experience and expertise, the 'look' is not the same. At some level this causes anxiety in me, since I could be closely looking at something and still miss the significance. I am reminded of this story where researchers found an extra-solar system meteorite in the Libyan desert, a tiny fragment that would have been completely missed by almost anyone.
posted by dhruva at 8:53 AM on March 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

Grandfather the architect back when craftsmen did serious bespoke work would take his two daughters to building sites and instruct them simply: "Observe".
posted by BWA at 10:18 AM on March 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

Also a reminder of Doris Lessing’s story “Mara and Dann,” in which the heroine’s birth culture includes the tradition of regularly taking children on walks, and then asking them “what did you see?” “And then?” et sequitur.
posted by mmiddle at 5:23 PM on March 5, 2021

lauranesson, there's a lot of evidence that generic mindfulness meditation isn't good for everyone and can be very bad for some people. I'll post details if anyone is interested.

Finding out that there's no advice that's good for everyone is another thing which takes looking closely.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:36 PM on March 6, 2021

I couldn’t look closely at anything until had first seen it from a distance.
posted by bendy at 4:51 AM on March 7, 2021