Continuing notes on vision
Remember the car racing video games in the 90s? Remember how the background scenery behaved relative to the foreground? It would rise and fall, expand and contract, relative to the immediate foreground - the racetrack or highway. It was very obvious, this background/foreground visual dynamic, and seemed contrived and unrealistically simple.
When I'm focusing my eyes a certain way - in a specific direction, a specific number of degrees above the horizon, and a certain distance ahead of me - the appearance of everything changes. It's like the video game: as I drive roughly south on the 51 through central Phoenix, as I curve east and west, down through a shallow valley, the buildings of downtown grow and shrink, rise and fall, in waves and smooth as silk, upshots of presence and advance quickly folding back into retreat.
That's the first thing about this deliberate practice of focusing differently than I usually do. If I use as my primary focus a spot as far ahead as I can see, and about 10-15 degrees up from the horizon - irrespective of traffic, by the way, of other cars and what direction and speed they're moving in - and I consciously take in as much as I can peripherally, then the visual experience is profoundly different from when I focus on the nearest car, and use my peripheral vision only at the street level. The visual field is like crystal clear, thick elastic syrup that slowly and quickly bubbles up and flattens back out, protrudes forward and then retreats.
The other thing is the peripheral vision specifically: it can be trained, exercised, and expanded. With a bit of practice, I can focus forward, like described above, and without scanning my eyes back and forth, I can take in lots of detail in a surprisingly wide arc. Not only do I have a wide arc of vision, but I can see lots of detail even in my wide peripheral field. For instance, I can adjust my seat so that I can look straight ahead through the windshield, and see all three of my mirrors simultaneously, in a seamless field of vision. So I can see in four directions simultaneously - forward through the windshield, behind on my left side, behind on my right side, and behind and straight back.
I learned somewhere that flies can see forward and backward and sideways simultaneously. Being able to see in four directions as I drive, I understand a little bit of the ability of the fly to maneuver so quickly around my swatting hands as I hit my head trying to shoo it away. Rather than being confusing to decode, the four views just described need no decoding, because they are phenomena, not data. They move together as one plastic liquid volume, without remainder or splippage. The four fields present as one heterogeneous field of coordinated pools of detail - the three mirror surfaces and the wide field of direct vision forward.
This all sounds abstract, but that's because I'm struggling to describe what I've never heard described before, but is my actual immediate experience. I don't have the vocabulary for it. I was led, in fact, to do some quick research on peripheral vision, and read a few abstracts and one article, and found out that there is a vocabulary on the subject, and people are researching various questions and problems of peripheral vision. My immediate experience is unquestionable, but how I understand it is a different matter.
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