Blind Sight

This morning my passenger slides into the front seat. I turn and greet her:

“Hey! Good Morning! How are you?”

“To be fair? Pretty puzzled… I can’t stop thinking about that speeding car yesterday. Where did it come from? I looked down that road and it was completely clear…”

“Yeah, that’s a puzzler. I didn’t see it either until it went past.”

“You must have done. How else could you have braked, swerved and moved out of the way before I even saw that lunatic?”

“Dunno? Yesterday was not our day to die?”

“Hmm… Hey? CREATE ART?! Karen? Did you put that note on your dashboard for me?”

“You read it first, it’s yours.”

We sit with silly grins and head off to work. Half way there and my passenger returns to our earlier words:

“I’m still thinking about it… Your reflexes are something else. But I don’t know, you’re a good driver… Hmm… No, that was something else, that was instinct…”

“Maybe so…”

I contemplate and an image from my Discarded Oracle comes to mind… This card was unusual in that I received the name during my fieldtrip with C. The image I dragged down a few days later. Usually the image would be very present and clear to see and well… I’m still panning for names for the bulk of this deck.

Blind Sight

The image arrived and it reminded me of retinal scans. Was this even a divined image or was it merely a memory of sun baking my eyelids whilst I was off world…?

Blind Sight? What a funny choice of words? What could it mean? Was it a pun? A play on words… Maybe Blind Sight was some kind of wisdom at a later date? The benefit if hindsight after you’ve been blindsided?

I asked the Google Oracle and discovered that I hadn’t invented the term. It was out there and existing…

From Chegg.com

Blindsight is the ability to respond to visual information without consciously seeing it. Psychologists study blindsight to learn more about how the brain processes visual information. Conscious vision depends on the primary visual cortex; however, people have demonstrated blindsight when this area of their brain is damaged. This suggests that another area (or areas) of the brain controls unconscious visual perception. Patients who have no conscious awareness of seeing objects have detected them in their path and moved around them. Such patients have also responded to color, emotion expressed by human faces, and motion (for example, supplying correct answers when asked to guess where an object is moving). Blindsight suggests that sometimes acting on information does not require conscious awareness of that information.

Hmm… OK, I guess the image works with this but as an oracle would someone with fresh eyes see that connection?

Life moved on and my thoughts turned to other things… Moving on further and the project shelved, I found myself on a 5 day residential course at Arthur Findlay College. Spiritual art? Drawing with spirit? I dunno… Something like that. Oh boy! Was that a long week… Don’t ask! I’ll save those tales for other days.

A peculiar thing about AFC is that if you ever meet anyone who has been and you tell them you are going, they instantly tell you about the amazing food. It is indeed amazing. What they fail to give you the heads up on is that wherever you sit for your first meal, that’s your seat for the entire week..

If I had known that, then I would maybe have chosen more carefully… Again, stories for other days..

But if I’d been more selective then maybe I would not have this tale to tell. Don’t get me wrong, it was at times a table, I’d sooner not be sat on but inbetween this pot pourri of enforced new (un)stable mates there were a couple of diamonds whose company I did fully enjoy.

One was a lady who hailed from Nordic Lands. Everyday she arrived swathed in colours and serenity. I instantly liked her a lot. We stayed behind one lunchtime and poured another brew. She showed me photos of her paintings, big soulful canvases filled with oil paints and other worldly faces. She asked me what kind of art I made.

I told her I was in stasis.

She raised an eyebrow at me. “Stasis? OK, show me your phone. You must have old things on there? No?”

I dug out my phone and oh… On that old phone,it tunrs out that I had stashed about three quarters of the D.O. She noticed me pause and asked me to hand it over.

She scrolled through my images whilst I tried not to cringe and then it was her turn to pause…

“This image… This reminds me. In Sweden in the Winter time, out in the middle of nowhere, we have very little to do. OK, we sit around and tell the Sagas, that takes up a lot of time but sometimes, we like to just get a few people in a car and go drive. So, we are driving one night and it is dark, it is real dark and the lights on the car fail. We can see nothing and we start to think that we are lost and we worry about how we will find our way home. In the backseat, we hear laughing. It is my friend who is a blind girl. She says “Don’t worry, I know the way”. She guides us all the way home, turn here, turn here. Funny! In the dark, she is the one who can see. What do you call this picture?”

“Blind Sight”

“Oh, yes, see you do paint!”

Isn’t it funny how you can overlook things that other can see blindingly clearly?

Though more nosily…When have you acted on information that did not require conscious awareness of that information?