UNFOCUSED

I took this photo yesterday, on a walk in the woods.  When I realized that I hadn’t focused properly (or at all) I took a second picture of the same view, but upon seeing the in-focus version I realized that the view hadn’t been worth the picture in the first place.  The completely fuzzy and unfocused version was much more interesting.

As you can see, it isn’t really a picture at all.  I just captured some light.  But I wonder if that wasn’t the point after all.

We see the world through a camera – everyone does, including you, and you can’t help it at all.  You are your own camera, and you see the world in a very particular way, and you send these very particular snapshots to yourself for review to see what you can make of the things around you.  Sometimes your view is unique because you choose to look at things that other people don’t, and sometimes it’s just because when you look, you think about what you see in a way that no one else thinks.  I think that most of the problems that people have with other people have to do with their cameras.

My camera is a Canon Rebel – my actual camera, the machine I use – but my personal camera – the one I use every moment that I’m awake – is a very individualized model.  I think every person should take a good while to figure out what model his own camera is – that is to say, he should figure out how he sees the world – and he should always remember that everyone else’s camera is of a different make.  It helps a lot when you realize that so much of disagreeing happens when people are looking at two different pictures taken from two different angles by two completely different people.  Your camera is as unique as you are – that is to say, yours is the only one of its kind.

It is of course very inconvenient that everyone’s views are so dissimilar.  It doesn’t really matter when we’re looking at separate things, but it starts to cause trouble when we all look the same direction and half of us see green and the other half see blue.  And the really crazy people see yellow.  Or maybe they’re the only ones seeing it correctly.

In my Anthropology class today, the professor read us excerpts from an essay called “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.”  It’s a satirical piece written fifty years ago by an anthropologist.  Anthropologists are weird, but they are some of the few people who understand that the differences between cameras matter.  If you cross your eyes at the world “Nacirema,” you’ll realize that it’s “American” spelled backwards.  The essay describes some very familiar parts of American culture from the perspective of someone who doesn’t quite understand what’s going on.  This confused observer thinks that the bathroom sink is some kind of holy fount where people go to worship.  In the context of the essay, it actually makes a certain kind of sense.  People assume some very surprising things about what they don’t understand.

Some people talk about not being able to see things clearly because they’re “too close to it.”  I don’t know if closeness matters so much.  I think the problem might be that we see it too clearly.  Our pictures are too much in focus.  As I said, the view in the picture above wasn’t very interesting.  But there was a very interesting pattern of color and light in it that I would not have seen if I had focused correctly in the first place. 

It’s impossible for me to see through someone else’s camera.  I can have them tell me how they see the world, and I might understand it if they explained it well, but I’ll never actually see the way they see.  On a case to case basis, I want to know what certain people’s cameras are like.  I am pretty familiar with my husband’s camera, which is very helpful to me.  For most people, I’ll never really know why they don’t see exactly what I see.  But I can let things slide out of focus.  Sometimes the lack of clarity can be very revealing.

You can be an outsider in your own world.  Just cross your eyes.