I was inspired to write this post by the work of Kim Douillard and Kevin Hodgson in a project called "Slices of Life".

I was especially struck by Kevin's photos here (and I am avidly awaiting Kim's).  In Kevin's night picture, however, I found myself wondering about what I could not see just as much as by what I could see.  Having taken night photos before, I also thought about how limiting the camera is as it tries to record the fullness that the night can seem.  I know that is not a fair comparison in many ways, but technology is almost always like that.  In other words, in the fair light of day or night, technology reduces, delimits, and otherwise 'cheapens' experience. It makes the world more legible, but less wise.

For example, below is a photo of a rectangular platte of ground shot this morning just outside my back door.

What we see has little to do with it means.  For one thing, the metaphor of the 'frame' makes legible only a very small portion of the available universe.  In a way this is exactly what the brain does so very well--it uses an 'ignorance' filter.  And by 'ignorance' I mean that we accent the second syllable.  Based upon some idiosyncratic and lifelong evolving algorithm, each of our brains takes from the picture above what it will and ignores the rest. A collander metaphor jumps to mind.  Or maybe it actively pays attention to some stuff in favor of other stuff, a pattern bias unique to each of our own sets of experience.  Schrodinger's Cat? Or Maxwell's Demon?

But our views signify uniquely.  Each of us comes to the photo with a different filter.  Thinking out loud here, perhaps the metaphor is a loom, a Jacquard loom with a punchcard template (read schema) that weaves the sensorium back and forth.  Or as early neuroscientist Charles Sherrington called it "the enchanted loom". The quote below is the loom in action according to Sherrington  as our brain wakes from sleep.  The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.

I  am not thinking of the  kind of loom below as a metaphor although it is cool and tempting.

This weaving of the senses in with the schema we already have in our minds, that's what I have in...mind.  Now, back to the matter at hand, the practical matter of what is seen in the rectangle of ground outside my back door.

First, I see or infer dozens of holes in the ground. Worms, beetles, and other critters are pouring from the warming soil looking for I know not what.  Perhaps they are like Mole in The Wind in the Willows. They've  got spring fever and are saying to themselves, "onion sauce". The are holing out of the ground and checking out the surface because they can and because they feel the need.  Fanciful? Yet the holes are there and my mind weaves in some Kenneth Grahame

Second, I know what the holes signify--soil health.  There is much to eat and many to eat it.  In a way it is as the hermetic philosophers insisted, "As above, so below."  Another weaving of the loom that contemplates the health of the soil.

Third, it means that spring has sprung. This cliche is reinforced by the 'frogged' thrum of peepers in the background ready to move and mate and carry on with the ancient seasonal struggle. And all the other heaves and sighs and blats and tweets of spring. Not to mention the smell and breath of spring, its earth and touch moving in between what I see and hear and what I have seen and heard in sixty years of springs.

The camera's purpose, like the brain's,