#i wander

Them: looking at pants

Me:

I was walking just before eight o’clock. The sky was mostly clear and the fading light gave it an appealing golden-green hue. Above me were hundreds of crows. Perhaps more. As long as I’ve lived here, and probably for hundreds of years before, enormous flocks of crows have flown over this spot every evening. 

The crows were flying into a headwind and remained almost stationary above me. The flock seemed to shimmer. One crow would bank its wings in a way that caught more wind than the others and this motion made it catch more light as well. The crows around it followed suit. This change happened in a rippling, radial way that made me think of a pond. As though there was, high above me, a surface of crows, and that this surface was being disturbed by drops from a source higher still. I tried to take a video with my phone.

This didn’t work. The crows seemed much further away on the screen. Their shimmering was completely lost. I was disappointed and I started to wonder why. 

It occurred to me that my phone’s failure to capture what I saw was one end of a very long thread. The phone’s camera saw the sky as a grid. Each square in this grid had two possible states: light or dark. This restriction caused the camera’s failure to see what I did. The numerous crows, the subtle effect of the light on their wings, the delicate balance between individual birds and the unified effect their motion created, all of this revealed a weakness of seeing the world through a binary grid. This weakness is caused by a philosophical division of the world into ‘there’ and ‘not there.’ This division was encoded into the architecture of the computer that assembled my unsatisfying video. It’s a division that has been latent in Western thought for two and a half thousand years. And the weakness of this way of thinking was suddenly clear when I tried to record the crows behaving as more than individuals.

It might seem silly to indict Western civilization because I tried to record crows with a cellphone from a thousand feet away. A sensible person might say ‘get closer’ or ‘use a real camera.’ These suggestions are solutions to the problem of seeing the crows more clearly. But helpful as they are, they do not address the fact that a problem was possible in the first place.

Further, one of the best ways of seeing to the heart of something is to find its ragged edges. It is precisely where systems of thought begin to fray that the possibility of transcending them seems most obvious. You ought to be suspicious, for similar reasons, when someone tries to correct your mistakes by pointing you in the direction of a system’s sweet spot.

Some more photos from my La Union trip with my bestfriend :-)