albarrancabrera.
"What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends of what sort of person you are."
- C.S. Lewis, "The Magician's Nephew"
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C.S. Lewis's sentence points to something deeper than mere physical perspective. We do not look only from a point in space, but from an inner history. Our senses are not a neutral window, but an active system directed by the brain that selects and anticipates. We perceive in dialogue with what we expect to find.
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The brain formulates constant predictions and adjusts what it receives in light of them. For this reason, we never see the "real" separated from our previous experiences. Every image is shaped by memory, emotion, and habit; every interpretation arises from a network of past versions of ourselves that continue to operate in the present.
Changing position, externally or internally, transforms those predictions and, with them, experience. Seeing and hearing depend on where we stand, but above all on who we are: active systems that do not merely register the world, but configure it in the very act of perceiving it.
The Indestructible 2016,
#70005 Pigments, on gold leaf on paper
