The Challenges of Seeing

            In the excerpt of The Object Stares Back that we read, James Elkins describes the challenges we face when we see. He describes many things that I have never considered before and makes you notice things about seeing that you would not have thought about before. He considers the idea that you can see something without really seeing it. He discusses how seeing to draw is different that just looking and that we must combine the thought of drawing and the thought of seeing together. In order to draw we must see with a purpose and have a sort of “mental sketch pad.” This seeing is much different than how we usually see to just recognize objects. Elkins gives the idea of looking at a landscape. We may “see the grass and the trees” but we are not really seeing it. We are really looking at patches of blurred colors and using our assumptions to guess the rest. It is good that we are able to use our past experiences to see the world around us, because you can never fully inventory a landscape in the same way that we do not have time to inventory everything around us. We must be able to recognize that a pencil is a pencil without having to spend time studying it.

            Elkins also talks about other ways in which we do not really see. He talks about the example of how we are not really able to see the sun. This got me thinking about light in general. Light is an object that is all around us, but it is not something that we can see, not because it is painful to see like the sun but just because it is not possible. Light allows us to see but is not something we can see in itself.

Sometimes we think we are seeing something, but are not actually seeing it clearly. Elkins describes how we have a distorted view of objects that are in our peripheral vision. This surprised me because I have never been aware of this fact before. I think we have enough awareness of what the objects around us should look like, that we do not notice that objects to the side of us actually look higher and skinnier. 

            I also thought Elkins’ idea about how we are not able to always have control of how we look at things is interesting. Often objects that have a sexual connotation are difficult for us to see because they are “forbidden images.” Elkins describes that our vision is either deflected or drawn in to these objects. It seems as though we will never be able to be neutral. We have to find a balance in our lives about seeing what we need to see, seeing what we want to see, and avoiding seeing what we don’t want to see. We have the ability to choose what we look at and we have the ability think about how we are seeing effects our perception of the world. We must note that “vision is not a simple act of volition” and there are outside sources, such as the idea of “forbidden images,” that influence how we see.

Most of the time we don’t think about seeing. It is almost like we have an “optical unconsciousness.” Seeing is just something we just do. We usually only see enough to get by and don’t spend time looking at every leaf or blade of grass around us. Elkins inspires the reader to consciously think about how they are seeing and to think about one’s seeing effects their perception of the world around them.