on looking - alexandra holowitz

[...]... block and its contents appeared to me more as a jumble of geological time and place Even a single building on West Seventy-sixth Street became a wildly anachronistic historical painting, on examination: Italian marble stood proudly aside 330-million-year-old Indiana limestone, atop 365million-year-old bluestone from the Catskills and next to boulders of Manhattan schist, some 380 million years old and... bare-bulb white, I am happy to share with you) Of the numerous intentional or unintentional letter Os—his first spoken letter, enunciated carefully and long, lips pursed and eyes beaming with pleasure on signs and walls (on the STOP sign, of course, but also on license plates and the zeros of no-parking signs—and by the way, nO parking, buster); on the circle-pocked grating of a window air-conditioner;... 1 Which neurons, and which synapses, is another, wooly question, one yet to be answered And how neural activity comes to feel like a stub, or like remembering, may be unanswerable 2 The proliferation of McDonald’s and Starbucks in far-flung locales notwithstanding Chain stores abort vacation-vision 3 It is almost reason enough to have moved to our current block that on its corner sits one of the last... to be noticed; keeping your preferred knife not among knives but among the poor defenseless spoons Hence the commercial success of highlighter pens, bright orange construction cones (or, even better, construction cones in neon green, for contrast with the old orange), and advertising that blinks at you from its billboard.1 Indeed, the singularity of one unexpected element in a visual scene is so remarkable... stopped in front of us and stared at my son, taking him for an audience My son was silent and attentive It read as a critique After a beat, the man transformed: he smiled at him In front of my son, he was unable to keep up his normal routine of an outsider among adults And I learned a new way of dealing with crazy -looking strangers on the street On a typical walk with a toddler, every person must be... decoration in front of the building save two pipes—one a humble pipe, the other a mysterious two-headed gnome I did not investigate.” By taking in my hand the small, soft curled fingers, and a good chunk of frayed wool jacket hem, both belonging to my nineteen-month-old son, I came to learn about the acute isosceles triangles on my block Before we even met the triangles, I was to have the conceptual... tickles a motor neuron into prompting a leg to kick—we can see attention beginning Confused, random, involuntary attention, but attention Visit that infant two months later, and watch as he looks you in (or near, or around) the eyes, and follows your head as it moves to his left and out of range That is attention, visual attention, beginning to unconfuse itself At nineteen months, my son was largely but... unusual occurrence on the sidewalk Vacations are the adult exceptions There, two things happen: we actually do see new places and second, we bother to look.2 I suspect that some of our fondness for so-called vacation locales (which are, after all, someone else’s home—as your home may be someone else’s vacation) is due to this simply looking Soon, though, we acclimate Familiarity begins following us around... would relent on “path”: it needn’t even be a true path, just a route along which to place my feet, one after the other, in going from somewhere to somewhere else How wrong I turned out to be On a late afternoon on a late-spring day, we prepared to go for a walk around our block At this age, my son had been walking on his own for seven months, but a walk outside—where he would be doing the walking, not... eyeballs,” as though fixing on the striations of neurons in the interior of his head In researching what people perceived attention to be, psychologists found that schoolteachers instructed their students to pay attention to an image by “hold[ing] the image still as one would with a camera.” To concentrate, to pay attention, is viewed as a brow-furrowing exercise Sit still, don’t blink, and attend Given . among knives but among the poor defenseless spoons. Hence the commercial success of highlighter pens, bright orange construction cones (or, even better, construction cones in neon green, for contrast. from each: a Q-tip (how does a Q-tip escape? I wondered), a chicken bone, sundry crumpled papers. I saw another Q-tip, and started to wonder about the ear health of my neighbors. As I continued,. headlight-wearing spelunker who can only see what is right in front of her in the darkness of the cave. Such a comparison can be misleading, because in fact one can still report on what was within one’s