Awareness

Through some strange serendipity, many of our readings for this course have matched up quite beautifully with the things I have been thinking of or reading about at the time. In this case, I am reading a book and came to the chapter on awareness on the same evening I read Mitchell's "Metapictures" article.

What first caught my attention in Mitchell was the statement that "the Duck-Rabbit, and multistable images in  general, reveal  the presence of a 'mind's eye' roving around this storeroom [of the mind], interpreting the pictures, seeing different aspects in them" (51). Because the Duck-Rabbit can be seen in more ways than one, it makes us aware that we are seeing in general the Duck-Rabbit and everything around us. The book I am reading suggests awareness is something different than the brain or than thinking; I guess this is because we can be aware that we are thinking. It suggests that most of the time we just live, without being aware of the sensory experience around us, generally until an event occurs in one sensory aspect that makes it impossible to ignore.

To illustrate this, I could use an example from McCloud. He says that when two people  are speaking to each other, they see each other "in vivid detail" (35), and "each one also sustains a constant awareness of his or her own face, but this mind-picture is not nearly so vivid; just a sketchy arrangement... a sense of shape... a sense of general placement" (36). My book suggests the visual things we perceive are the easiest to be aware of, but when it comes to things like feeling the shape of one's own face, we generally ignore it. McCloud, moving on from his discussion  of faces, states "the phenomenon of non-visual self-awareness can, to a lesser degree, still apply to our whole bodies. After all, do we need to see our hands to know what they're doing?" (37). He illustrates this with an image of a man holding a glass but looking at a woman. However, my book would say that knowing one is holding a glass does not constitute awareness, but that one must feel one's self holding the glass.

Mitchell's multistable image can create awareness because "it has as much to  do with the self of the observer as with the metapicture itself" (48). He says the multistable is image is "a device for educing self-knowledge" and "a kind of mirror for the beholder" (48). Perhaps the most clear statement he makes to illustrate this, one I quoted on the board yesterday, is: "If the multistable image always asks, 'what am I?' or 'how do I look?', the answer depends on the observer asking the same questions" (48). In this way the multistable image might help an observer move beyond the state of the man simply knowing he is holding a glass into a state where he or she really becomes aware of the glass, their hand, and themselves.

In conclusion, I read some unusual books.