Dining Blindly, Part II: Being Seen & Being Watched

For a fleeting moment I fretted about how the hipsters might size up my appearance, an upstate New York writer decked in black cowboy boots, toy metal spurs, a black suit, and a metal badge that named me “Sheriff.” My cowboy hat and a silver bolo tie framed my shaggy gray hair and unkempt beard, all indicators that I did not fit amongst the hip twenty-somethings with tight fitting jeans and semi-mohawks. Most of them acted like regulars in this cinder-block warehouse nightclub with orange light bulbs easing the space’s overall neo-bohemian darkness. I was consciously in costume; the rest of the crowd--besides my fiancé donning her version of Peruvian cowgirl attire--probably did not think they were. Since the organizer had billed this event as a “Pre-Halloween Bash,” I thought we should come in costume; no one else, apparently, did.

After all, we each had arrived at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn’s trendy Williamsburg neighborhood to experience something with our eyes closed--Dark Dining--so why dress up? I should’ve figured that out. Consequently, in typical social awkwardness, my eyes hitched mostly on Hillary’s face and my glass of wine while we waited to eat in the dark. Mostly, I didn't care, but part of me still wondered how this crowd viewed me.

Then, a woman clacked two sticks. “Welcome to Dark Dining,” she said in a deliberately stilted, ceremonious voice. The only other forty-something in the crowd, she kept her hair cropped close and dyed red, her eyes framed in stark black glasses. She was New York hip. Plus, she was the organizer, so she fit fine. “Soon, you will be instructed to put on your blindfolds,” she said, “and someone will lead you and your party carefully into the dining room and to your table.” Then she laid out the rules of the game: 1. When the sticks clack, keep silent. 2. Signal your waitperson by raising your hand should you have a question, need a drink, or want to pee. 3. Above all else, once you’re in the dining room, don’t peek! The admonition piqued my Pandora curiosity all the more, of course, but I would comply.

We lined up outside the dining room, a waitperson instructed me to place my hand on Hillary’s shoulder, and over my cowboy hat I slipped on a “Mindfold.” This blindfold with a tight-fitting foam lining blocks out any and all light source. As all visual cues vanished, as I entered my personal virtual pitch-black forest or my mind’s isolation chamber right there in the nightclub corridor, my body eased. For the first time all evening, with my eye sight completely blocked, I surrendered to the moment.

Perhaps more than any other sense organ, eyes govern our perception of reality and truth. Our common language betrays our sight-centric nature. “I’ll know it when I see it.” “I see what you mean.” “How do you view the situation?” “She has a unique point of view.” Truth, though, loves to hide itself, as the pre-Socratic Greek thinker Heraclitus reminded us centuries ago. So often, of course, our eyes betray us.

Our eyes, we might even say, can blind us. With them, we quickly size up and assess. Worse, folks like me often feel not seen but watched as if a cadre of god-like judges daily gawks at our physical awkwardness, our bad haircut, our outdated corduroys. Both our eyes’ anticipation and our self-consciousness alter our perception of reality. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that not our eyes but our spinning mental faculties smudge our windows of perception. More to come on that and the rest of the Dark Dining experience.

Dining Darkly and Blindly

To follow up with questions about painting blindly, I'm going to explore tomorrow evening dining blindly. Yes, I'm going to eat in the dark. I'm even going to pay big bucks to do so. Ridiculous? Possibly. But it's in the name of research and romance.

The gist is this: For the past few years, chefs and clever restauranteurs have been serving patrons in the dark. Either with blindfolds or in pitch black dining rooms, patrons from Los Angeles to Zurich to the Lower East Village have been treated to eating dishes with their eyes closed. No more dishing out thirty dollars for a skimpy leg of lamb and a parsley snippet shaped to look like a sailboat. No more paying pretty pennies for a Japanese chef to souffle your fish with exploding flames on your table--a visual feast that may compensate for a less than satisfactory gustatory experience. When you dine in the dark, your tongue not your eyes decide your meal's fateful rating.

Why? What's the purpose? Personally, I'm intrigued because restaurants that over-emphasize "presentation" and a meal's (if not the waiting staff's) visual appearance annoy me. I want to pay for exceptional food not for a waiter who looks as if he's modeling for a Calvin Klein ad on the side. The experience also intrigues me because I know my eyes too often dictate my experience of reality. With my eyes covered, my tongue and ears, my fingers and nose will have to guide me. As part of my research to track wonder, the experience affords me the immediate opportunity to explore how our senses invite wonder, how with eyes closed, we can live (and eat) in that state that hovers between wake and dream, between the outer world and the inner. Granted, this event will attract a lot of trendy people who will be decked out to be gawked at, but luckily I won't have to look at them either.

In the book Satisfaction: the Science of True Fulfillment, neuroscientist Gregory Berns explores the senses' role in a similar dining experience. He notes that "what you 'see' is as much the product of your imagination as it is the result of what your eyes physically take in" (87). That is, expectation and imagination directly influence the ways our eyes absorb and translate physical data--be it the slabs of penne vodka or the sushi rolls on our plate. He cites the work of another scientist, Peter Kaminsky, to state the obvious: "anticipation--the way you conjure up the food before it arrives--may actually affect how you taste a meal" (87). So, what happens to how you taste a meal when 1) you're blindfolded and 2) you're not given a menu and you don't order the meal--the waiter simply brings out the fixed meal? I'll find out tomorrow. I admit that since the event is billed as a "Pre-Halloween Bash," I cannot help but remember those eerie haunted house experiences in which, amidst an utterly dark room, I was asked to stick my hands behind a curtain and feel some mad scientist's "brain experiments" (composed, no doubt, of some cold pasta). Who knows what I'll be feeling and eating.

And romance? Well, Friday was Hillary's, my fiance's birthday. As part of her birthday experience, I'm taking her to the Galapagos Art Space tomorrow evening for a rich Dining in the Dark experience to be accompanied by some funky music; she has no idea what she's in for, so she'll be in even more wonder without expectation. Sort of gives a new twist to the idea of a blind date.

Painting Trees Blindly

I suspect many of us assume mental images come from memory. One October morning, you see a maple blazing red leaves, and then that night you dream of swaying in red-leafed maples. But images must be more than memory's projection onto your imagination's screen. Take the case of the blind painter.

At least one man blind all his life, a Turkish fellow named Esref Armagan, paints exceptionally accurate depictions of landscapes. With eyes that have never seen maples as we know them, he and his brush can render trees with precisely scaled detail down to the browns and reds and greens and golds we'd expect from a "realist" or at least an impressionist. So, how can a man whose eyes have never seen objects paint ponds and mountains and stones with realistic accuracy? How does his brain's visual cortex light up when painting in a way our visual cortex would do so if we closed our functioning eyes and visualized a tin can tied to an old man's ankle or Rin Tin Tin scratching his back on wet green grass?

When I told two good writer friends--he writes about space rocket entrepreneurs; she, for American Express--about this story, he said, "Oh, c'mon." She said, "That's a bunch of crap." "How does anyone know for sure he's not faking it?" he said. "Just because it's in Sciencenews doesn't mean anything," she said. "This guy's scamming these scientists," he said. Their hostility shocked me into silence, frankly. What in this story threatens people? I suspect my friends--whose skepticism I usually appreciate and who are perhaps jaded by living in Woodstock, NY, where every other person has a "dubious" notion about fairy worlds and blue energy fields--held tight to the idea that mental images must stem from memory and that sensory memory MUST fill a painter's imagination with a reservoir of images from which to draw; hence, no person blind all his life possibly could paint landscapes with any degree of representational accuracy without a lot of coaching and conniving goin' on.

Well, one explanation draws from current cognitive science. Blogger Hannibal performs a fairly good job of explaining how neurons fire and create images without memory's benefit. In addressing a similar line of questioning in relation to this painter, Hannibal draws largely upon cognitive scientist Daniel Dennet's book Consciousness Explained to offer a fairly lucid neurological explanation:

There are neurons that fire in certain patterns in response to particular kinds of visual stimuli, but they don't "encode" any information that's then "decoded" by some "I" located somewhere else. These neuronal firings also don't "represent" anything, because that presumes that there's someone "in there" to whom and for whom the patterns do their re-presentation. When my visual cortex lights up, either in response to visual stimuli coming in from the optical nerve or because I'm engaged in the act of visualizing something, that's all that's going on in there. There's no other part of my brain or part of my person who represents the ultimate "I" and who has to take a gander at all that visual cortex activity in order for "me" to sort out what I'm "looking" at.

In essence, Hannibal suggests that there's little fascinating in a blind man's abilities to render painted images so "realistically" since the brain's chemistry fires images without visual memory's benefit. I understand and respect both Hannibal's and Dennet's perspective; in fact, neuroscience fascinates me. Still, brain scientists, as Hannibal seems faithfully to assume, do not have final say on what makes us "us" anymore than theologians of centuries past. Or at the very least, this reductive response doesn't satisfy my curiosity. To suggest we and our imaginations are little more than the brain's random neuronal firing reduces, in fact, Einstein's claim that "imagination is more important than knowledge." Without imagination, I would posit, science as we know it ironically would not exist. Exceptional brain scientists must require imagination to diagram miniscule neuronal circuitry like branching and rooted trees. Darwin drew not just upon his sensory observation and intellect but also possibly upon his active imagination to theorize human beings' evolution from apes (Lesser biologists might have seen the same phenomenon through their windows smudged with religious prejudice and drew no new conclusions). Even Descartes himself--held culpable with good reason or not for so much reductive scientific thinking and assumptions--drew upon dreams to develop some of his theories regarding thought and existence. (Wonder, after all, Descartes deems "the first passion," and wonder requires imagination.)

I wonder, for instance, about other senses' role in shaping visual images. I wonder how Armagan's nose's ability to inhale dried leaves' musk, his skin's ability to absorb the touch of wind that also blows through trees' leaves, his ears' ability to take in dried leaves' cracks as his sneakers and cane trek along a wooded path in Turkey might influence the artist's visual imagination. I wonder what happens to Armagan's brain if I were to read to him a descriptive passage, say, from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I wonder if Armagan's dog recalls the next day images of kitties from her night dreams or if his dog dreams of trees she's never seen.

I wonder what blinds us to wonder. Too much thinking we know? Too much need to have the final say? The mightiest say? Am I culpable of same said desire?

Images are more than memory's projection. Agreed. But images, too, are more than our neuron's random chemical combustion. Of that I'm convinced. But what then creates them and how exactly Armagan's imagination paints images on his skull's inner walls I (and Hannibal and Dennet and others) am not certain. More later. I welcome your speculation (and corrections).

What is an Image?

The brain's flicker on your skull wall. An electrical apparition. Memory's ephemera mixed with neuronal fire. A whisper from the gods. The mind's cave wall paintings. Virtual experience. The imagination's healers. The imagination's fuel-efficient airplane.

Thirteen squawking geese flush along the pond's lip. Her almond eyes glint in morning light as she watches over the toddler. A scrape on skin has become a caked scab. Amelie's short chubby legs hobble after the terrier who waddles and yelps after the geese.

This prose, a sort of ekphrasis.

(Some of those details--the geese, the pond, the morning light, the scrape, a photograph of Hillary--come directly from my study's surroundings. Amelie comes from memory--my friend's daughter who visited last week. The terrier, invented more or less. The implied narrative connection among sentences, complete invention.)

If you read those words with an active imagination, your visual cortex will light up with a similar stimulation as if your eyes gawked upon geese or a girl or a dog.

Mind Cave Invitation

Greetings, cave dwellers.

Images haunt me. Not nightmares or ghosts, exactly, but the fact that we wee humans can concoct images in our noggins, that some ephemera can blaze on the back side of our skull's walls makes me wonder. This blog will explore ideas related to this ability. I suspect I'll explore its connections to religious thinking and religious experience in various forms.

My earliest memory, in fact, was a waking dream. When about four-year-olds or so, I woke up, gawked at my bedroom ceiling, and saw floating overhead about three sea turtles. They smiled, I think, as they floated or flew across my room. (Even as I write these words, images of turtles and of a tow-headed boy surface.) Why does this memory--if it is memory more than concoction--haunt me? Why do I find so much significance in these fleeting images I regard as my earliest "memory"?

And so what? Why does this experience of having mental images matter? I don't know, really, but through this "blog essay" I intend to explore why images--from dreams, from imagination, from religious experience--matter. Why do we human beings have this capacity to create, remember, recall, and find significance in images? Do other animals have this capacity? How might this ability to form images in turn affect our bodies? Our sense of reality? Our sense of identity? Our capacity for violence? Our capacity for benevolence?

Other than being a dreamer like you, what else "qualifies" me to write this blog? Well, again, I don't know. I've written about and published articles and essays related to the imagination and to dreams. I've been a crazed poet in an earlier life--a wholly unprofitable but rewarding endeavor nonetheless that daily asked me to heed my imagination. My next book, too, will explore images in more depth. It's tentatively titled _Tracking Wonder_ and includes research drawn from artists' lives, archaeology, psychology, and neuroscience. It also will include my direct experiences in "tracking wonder" with animal trackers, a shaman in Peru, an artist-cum-archaeologist who has devoted her life to studying our country's oldest cave art, the founder of the Lucid Dreaming Institute, and more.

Images craze me, I guess. I hope you'll join the crazed conversation and post your responses.