_a little story
she remembers sitting in the open window of her room on the top floor. The house is on a hill, and the illuminated city seems bigger at night than in the dull day. For a long time she sits there, glancing here and there and back again. She remembers the synesthesia of looking out and hearing music, and then with one glance looking in and hearing the city, all in a moment simultaneous duality. It is not the room, or its vantage point, but rather the reconciliation of opposites, within a single moment, by instinct and as an impulsive sequence.
As she arrives at the gates of the city, she remembers sitting in the open window, glancing neither here nor there.
The eye, she deliberates, might be the mechanism of that memory, the key to its effortless passage between antitheses. The lens receives light from its environment and focuses it onto the retina, here the inverted image is transposed into neural impulses which, processed by the brain become perception, our inner interpretation of the outer physical world. Within this light-fast sequence occurs a continuous and sustained transition between the internal and external and this she thinks must illuminate some mechanism which might allow for a construction which realises and manifests that moment.
She remembers sitting in the open window and wanders how she could dwell in that dichotomy. This is the question, what is the necessary construction to make this moment manifest in the physical environment?
She has come to Valencia on a kind of pilgrimage. She heard that there was once a professor here who had captured in images the space of that most fundamental of transitions, the retina. And so she has come here to find the modern day shrine to science where the evidence of that elusive space he had captured now lay.
The professor was one Ramon Y Cajal. He had been a rebellious teenager and in spite of his father’s efforts to apprentice him to cobblers and barbers, had indulged instead his passion for drawing and the pursuit of aesthetics. Much to the relief of his father I’m sure, he did finally enrol at the University of Zaragoza to study medicine. Ten years after graduating he was appointed a professorship and chair of anatomy at the University of Valencia. At 35, Cajal would finally reconcile his talent for imagery and science when he travelled to Madrid to meet Dr. Simarro; he wrote in his autobiography: “it was there, in the house of Dr. Simarro, that for the first time I had the opportunity to admire those famous sections of the brain impregnated by the silver method of The Savant of pavia.” He continued: “A look was enough [the nerve cells appeared] coloured brownish black even to their finest branchlets, standing out with unsurpassed clarity upon a transparent yellow background. All was sharp as a sketch with Chinese ink.” Enraptured by the technique, Cajal promptly stained the retinas of birds with the silvery ink. From this devised immaculate drawings plotting the neurons and their interactions and thus establishing the basic principles of modern neuroscience.
There was in this man’s method a certain madness she thinks. A perverse and brutal indulgence in the dissection of the sacred to reveal and demystify it. She admires of course the final product of these exercises, but shies away for now at least from those operations. For now, she remains passive, observing.
She remembers sitting in the open window, wanting to capture that moment and fix it.
Tomorrow she would arrive at the shrine, where she would see with her own eyes those delicate plans of where photon turns to thought.
The fixing of an image is a preoccupation inexorably linked to her desire to dwell in dichotomies. The camera’s eye could capture more perception in an image than hers could. She revels in the possibility of framing a composition to exclude the world she chooses to reject and distil the customised constructed world of her personal desire. In this way, she could see the world by filter, overexposing in order to express the ambiguity of her subjects in the somewhat nostalgic manner of the German expressionists.
People would say, as if trying to enlighten her, that not everything was so black and white. This irritated her intensely, as if patronising words like this would suddenly wake her from her slumber of ignorance, that she would suddenly awaken to the rich and diverse world which is greyscale. God forbid no; she maintained that things were that simple, that is was all about black and white.
This is not say that she is in denial about the fact that her eyes do actually, for better or worse perceive colour. But she has a habit of dwelling on contrast, of immersing herself in its clarity, encircling it until it reveals her preoccupations in the material of her environment.
As she wanders through the city on her way to the shrine, she remembers sitting in the open window wanting to compress the space of the city and stretch the time of the moment.
Suddenly she finds herself outside the University but stops at the glass door, captured by its dissection of the square. As the polished door pivots it splits the square in two and then slowly merges it again. She stops, looking at this, nudging the door open a little every time it comes to rest. As people pass behind her, she spies them according the angle of the pivot. The frame of her vision thus becomes privy to a much larger space, stretched over a longer period of time.
In a cafe on the square she finds solace in a place which seems to have the ingredients of her mnemonic space. She sits here soaking in whisky and cortados, simultaneously sipping at home and abroad. She recalls an architect friend of hers once saying “Good building must be seen as the nature of good construction, but a higher development of this ‘seeing’ will be construction seen as nature-pattern. That seeing, only, is inspired architecture...” He continued ecclesiastically: “ This dawning sense of Within as reality when it is clearly seen as Nature will by way of glass, make the garden be the building as much as the building will be the garden.”
She chuckles at this recollection, seeing about her every antithesis of this self induced epiphany. At the time she had been struck by the idea of a “dawning sense of within as reality”, mostly due - she realised now - to the fact that she saw little or no connection between this notion and the rest of the sermon. Her sense of reality was not one made of glass and steel and concrete.
Here the glass is not that immaterial facilitator of a dematerialised architecture (and by the way what was that architect’s obsession with demolishing his own work the moment is became solid?). On the contrary, the glass here does everything to mediate between the garden and the building, bouncing its imagery from plane to plane until all its momentum is lost and all that remains is a matter of perception. Although she feels terribly at home here, no doubt partly due to her relative intoxication by now, she misses within these walls of strewn out images the dynamic of her memory. She misses the movement of one to its antithesis, and so she leaves, continuing toward the shrine.
She remembers sitting in the open window, considering the cycle of seeing and being.
As evening approaches she thinks of the cyclical nature of her eye construction, its mechanisms and its framework. She repeats to herself: light reaches the eye is focussed onto the retina is transposed to neurons is perceived by the brain is the instigator of emotion is again transposed to physiology is thus made physical is then made a construction is reflecting light, is entering the eye and is focussed by the lens is transposed by the retina to be read by the brain and is expressed through emotion as physical form is constructing the environment and reaches the eyes by light, focussed onto the retina and...
Tomorrow she would see for herself those delicate plans of the dissected eye.
