Registration Point

I. The Perceptible Wavelength

I'm not on Facebook, but every so often I look over bink's shoulder at her FB, to catch up on people we both know. bink is FB-friends with my sister, and last night I looked at what my sister has been posting since our father died two months ago. 

It was so strange to me: she's been posting frequent tributes presenting our father as the most "fun, funny, smart, warm, beautiful man"––her words. An ongoing series of photos illustrates how unmitigatedly adorable [her word] she thought he was.

You know how you get seasick when something changes your vision--like when you get new glasses,  or look through a prism? I felt like that, seeing through my sister's eyes. She always adored our father, and now he's dead, she's flattened his complex personality, papering over the man's twisty shadowed valleys. 

I actually felt rather disturbed when I went to bed last night, the way you do when you've had contact with a reality at odds with your own. But as I was lying there unable to sleep, I was comforted to remember something I'd recently read about human vision in The Brain: The Story of You (companion the PBS television series), by neuroscientist David Eagleman.

Eagleman points out that, as you know, "color" is just the name we give to certain waves that we are able to see--it has no objective reality outside the cave of our brains. And other waves, such waves of cell phone conversations and radio stations, are around and in us all the time, but they are imperceptible to us.

"Humans detect a tiny fraction [about 1.5%] of the information carried on the electromagnetic spectrum. ...Visible light is made of the same stuff as the rest of the spectrum, but it's the only part for which we come equipped with biological receptors."

That's true psychologically too, eh?  
We only register other people's realities that fall within the range we CAN pick up, we only process the emotions and thoughts we have receptors for (or, you know, that we have open, working receptors for).

It was always the case that my sister and I saw my father differently--we picked up different waves.  When I'd try to talk about what I was getting from my father, my sister would reject it, and me––once actually (and usefully) telling me, "I don't care how you see it,"––even though she had sometimes been present when my father had done the thing I was talking about.  She seemed psychically unable to see the full spectrum of who he was.

"Each creature picks up on its own slice of reality," Eagleman writes of the brain. "No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists:

"What does the world outside your head really 'look' like?
Not only is there no color, there's also no sound: the compression and expansion of air is picked up by the ears, and turned into electrical signals. The brain then presents these signals to us as ... tones.  …The real world is not full of rich sensory events; instead our brains light up the world with their own sensuality."

So, that was a good reminder to me that you see what you can see, and my sister and I simply have different capacities, especially where our parents are concerned.  

II. The Point

But also, as Harry Nilsson's Rock Man said (0:28) in The Point (1971), you see what you want to see:

"You ever see a pterodactyl?"

"No."

"You ever want to see a pterodactyl?"

"I guess not."

"Well, that's it: you see what you want to see."

I'd forgotten, but The Point was a big influence on me ten-year-old me. I have yet to this day to see the made-for-TV animated film, which looks pretty great, but I got the album (cover, right--needlepoint by Kathy Torrence) from the library and listened to it over and over.

Looking it up now, I see Nilsson was inspired by an acid trip,* but at the time, it just felt like someone who got reality--- being a kid is pretty trippy. (So's having a human brain). 

(In fact, I see now that growing up in Madison, I was unknowingly influenced by a lot of trippy stuff. When I got older I was, like, Why's everyone so one-dimensional?)

The Point is about a boy, Oblio, who is exiled with his dog Arrow from their town: "You have been found guilty of being pointless", from the album inserts:
 

Funny, speaking of rocks and stones, the example I always give of how my father and I related (or didn't relate) is kind of trippy itself––on my part, anyway. I've never done psychedelics, but I was interested in religion and philosophy, which is related, and when I was fifteen I tried to discuss with my father whether rocks have souls. 

He told me that since we couldn't know, it wasn't worth asking the question.

Well, as the Rock Man says [at 1:39] to Oblio: Being a rock is a very heavy life.

Oblio: Boy, I never realized that rocks and stones were so...

Rock Man: All you gotta do is open your mind, along with your eyes.  
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*Nilsson explained his inspiration for The Point!: 

I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, 'Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn't, then there's a point to it.'

The Point--entire album on YouTube, starts at 36:56, narrated by Nilsson

The Point, songs only, pt. 1(no narration)