A Short Narrative

Let me first note that while Arnheim's ideas certainly do resemble in certain details ideas that have come before (Plato's Ideals, Jung's Collective Unconscious) it isn't the same as those things, and his purpose in writing is not the same as those people's. Arnheim is interested in a pretty simple question, which is how do we see? and his book is more or less a survey of the science that had been done up to that point. Is it all correct? I rather doubt it.

Does it fit well with my perception of reality? Yeah, and it's possible, even reasonable, that Plato and Jung both had some vague notions of these same things (they were, after all, humans who could see, and had therefore access to a human visual cortex to ponder and examine) and constructed their towers on some of the same material. But really, Arnheim and I are mostly interested in how people see stuff.

Here are some simple graphics which, I propose, relate a short narrative:

Now, to be sure, this is just me, fumbling through my probably shoddy understanding of Arnheim's ideas, feeling my way through some graphics. To me, the "story" reads clearly. To you.. I don't know. I dare say you see some sort of narrative, especially since I told you there's supposed to be one. Certain elements are likely to "read" for you, but probably not all of them.

For reference (spoiler alert) what I intend is: figure at rest, an eye observes you observing, the figure rises, violent outburst, the figure is prone once more. Is there one figure or two, or three? Is the figure at the end victorious or dead? Unknown.

These arise out of some photographs I have taken recently, and it strikes me that the photos muddy the allegorical waters a great deal by being photographs. It is not an abstract prone figure, but a hand, or a razor. The eye is not an eye, but a flower, or a bottle cap, or a ball.

Even assuming that the abstracted graphics "read" can one successfully do the same things with photographs? Does a prone razor, followed by an ball, have the slightest chance of reading as the prone figure... observes you or will the ground truth of the pictures as what they are forever prevent that? I dunno.

Certainly if I repeat many prone figures, the hand, the razor, the dog, the branch, you will probably get the prone figure reference. Arnheim might teach that your percept of each of these photos would contain the prone figure abstraction, and I assert that by repeating different pictures of different things your percept will distill naturally into the underlying abstraction.

Similarly, if I gave you the ball, the bottlecap, and maybe even an eye, each centered in the frame, you would at least note the common graphical appearence, and might be willing to accept the idea of an eye or a peephole with a little prompting.

I don't entirely know where I am going here. I don't want to tell "Gilgamesh" with pictures of razors and tennis balls, because that would be stupid. But some sort of flow of emotion, or feeling, would be nice.