Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Depth Perception

When I was a little girl,perhaps 8 or 9 years old, I drew a picture of a bridge over a river. There was something wrong with the picture, but I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I asked my mother and she said "There's nothing wrong with it! It's beautiful" That made me angry. I thought my mother was lying to me.

Many years later, I came across that picture and immediately knew the perspective was off on the bridge. Again, I was annoyed with my mother for not telling me the truth when I asked her all those years ago. Now, it happens that my mother was blind in one eye and had double vision in the other. I 'knew' that, but I didn't grasp what it meant.

Cross your eyes. That's how the world looked to my mother. Now imagine that you're seeing that out of only one eye. Do you know what happens? It's flat. Depth perception requires stereo vision. My mother saw the world as two flat images overlapping one another. She couldn't see that the perspective on the bridge was off because she had no depth perception.

She spent her life seeing two of everything and aiming at the space in between them. If she looked at you, she saw one to the left and one to the right and if she wanted to touch you she had to aim at the space between the two images.

 I'm working on a book. Like the bridge in that drawing, it is off and I don't know how. I keep looking at it, I know it's off, I can feel it. I just can't pinpoint the problem. The information is good, the process works, so it must be the presentation. Except it isn't the presentation or, if it is, I can't find the thing that is causing the presentation to fail.

There was a good 20 years between drawing that picture and seeing it again to recognize the problem. Another 10+ years passed before I understood that depth perception required two properly functioning eyes. Yes, it took me over 40 years to understand how the world actually looked to my mother.

It still amazes me, taking my vision for granted, that she managed to move so smoothly through a world where everything she saw was where she didn't see it. She literally lived her life 'reading between the lines'.

 I'm hoping it doesn't take me as long to see what is in the book, and to see where it isn't. I'm trying to read between the lines to find what ought to be there and bring it forward.

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