Flow

The river is so much lower than last time I saw it!

For this post I want to focus on something from Iain McGilchrist's Master book. This is the importance of both distance AND connection.

Petrarch [is] said to have been the first person to think of climbing a hill for the view, but it is striking that what he reports is, not the utility of the experience, but its beauty. This illustrates a feature of these turning points in Western civilisation, that they begin as symmetrical. The standing back is, if one can put it that way, in itself ‘hemisphere-neutral’, a function of the bilateral frontal lobes. But once again the fact of standing back necessitates a sharpening of the division of labour, a demand for abstraction and generalisation, favouring the left hemisphere; and at the same time it generates a leap forward in the right hemisphere's relation with the world around it, to which it now stands in a deepened and enriched relationship, through the achievement of what I have called ‘necessary distance’.

In the first part of this book I have referred to the fact that depth relies principally on the right hemisphere. Each hemisphere, however, has its contribution to make to perspective. Perspectival space is also related to individuality, another classic element of the Renaissance world view, since perspective mediates a view of the world from an individual standpoint – one particular place, at one particular time, rather than a God's-eye ‘view from nowhere’. Like individuality, however, perspective is understood differently by the two hemispheres. Perspective is, on the one hand, the means of relating the individual to the world and enormously enhancing the sense of the individual as standing within the world, where depth includes and even draws in the viewer through the pull of the imagination; and, on the other, a means of turning the individual into an observing eye, a geometer coolly detached from his object's space. Equally the rise of the sense of the individual as distinct from the society to which he belongs enables both an understanding of others as individuals with feelings exactly like one's own, the grounds of empathy; and, at the same time, a detachment of the individual from the world around him that leads ominously in the direction of autism.