Heroes Not Zombies

This is a very common pattern of spider web, and in the early morning the dew hangs in sparkling droplets creating these beautiful strings of glittering crystal balls.

But this particular web attracts me especially because of the parts I can’t see. There is a whole central section between the outer rings and the middle of the web which have not held onto any water droplets (or hardly any) so there are many strange of the web that, at least at first, you can’t see.

That reminds me of constellations – how we create the designs and symbols in the night sky by “seeing” the invisible connections between particular stars. It was the artist John Berger who first pointed that out for me when I read his “Ways of Seeing”.

Artists are also the people most likely to be aware of “negative space”. Only yesterday I came across an article which pointed out that if you look at an “8” of diamonds in a pack of cards, you can see the figure eight in the negative space between the red diamonds.

It’s clear once it’s been pointed out to you, isn’t it?

Iain McGilchrist describes how the right hemisphere is brilliant at enabling this kind of observation. Whilst the left hemisphere zooms in on the parts, the right has a preference for connections, for “the between-ness”, and for patterns.

Finally, this web makes me reflect once more on perception, and how what we “see” in our minds, is not a simple optical image cast onto the brain by a lens, the way a camera works. It’s a far more complex phenomenon, an act of creation, where we use sensations, memories and imagination to deliver the exact image which we “see”.

Turns out there is always more to be seen that we realise at first, it’s always worth exploring the “gaps”.