Andrei Cornea, Dilemma: Details, thresholds and cat

Do you know the little tricks through which we show children how we see or more precisely how we understand what we see? A kind of visual hocus-pocus. You draw a circle, then you add small lines all around it. "What is it?" "It's a sun," any child would say excitedly. "How come, it's not just a circle with lines?" "It is both a circle and lines, but also a sun." "But what is more?" you insist. "It's a sun," they decide. Then you draw an oval, slightly elongated. You add two small inner circles. "What is it?" "An oval with two small circles." You add a vertical line. "What is it?" "An oval with two small circles and a line." "But now?" (I added a small curved line under the vertical line.) "Oh, now it's a face, even a smiling one!" the child rejoices. Again, you act surprised: "How, have the oval, the circles, the lines disappeared? These are geometric shapes." "They haven't disappeared, they are still there." "So there are both shapes and a face?" They ponder. "Now turn the paper with the drawing upside down. Is the face still there?" "It's gone..." the child sighs sadly. "Now there are only the shapes again... But we can turn it back," they say again, excited to give life back to the drawing that, for a moment, seemed to have been lost. "Look!"

We can, of course, complicate the experiences with more elaborate shapes, from which cats, hats, rabbits, houses, or shadows unexpectedly appear. What fascinates me, however, is the narrow threshold, the detail that separates the image from the non-image, life from non-life: do you remain on this side? You see only lines, points, spots. You add something small, you would say almost trivial – sometimes a single point, other times a small line or a little circle – and suddenly the cat appears, to everyone's delight. You remove the little circle or the triangles – almost nothing – and the cat disappears; you are left again with just a few shapeless forms.

Was the old Democritus right that "taste is convention, color is convention, warmth is convention; in reality, only atoms and void"? He could have added rightly that "the shape" is also convention, whether it's a cat, life, or spirit. That is, all are "formless shapes" that only our mind and our intention to discover faces everywhere humanize them, give them life? And yet, it seems there is always a trifle, a small detail added to the whole, a detail that, as if by magic, transforms the geometric lines, making them, from death, alive. Almost nothing has changed and yet everything has changed. It's like a little witticism, dropped unexpectedly into a long and dull conversation, which cheers up the audience... Or like a ray of sunlight sneaking into a room behind a curtain, which suddenly outlines and characterizes the furniture and people there, making us see ourselves younger and more beautiful. Sometimes, as in the paintings of Claude Monet or Auguste Renoir, you only need to add a little distance: the faces (of people, trees, sky, water) suddenly emerge from points, spots, and lines of color only if you step back from the painting enough, beyond a certain threshold. Up close, the painting is an indecipherable whirl of spots, lines, and colors; from further away, there are fields, trees, water, sky. But what is the painting, really? A formless whirl or a picnic with trees, water, and sky? Spots or faces? And whirl, and picnic. And form, and face. But which of the two is truly so? The child chooses the face. Democritus chooses the whirl. Proximity, he would say, dissipates illusions. Just as it is if you remove a line or two from the cat's face. It's gone!

So is "the face" in general an illusion? An illusion that would persist only as long as we pass beyond a certain threshold, which can also be considered a certain type of convention, but which would disappear as soon as we remain on this side of the threshold, in the so-called world of reality and truth. And conventions depend not only on a trifle added, not only on distance, but also very much on the eye of the beholder, on how they have been educated. About three hundred years ago, a Dutch painter lost at the court of the Chinese emperor was asked to paint a portrait of the emperor. The painter complied, and his portrait was done in the usual chiaroscuro for European painting. It was a disaster, which cost the poor painter his life: for the dark colors on half of the emperor's face were considered by the Chinese as representing "dirt," thus synonymous with blasphemy against the Son of Heaven, whose entire face must remain absolutely clean. Where the European eye saw shadows on a volume, the Chinese eye saw only spots on a surface.

What do such threshold experiences tell us? That, in truth, more our intention and perspective bring "the face" – that is, life and meaning to things. That "the trifle" added or those few centimeters of distance more or less make the difference between the chaos of "atoms and void" and the cosmos of "faces" only because we are used to looking or perceiving things in a certain way. We seek "faces" everywhere and, with a little help, we manage to discover them too. But were they already there or not? Or does only convention decide? Convention, law actually establishes how we see what we see. That is, truly, not even that additional detail, to which I referred, would be essential by itself, but only our will and intention to look at a part of the world in a certain way transforms it into a threshold between chaos and cosmos. Truly, everything would be nothing but illusion and deception; the Chinese, wise like Democritus, were somehow right to execute the illusion-creating painter.

Truly... And yet, we also have another truth – simple, undeniable, and this time, wise: the joy of the child (including the child within us) who, after the little exercise of visual magic, has "discovered the cat"...

https://www.dilema.ro/situatiunea/detalii-praguri-si-pisica