55”x 55” Pt. 3 © Nadia Daniels-Moehle. 2020. Acrylic on wood.
This piece is inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and represents my perception as author and artist as it effects my work, I am hidden in my work just as much as I create it, just as much as it is limited by my perception.
I spent the equivalent of fourteen weeks on “Curious and Fragmented, a Creative Exploration of Perception”, though each week’s work lives together with the others. All seven pieces of art illustrate different aspects of the writing, weaving my reflections on perception throughout the entire CognEYEzant:52 installation.
Somewhere in the middle of my teens, I took lots of philosophy classes, and woven through all of them was a common thread: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (Project Gutenberg / Bookshop). The story, written approximately 2,300 years ago, explores perception, and though it fascinated my teen self, I never fully understood the importance of perception until the COVID-19 pandemic.
The allegory begins with inhabitants chained inside Plato’s Cave who are forced to experience a life, a reality, made of only shadows. When Plato’s protagonist escapes, three-dimensional reality throws his perceptions into turmoil. And his attempt to share this new reality with the other cave-dwellers does not go well: illustrating how people hang onto our perceptions of the world as if they are the world itself. This story crashes into my reality as months of self-isolation pass, and I realize that I live in a cave of my own; one that encompasses my entire world. All humans move through life in our own versions of Plato’s Cave: our perceptions. Though they are malleable, not made of stone, and though we are forever within them, we are not trapped.
As I face the very beginning of my 20s and tumultuous time alongside millions of others, I realize that, now more than ever, we need to learn to recognize, challenge, and expand our perceptions. This piece is an exploration of the tools, stories, and resources–the process–I encountered through my teens that helped me to recognize and expand and connect my own perception. It all begins with curiosity and childhood.
“But how does one keep an imagination fresh in a world that works double-time to suck it away? How does one keep an imagination firing off, when we live in a nation that is constantly vacuuming it from them? The answer is, one must live a curious life. One must have stacks and stacks and stacks of books on the inside of their bodies. And those books don’t have to be the things that you’ve read —that’s good, too, but those books could be the conversations that you’ve had with your friends that are unlike the conversations you were having last week.”
—Jason Reynolds, in his On Being interview.
Author Jason Reynolds spoke these words into my headphones, and he reminded me of my child-self who began collecting “books on the inside of [my body]”. I clung to childhood as I saved my baby teeth and lost myself in stories because deep down I knew that childhood’s unfettered curiosity connected my internal perception to the world around and outside of me. I did not want to grow up. Childhood created space for my imagination and time to branch as owlets do: hopping from tree branch to tree branch before finally taking wing. And when childhood inevitably faded into adolescence, I learned that, as writer and philosopher Rebecca Solnit articulated (WorldCat / Bookshop):
“childhood fades gradually in some ways, never ends in others; adulthood arrives in small, irregular installments if it arrives; and every person is on her own schedule, or rather there is none for the many transitions.”
At 14, long before I read Solnit’s thoughts on childhood, I proposed that if brain development continues well into our adulthood and longevity is increasing, we could also lengthen childhood —at least a couple of extra years. And so as adolescence crashed into early adulthood I tried out my theory, discovering data that, like Solnit’s words, supported my proposition that the years of childhood should be extended.
At 14, long before I read Solnit’s thoughts on childhood, I proposed that if brain development continues well into our adulthood and longevity is increasing, we could also lengthen childhood—at least a couple of extra years. And so as adolescence crashed into early adulthood, I tried out my theory, discovering data that, like Solnit’s words, supported my proposition that the years of childhood should be extended.
According to Our World in Data, global longevity has increased from 46 in 1950 to 71 in 2015. We’ve gained 25 years, and 25 just happens to be the age that the Teenage Brain (WorldCat / Bookshop) authors Frances E. Jensen and Amy Ellis Nutt argued is when “the most important part of the human brain—the place where actions are weighed, situations judged, and decisions made—is right behind the forehead, in the frontal lobes… the last part of the brain to develop.” But 25 is just the beginning. Ned Johnson and William Stixrud, in The Self-Driven Child (WorldCat / Bookshop), describe how the development of our “emotional control functions follow [finishing their development] at around thirty-two.” And maybe this is why more people in my generation, including myself, find it rational to stay home in intergenerational homes well into our 30s.
Yet, the development of our brains does not signal to our internal selves that we are “grown”; this perception of ourselves is dependent on our own experiences and emerges on its own time. The loss of childhood does not imply the loss of curiosity, but we often have to keep a childlike wonder alive in order to keep our perceptions open. Something my sister innately was able to do when, my sister, who was 10 at the time, discovered an extinct Eastern Elk skeleton beneath the ice in a lake’s spring melt. My dad’s rigid adult brain saw sticks through the murky water, but the plasticity of my sister’s childhood brain allowed her to see that there could be something more. And there was so much more.
My sister’s curiosity guided us to explore the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History’s musty mastodon bone-filled basement, to fund carbon dating and DNA testing with a $5,996 Kickstarter campaign, to connect with the director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (and to literally dozens of “grown-up” science experts). In our search to discover the bone’s origins, my sister and I learned that questions lead to answers, and answers lead to more questions.
The scientific process relies on these cycles of answers and questions, this doubt-fueled curiosity. “Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty —some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.” Physicist Richard Feynman described (pdf), “in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt”.
If doubt’s combustion propels science forward, mistakes propel our brains (and our perceptions) to expand. For me, learning occurred in a series of experiences, discoveries, and mistakes that shaped my childhood brain. At first, I thought those mistakes were a sign of my abilities eroding. But they were the exact opposite. Mathematician and education reformer Jo Boaler explains (WorldCat / Bookshop) why:
“The times when we are struggling and making mistakes are the best times for brain growth. When we are willing to face obstacles and make mistakes in the learning process, we enhance neural connections that expedite and improve the learning experience.”
From my young experience, consciously learning from mistakes requires responding to them with curiosity. Curiosity not trapped in the childhood years of our lives but expanding and evolving just like the scientific process. The trick is to learn to both turn that curiosity inward to nourish those libraries lining our bodies and outward to explore the worlds and perceptions surrounding us.
“The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books.” Author Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote (WorldCat / Bookshop), “I was made for the library”. I too was made for the library, made for books and the spaces and people and times that books enable us to inhabit; made for libraries where countless stories, concepts, and voices exist at once, waiting for us to bring them back to life.
Philosophically, I think each of our perceptions brings reality to life, just as readers have the power to make books come to life in our minds. In the realm of literary theory, this bringing to life, this “meaning”, raises questions: does meaning belong to the author; to the words themselves; or, like the reader-centric theory Stanley Fish champions (WorldCat / Bookshop), does the text’s meaning belong to the reader? I would answer yes, and have a feeling Rebecca Solnit would too, as she wrote in her memoir (WorldCat / Bookshop): “the words are instructions, the book a kit, the full existence of the book something immaterial, internal, an event rather than an object, and then an influence and a memory. It’s the reader who brings the book to life.”
When we read, we’re not just reading words, we are reading what is in an author’s mind, their beliefs, experiences, and perceptions. Reading can peel away the vast divides between humans’ perceptions, still writing “something down doesn’t make it true.” As lyrical writer and historian Jill Lepore understands (WorldCat / Bookshop), “the history of truth is lashed to the history of writing like a mast to a sail. To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind. Stories are full of power and force; they seethe with meaning, with truths and lies, with evasions and honesty.”
Exploring our perceptions is just as much a process of experiencing our present as it is a process of history: we are made of everywhere we’ve been and everything we’ve encountered. We are made of fragments of the world, just as history itself is something we can only understand in fragments. When I was 14, I learned that studying history is a process of collecting fragments. Exploring the German politics that led to WWII and The Holocaust, I learned that Hitler’s failed art career preceded his tyranny (WorldCat / Bookshop); learned that Anne Frank’s family was refused asylum in America; learned that Josephine Baker was not just an entertainer, she was an activist and intelligence operative; learned that while my Polish great-grandfather served as a litter barer in France, my pregnant German great-grandmother lived in his family’s home in Chicago. All these pieces of history barely scratch the surface of the stories and lives they try to capture, and don’t speak to the life, trauma, and even more history that spirals out from each fragment we come across. All the fragments intercept and belong to every single person who experienced it.
History we are taught is documented by the few; often all we know of times before us and lives beyond us is filtered through a documenter’s perspectives. Countless perspectives have been lost or actively destroyed, like swaths of Ancient Greek lesbian poet Sappho’s work. Somehow her poetry found itself transposed on paper, but by whose hands, since in Sappho’s time, most women were illiterate. Saphho’s work exists now, only in fragments (WorldCat / Bookshop), in pages harboring only handfuls of words like “right here…(now again)…for ” or a single word “youth”. The lost and destroyed poetry tells the story of history’s fragility and fragmented nature.
For history to be accurate, history would include every single perspective, each individual’s story in that moment—an impossible task. When interacting with history, I’ve learned to hold the perceptions that we don’t actively see or hear, read, or remember. My home is built on land belonging to lives and stories, histories and memories and moments I will never know. Moments belonging to the Anishinaabe peoples, who captured stories on animal hides and wiigwaasabak, birch bark scrolls, who lived and dreamed in the same forest in which my home now occupies. Recognizing the responsibility I have to the past of the spaces I inhabit reminds me how history belongs to me only in the moments I inhabit; reminds me that every single life, memory, experience—forgotten or remembered—created this moment in which I write.
This moment, created entirely of perceptions, is a present fragmented and connected equally by all the perceivers within it. And each of these perceivers, each and every one of us, is made of our memories, memories that are “made up of moments, strung out over months, years, decades” wrote author Rebecca Traister (WorldCat / Bookshop). “[Moments] become discernible as movements—are made to look smooth, contiguous, coherent—only after they have made a substantive difference.” Each of our pieced-together experiences, our infinitely different ways of experiencing the world, reach out to meet and challenge each other. Our reality as we know it is just that: what we know and interact with.
In one of my earliest memories, I snuggled for hours on my pregnant mom’s lap while she read aloud all seven Chronicles of Narnia books (WorldCat / Bookshop) when I was barely three years old. When I remember those moments, the 17 years between the memory and my present fade until I hear the reverberation of my mom’s voice and the shushing sound of her fingers turning the pages.
I spent my childhood within stories, my imagination catching fire while listening to the murmur of reading voices and then my internal reading voice, feeding my voracious and insatiable love of reading. All that time away from harsh and fast reality taught me to appreciate, to lament, and to question the world around me. I learned that books are like time machines, that can create experiences and people and places within the pages and sentences and words, that can create time… a pause… to reflect and wonder while you are lost in concepts or another world.
To step into the world created by an author’s brain, we have to trudge through our own perceptions, as Virginia Woolf wrote (WorldCat / Bookshop), “most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning”.
The challenge of accepting our perceptions and banishing “preconceptions when we read” suggests that we might need to slow down and trust our brain because “in our brain there are ‘delay neurons’ whose sole function is to slow neuronal transmission” wrote scholar Maryanne Wolf (WorldCat / Bookshop). Perhaps our brains, like Wolf, recognize that, “in music, in poetry, and in life, the rest, the pause, the slow movements are essential to comprehending the whole.”
In our current technological atmosphere, with the constant onslaught of information bundled into feeds and algorithms, “comprehending the whole” is increasingly difficult. The faster the media, the faster our thoughts, and the closer we become to what we interact with, and interaction becomes reaction. However, technology extends beyond the digital and offers us a reflective antidote: books. As journalist Nicholas Carr explores (WorldCat / Bookshop):
“Despite being surrounded by tens of thousands of books, I don’t remember feeling the anxiety that’s symptomatic of what we today call ‘information overload.’ There was something calming in the reticence of all those books, their willingness to wait years, decades even, for the right reader to come along and pull them from their appointed slots. Take your time, the books whispered to me in their dusty voices. We’re not going anywhere.”
Our perceptions, like a book’s patience, aren’t going anywhere, and if we are to comprehend the whole, we need to pause in order to think, to inquire, to reflect. “Reflection (sometimes called “meta-cognition”) is the moment… where you pause to think about what you’ve learned” explained educator Cathy Davidson in the 2016 article “A Reflection on the Importance of Reflection.” We can practice our pausing and meta-cognitive abilities by slowing down the reading process, by deep reading. As journalist Ezra Klein described how his experience with deep reading in a 2020 podcast episode “is more associational, is more creative. I’ve come to really honor the idea that what is happening while I read a book is often not about the book, it’s about my interaction with the book. […] So [deep reading is] really the process of being in [a book] long enough to draw connections.”
The ability to draw connections while reading is something we need to practice and learn to do in our faster-paced lives. I used to think we could only be reflective about our lives if we were removed from them somehow. Now I understand that we have to, as artist and writer Jenny Odell puts into words in her book How to Do Nothing (WorldCat / Bookstore), both “contemplate and participate”.
Books, the act of reading, assist us in the contemplation and participation that challenges us to live in multiple times, perspectives, and places at once. Reading can transport us into another person’s experience and invite us to challenge our perceptions (our Platonic caves) not by escaping them, but by simply acknowledging that our perceptions exist.
To the prisoners in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the outside world does not exist because they do not perceive it. When the protagonist escapes, he is at first overwhelmed by the physical world and then finds comfort in the familiar, in the shadows. It is only with time that his perception adapts to a world where the cave and the outside can exist simultaneously.
In Ancient Greece, Epicurus, the father of Epicureanism and Hedonism, wrote to a person named Menoeceus. In the letter (WorldCat / Bookshop), Epicurus fleshed out core elements of Hedonism, so much different from the debauchery we associate with it today. Epicurus wrote that a hedonist, like Plato’s protagonist, “believes that the misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.” And to be cognizant of our own perception, of the perceptions of others, of the discrepancies and similarities between them, is infinitely more rewarding than being unaware. Because, the “qualities of the world depend on the perception of the experiencing creature” states a core element of Epicureanism (WorldCat / Bookshop).
The qualities of the world we create and our impending future rely on us, too. In her speech “Learning from the 60s” (WorldCat / Bookshop), lesbian poet and librarian Audre Lorde said, “to refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up.” And to refuse the existence of all the perceptions we don’t comprehend is to give up on the richness–the hedonism–of experience.
While writing this essay and creating CognEYEzant:52, I’m reviewing the “stacks and stacks and stacks of books on the inside” my body. Flipping through the pages and memories, I’ve noticed that our perceptions conglomerate into written and visual documentation, and into scientific processes and mathematical equations. I learned that this process is all about, as science historian Helen Macdonald wrote (WorldCat / Bookshop), “attempt[ing] to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To rejoice in the complexity of things.”
Writing about perceptions while living through countless crises at once—climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and systemic racism, to name a few—has shown me how perceptions allow us to experience incredible complexity, to feel deep separateness with the world and unshakable commonality, all at once. And that no matter how different our perceptions may be, how different our caves may feel, similarities abound. “[T]echnology has changed and culture has changed”, said author and classicist Madeline Miller. “[B]ut human beings and the things that we struggle with, the things that we love and fear are all still with us.”
If we can look behind and beneath and beyond the layers of perception within the world around us, then the awareness of our own perceptions just might encourage us to expand into that same world. It is a never-ending process, and to begin, and begin again, we have to arm ourselves with curiosity, in order to, in the late Rep. John Lewis’ words, “take the long, hard look”.