“The resonances of losing stereoscopy can be unexpectedly far-reaching, causing not only a problem in judging depth and distance, but a “flattening” of the whole visual world, a flattening that is both perceptual and emotional. People in this situation speak of feeling “disconnected,” of a difficulty in relating themselves not only spatially but emotionally to what they are seeing. The return of binocular vision, if this occurs, can thus give great pleasure and relief, as the world once again seems visually and emotionally rich.
—Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia

Reading through Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, I was struck by the idea that it might be our deficiencies or our weaknesses that lead us to our talents.

Art Spiegelman has amblyopia, or lazy eye — he’s virtually blind in his left eye.

“[W]hich means that I don’t have binocular vision, and have difficulty seeing in three dimensions. This might have been part of what made me a cartoonist rather than a baseball player. I was rotten at sports, but I found that if I could draw good caricatures of the teachers I wouldn’t be doomed to be the butt of everybody’s scorn.”

Today I found a good scan of Spiegelman’s cartoon, “Eye Ball,” which originally ran in the New Yorker:

(Why such an interest in vision? I should note that I have poor eyesight, mild red/green colorblindness, and a grandmother with cataracts and glaucoma. I’m terrified of going blind!)

Ever since I read David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge, I’ve been very interested in binocular vision. Longtime readers might remember this sketchbook page from a post I did about the tyranny of linear perspective in comics:

Thinking about all this, I dug up an old New Yorker article by Oliver Sacks about stereoscopic vision (the article is called “Stereo Sue” — I’ll post the beginning in the comments below). Sacks talks about the discovery of stereoscopic vision, and then some alternatives for those who don’t have it:

There are, of course, many other ways of judging depth: occlusion of distant objects by closer objects, perspective (the fact that distant objects appear smaller), shading (which delineates the shape of objects), “aerial” perspective (the blurring and bluing of more distant objects by the intervening air), and, most important, motion parallax–the change of spatial relationships as we move our heads. All these cues, acting in tandem, can give a vivid sense of reality and space and depth. But the only way to actually perceive depth rather than judge it is with binocular stereoscopy.

And uh, well, I guess that’s all I’ve got on the subject at this point…

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain is okay. As a huge Oliver Sacks fan and a musician, I thought I was going to like it more than I did. But really, it’s a pretty scattered book. There’s not much of an overarching theme or thread — just 350 pages of Oliver Sacks writing about music and the brain. Which is very cool and all, but it doesn’t make for an engaging long narrative. It might be a good bathroom book: you just pick up a chapter here and there, rather than reading it straight through.

Here’s a big roundup of links related to the book:

• Seed Magazine » The Listener » As Oliver Sacks observes the mind through music, his belief in a science of empathy takes on new dimension
• Wired Magazine » Oliver Sacks on Earworms, Stevie Wonder and the View From Mescaline Mountain
• The New Yorker » Oliver Sacks » A Neurologist’s Notebook » Music and amnesia
• Oliver Sacks » The Bat Segundo Show

“…he seemed to have lost the ability not only to see color, but to imagine or remember it, even to dream of it. Nevertheless, like an amnesiac, he in some way remained conscious of having lost color, after a lifetime of chromatic vision, and complained of his world feeling impoverished, grotesque, abnormal — his art, his food, even his wife looked ‘leaden’ to him.”

- Oliver Sacks, The Island Of The Colorblind

Greetings from South Carolina. The past few days I’ve done nothing but swim, tan, play the ukulele, walk the beach, eat and read. I’m in paradise.

I foolishly thought I’d be able to leave the book behind, but I forgot how the ocean waves have a way of clearing your mind of junk and leaving it free to do the good thinking. So, I’ve resumed working in my sketchbook. This afternoon I drew a boy battling the waves with his raft. It was perfect.

Other highlights: last night Meghan made her famous shrimp boil, and this morning I finished Elmore Leonard’s spectacular GET SHORTY.

It’s supposed to be 90 degrees up in Cleveland…hope everyone’s staying cool.