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Is seeing believing?

Some things are just so obvious they don’t require additional invented names; any attempts to prescribe specific descriptive terms to them, smack of academic puffery. That a marker is something which allows you to write, or make a mark -that it is something which affords you this opportunity- is trite. Still, I am fascinated by the ability of a special name that draws more attention to the fullness of a reality which we all inhabit, even if only through a glass darkly. Affordance Theory surfaced recently in an essay I happened upon, and although the concept first struck me as banal and perhaps unnecessarily obvious, on further reflection it dawned on me that it might be a rather interesting way of formulating Plato’s idea of Forms: that just as a chair, for example, has many configurations we can all recognize, so there must be something universal about ‘chairness’ (it’s Form) that transcends any specific attempt to define it more closely. Okay… that’s what I figure Plato meant, anyway.

Affordance Theory, originated by J. J. Gibson, suggests that the world is perceived not only in terms of object shapes and spatial relationships but also in terms of object possibilities for action (affordances) -and yes, I had to Google it after I finished reading the essay, okay? So, not only do we recognize that an object is, say, round and red, but that it is also edible.

Still, I find the appreciation of the multiple ways we can understand an object is often not only obvious, but extremely insightful as well. Gibson felt that meaning was independent of the perceiver and that the environment decided perception; meaning was what the environment afforded the observer -hence the name of his theory. Although I don’t totally understand it, I love the way Wikipedia puts it: ‘Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perceptions, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing.’ It smacks a little of Aristotle’s explanation for why an object falls: to get back to its natural place… Okay I don’t understand Aristotle either.

But Gibson’s theory is more clever than that, I think; it is incorporative: it is a combination of the environment where the person finds themselves and how they then interact with it: more of a dialogue than a monologue. In fact, I have to wonder whether Gibson is actually ascribing agency to Nature -something I have wondered about ever since my father told me a story about the tree that saved his life:

“Do you ever wonder what things are thinking about, G?” my father asked me one evening when I visited him in the hospital. He was an old man by then, and recovering from an operation for cancer; I wasn’t sure if his pain medications were directing his words, but even so I had to nod my head. I’d often asked myself those sorts of questions.

“Even things that can’t normally communicate their thoughts to us…” His words trailed off and his eyes closed for a moment as his own thoughts bubbled slowly in his head.

“Do you mean things like dogs and cats…?” I thought perhaps I could help him focus his ideas.

He slowly opened his eyes and sent them to probe the expression on my face and judge my willingness to accept something far different from that. “Do you need a brain to formulate thoughts, G?”

I have to say the question took me by surprise. “Thoughts are brain things,” I answered, “Communication is different…” He had startled me; after all these years, I didn’t think he processed the world like that -processed it like me.

A weak smile surfaced on his lips. “But, would you communicate if you didn’t expect a response? An answer…?”

An interesting question, so I smiled back at him.

“See?” he said, his rheumy eyes starting to twinkle even in the fluorescent lights of the room. “When a person exhibits stress, it is a form of communication, don’t you think?”

I nodded again. I was beginning to see my father in a new way, and grasped his hand.

“You understand things differently when you get an answer,” he said, closing his eyes again -but whether from pain or thoughts was hard to tell. “Even if it was an answer from something that shouldn’t be able to respond,” he added, slowly organizing his words around whatever thoughts were percolating inside.

His eyes closed again, so I squeezed his hand to remind him I was still here.

His eyes quickly opened and focussed on my face again. “When I was still a young man,” he said, “I sometimes got summer work on my older brother’s tugboat. He used to pull barges up and down the Fraser River, and one of my jobs was to make sure the towline stayed properly fastened. Sometimes it was quite late before we arrived to deliver the barge, so it was quite an adventure.

“Early one morning just before dawn as we were towing an empty barge upstream, I remember we ran smack into a storm blowing down along the river, and the water became really choppy,” he continued. “It started raining heavily and the wind was screaming along the Fraser, so my brother risked a quick glance to make sure I had a life jacket while he concentrated on keeping the tug in the middle of the river. He told me to go astern and check the line holding the barge when a sudden gust of wind and rain blew me to the deck before I had the life jacket tied on properly and it washed overboard. The next gust toppled me over the gunnel before I had chance to grab something to stop me.”

My father’s eyes suddenly stared at the curtain around his bed, as if he could still see the water. “The next thing I knew I was grabbed by the current and swept wide of the boat, wide of the following barge and then into the middle of the river again.

“The water was ice-cold and the current and waves too disorganized to orient myself enough to swim to shore. I don’t know how long I attempted to stay afloat, but I realized that without the lifejacket, I couldn’t keep up the effort for long and I began to swallow water each time a wave crashed over me.

“I had just about given up when I felt something touch my arm and I grabbed for it in desperation. It was a branch or something, so I worked my way along it, hand over icy hand until I came to the trunk to which it was attached. A tree had obviously been blown over in the storm and swept into the raging waters, and I managed to scramble onto the trunk and lay on it like a surfboard.”

His eyes found mine again, and he smiled. “Somebody on the shore must have seen me floating by, or maybe my brother had radioed a distress call and they were already looking for me. But if it hadn’t been for the tree, they couldn’t have seen me in all those waves.”

My eyes were as big as saucers by then, so my father didn’t have any trouble locating them. “Don’t you think a recently toppled tree is still alive?” he asked, his tiny smile now a big grin that almost swallowed his face. “Do you think that maybe it…?” His voice trailed off before he completed his thought, and I suppose the pain medication that he’d been given to steel him for my visit was finally beginning to take hold. His eyes closed and his breathing became regular again, but the smile never left his lips.

“Yes dad,” I whispered as I squeezed his hand and prepared to let him sleep, “I’m sure there was some communication between you two…”

But after a comforted sigh, he slipped into his private, pain-free world for the night. It was yet another affordance for him, I think…

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