Point of View

In a year of postings, the physical, not to mention, the personal point of view appear dominant in all of them. Whether I refer to the view outside my windows perched on a great pile of stones in a shingled, shanty house nearly a hundred feet above a marshland that leads in a westerly direction to the sea, to sunrises and sunsets, to sun or storm and though most of my thoughts here occur during night or morning hours, it is all just me and my point of reference. When "maxi" sized sailboats sail up and down the estuary, their mastheads can be at eye level upon occasion. When the sun rises, it strikes a distant western shore and bounces back, a veritable dawning in the west, at least until it crests the trees and hills above our little perch.

When I look at everything, it is through my own increasingly myopic set of eyes. At least I have two of them, to view the world stereoscopically, two separate cameras that merge things into one fiction of a view. Could one be measuring pure fact, the other what my eye would wish to see, a fiction? Could this explain how people viewing precisely the same set of things or events have so many different recollections, and why there often are so many sure and certain, extracted, conflicting truths? My surroundings influence me greatly. When I am here in my redoubt by the sea, I am more expansive than in a Providence closet. When I am not disturbed by things like painting, patching leaks in a roof gone porous in its dotage, or scrubing scum off shower walls, I can be most focused. The long view of things taken in a modicum of tranquility yields my longest thoughts, and if and when I shall have some peace, "for peace comes droppping slow" here, at least for me. I need some stillness, a view from a soundless room. I need like Uncle Bill, to operate from a distance, even from my own cranium, but without ambient cacophony. I have a running conversation from within.

And then, of course, there is no such thing as objectivity. If it is a camera, at what decisive moment does one click the trigger, and on what angle, high or low or close or from afar? And what gets cropped in the end, or edited from a set of images or a proof sheet. It is far safer, in my view and opinion, to recognize that the point is not objectivity, but awareness that what we see is ours, unique, special and valid. If we wish validation, then seek out the views of others and plot them, marking them on a kind of chart to see if there is a grouping, a center, or if they land like grape shot in a random pattern that betrays no more than many different views. And there is a further point, to never waver in the certainly that what we see is just as valid as what someone else does, just as worth communicating, and to at once be humble and egotistical. The world would want us to melt away and merge into the earth. Sooner or later, we all do that; no sense in going out without leaving any mark. We are all important and omnipotent, could we realize it!

And so these thoughts about my point of view, my perspective on everything that flickers into view, seen and imagined, reveal only personal truths. I try to gain objectivity by watching and listening to selected other perspectives. I triangulate and crunch the information in the myriad algorhythms within my mind. Depending on what interests others, how they relate to what it is I choose to see, determines just how interesting I may be, how locally or universally these truths that I extract may be. I do not want to be alone with my thoughts, but to share them. I am alone with these thoughts,of course, it is the universal condition, but I can attempt to communicate them to any soul that is receptive, should there be one. Were no one interested, I might live hermetically, in a sealed bottle, airless, looking out, and dead to the interactive world.