The first time one investigates the rumble strips on the side of the highway while motionless is always an eye opening experience in perspective. As you whiz past at 65 mph, they seem narrow and deep. That’s not really the case. Each depression is really a foot wide. The depth is almost insignificant. Changing your frame of view entirely changes the properties of the objects being examined.
Often times, these indentations fill with a half inch of water. This morning, as the sun rose over southbound 195, the strip on the left hand side of the road was filled with water. Were I standing on the highway, I’d see the reflection of trees, a hill, a sunrise, a smattering of clouds – but I wasn’t, I was moving. It doesn’t feel real, like frames in an old movie flashing past the eyes. Or images as in a dream; snap, snap, snap, snap, fusing together to create a picture reel, a flip book of reality, discretized though coherent.
I’ve read, and validated, that the human mind can process language so long as the first and last letters of a word are in the correct location. The letters in between can be jumbled and the mind will still process the word, almost without pause. This morning I watched the sunrise through a two foot wide row of water, one foot at a time and I lost little of the grandeur. It makes you wonder what is necessary, what is essential.
Life is a series of discrete events that intermingle to a cohesive whole.
The mind doesn’t process two things simultaneously. I wonder what would happen if, instead of a flat surface of water balanced by gravity, I had a set of 1 foot wide mirrors, collectively cocked a few degrees left. I imagine I’d still get an image – why wouldn’t I, it’s just a few degrees. I still have the angle above the horizon. Then, instead of having one set of mirrors separated by strips of nothing, I had a second set of mirrors, pointed a few degrees right. Independently each would cast their picture reel into my brain – I’d understand the whole picture with half the images. But when they’re both present? Then what does my mind do? Do we interweave stimuli if they are not simultaneous, but also not independent?
I think this is how it works in every day life. I am about to work for however many straight hours, work will shine into my head one strip of light at a time, while all varieties of other images stream in at evenly spaced intervals, casting an image of something entirely different. Something bigger, maybe. The question is whether or not it’s a pile of unassociated nothing, or a coherent image.
Words 
Leave a Reply