1.22 The Four Dimensions of Reality and the Two Dimensions of the Canvas Part 4: The Development of Linear Perspective, Medieval Simultaneity, and the Zulus

Dilettantery

"May God us keep From Single vision & Newtons sleep."

-William Blake

"When a man has seen a [linear perspective] picture for the first time, his book education has begun."

-Robert Laws (1851–1934)

"My main argument was that a photograph could not be looked at for a long time. Have you noticed that? You can’t look at most photos for more than, say, thirty seconds. It has nothing to do with the subject matter. I first noticed this with erotic photographs, trying to find them lively: you can’t. Life is precisely what they don’t have—or rather, time, lived time. All you can do with most ordinary photographs is stare at them—they stare back, blankly—and presently your concentration begins to fade. They stare you down. I mean, photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops—for a split second. But that’s not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world."

-David Hockney

"The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. Shakespeare seems to have missed due recognition for having in King Lear made the first, and so far as I know, the only piece of verbal three dimensional perspective in any literature. It is not again until Milton's Paradise Lost (II, 11. 1 -5) that a fixed visual point of view is deliberately provided for the reader...The arbitrary selection of a single static position creates a pictorial space with vanishing point. This space can be filled in bit by bit, and is quite different from non-pictorial space in which each thing simply resonates or modulates its own space in visually two-dimensional form. Now the unique piece of three-dimensional verbal art which appears in King Lear is in Act IV, scene vi. Edgar is at pains to persuade the blinded Gloucester to believe the illusion that they are at the edge of a steep cliff:

'Edgar. . . . Hark, do you hear the sea?

Gloucester. No, truly.

Edgar. Why then, your other senses grow imperfect By your eyes' anguish... . Come on, sir; here's the place. Stand still. How fearful And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!'

...Far from being a normal mode of human vision, three dimensional perspective is a conventionally acquired mode of seeing, as much acquired as is the means of recognizing the letters of the alphabet, or of following chronological narrative. That it was an acquired illusion Shakespeare helps us to see by his comments on the other senses in relation to sight. Gloucester is ripe for illusion because he has suddenly lost his sight. His power of visualization is now quite separate from his other senses. And it is the sense of sight in deliberate isolation from the other senses that confers on man the illusion of the third dimension, as Shakespeare makes explicit here. There is also the need to fix the gaze:

'Come on, sir; here's the place. Stand still. How fearful

And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!

The crows and choughs that wing the midway air

Show scarce so gross as beetles. Halfway down

Hangs one that gathers sampire—dreadful trade!

Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.

The fishermen that walk upon the beach,

Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark, Diminish'd to her cock; her cock, a buoy

Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge,

That on th' unnumb'red idle pebbles chafes,

Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more, Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight

Topple down headlong.'

-Marshall Mcluhan, Gutenberg Galaxy

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/nvsg5u/122_the_four_dimensions_of_reality_and_the_two/?