1427 Visuals

Saturday, August 11, 2007

One of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons is "Jane & The Dragon". I get it on NBC. The characters and stories are ok, no violence. What fascinates me are the technical aspects.

I love the way everything but the faces look like they were colored (expertly, and beautifully) with crayons. The bodies move so naturally they look like they could be "shopped" humans in costumes, but I'm pretty certain they're not. Like, when a character is just standing with his arms hanging, an arm will sway slightly, just like a real arm will. The faces show the tiniest nuances of emotion. (But the bodies are definitely cartoon bodies, with impossible proportions and so on.)

It's well and beautifully done, and that's what I love to watch. I watch it because I admire it.

That got me thinking about how visually oriented I am. Everyone likes to look at beautiful things of course, but I often see beauty where others don't. A pattern in the gravel on a path. A cow's eyelashes. That soft spot behind Jay's left ear. I'm not talking about the "oh, that's pretty" stuff. I'm talking about stuff that stops me, that makes me focus to the exclusion of my surroundings. Don't try to talk to me when I'm looking at a cow's eyes. The simplest things will stop me in my tracks. Like that moment in the evening, some evenings, when the sun is dropping and the very air turns golden, and the light seems to shine from under the leaves. If I'm driving, I have to pull over until it ends, because it overwhelms me.

My furniture is mostly Victorian, and my decor tends to the Victorian, too. Visually cluttered. I don't see how anyone can live in those sterile white straight-surfaced spaces shown in the magazines. I want my home to be such that no matter where my eye alights, it finds something beautiful, something visually interesting.

My greatest health fear is blindness. I've known several blind people, and they lived full lives, but still, for me, a diagnosis of impending blindness would frighten me more than an inoperable cancer. Cancer might take my life, but blindness would leave me alive with no life.

Jay was blind the last six months before he died. He didn't fully understand that he was blind, though, because his brain was still generating visual signals. He very clearly saw things, and I'd have to explain to him that what he saw was not there. He couldn't feed himself, because although I'd take his hand, "The juice is here, and the cookies are here...", what he "saw" and believed was different. The hardest was when he saw people standing next to his bed, and wanted to know who they were. He could describe them down to the tiniest detail. It was very confusing to him when I'd tell him it was all hallucination. I felt so sorry for him. Blackness would have been a blessing.
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