Seeing with Sappho
Clarissa Cutrell
I see the world in stills. Moments frozen in time. The details of a Russian novelist spill my thoughts with super saturated colors, vivid edges, brooding shadows, imagination filling in where memory fails. Poetry of the moment, I call these pauses. Opportunities to absorb everything in full relief. There’s a reason why still-lifes have always been so popular among artists and the art-loving public.
I don’t remember when I first began experiencing the world in this way. I have a memory, as a child, watching a plane shoot contrails across a blue sky, me behind a screen door, and a fly crawling there, precisely the size of the plane, covering it, so the contrails seemed to fall from him. It was a moment I wanted to hold forever. Another memory–me a bit older, sitting on the floor of the ocean inside the Great Barrier Reef, awaiting my scuba instructor who had surfaced to help a student having difficulty. Perfect clarity and the rhythm of breath. Then suddenly I was surrounded by a school of neon blue and yellow fish. They enveloped me in perfect unison for 20 seconds, and just as suddenly were gone. It was a moment I wanted seared into my retinas. One I never wanted to lose. These are the stills of my memory that define my world experience.
Sappho, however, sees things much differently. Where a person’s eyes are rich in cones that allows her to see colors in all their rich and glorious hue and make out the fine lines that separate one object from the next, a dog’s eyes differ. A dog’s eyes are much richer in rods, allowing them to see better in low light and detect movement at a higher rate, but less able to detect color. They see the world faster than us, and a wider swath of it with a wider visual field, while losing the ability to see their own paws in sharp focus. A higher “flicker-fusion” rate allows them to fill in the spaces between. The parts we miss. Where we see stills, they see a world in motion.
In a world constantly moving, I wonder which is at the better advantage? I suspect neither, but it’s a lucky partnership. Where I stop to absorb the view, Sappho experiences the moment in a completely different way. She is still, but noting the play of light across water below, the twitching of leaves on a nearby tree where a squirrel has just come and gone, the shifting cloud play and dust contrails of fleeing deer, the trees below with the chatter and rattle of birds and life, all while watching my changing mood, and sieving the air of a million smells I can only dream about. It’s a very beautiful image I have of this moment, down to the ruffling fur on her back as the breeze kicks up and reminds me it’s time to go. I’m grateful for the stills I have stored in my mind’s eye, but am also thankful for Sappho, who keeps me moving to the next view.