The Rules of Seeing by Joe Heap
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s an App for That

The first and last computer programming I ever attempted was on an IBM 1401 sometime around 1965. The 1401 was the Model T Ford of computers. We were told that the new technology would soon change the world, so we all had to learn to drive it (plus ça change...). My thought was if this is the vehicle for a new world, I’m destined to be a passenger or roadkill, but certainly not a driver. And so it has turned out.

FORTRAN was the computer language du jour, a code of very precise, extremely narrow instructions were required to add 2 + 2 (no meta-instructions or OOP’s in FORTRAN, just lots of DO-LOOPS). The point of my education was apparently meant to demonstrate just how complex even the simplest calculations actually were. There were no off-the-shelf apps from Apple or Google. Through normal human development the complex logical structure of everyday tasks had been hidden beneath a layer of unthinking quotidian routine and our job was to reveal that structure. Who knew? Who wanted to know?

My experience of modern technology is how I imagine one of the two of Heap’s protagonists, Nova, who, blind from birth, is suddenly able to see. Her 1401 compiler is herself which doesn’t have the software to make sense of the new visual data. Every detail of the experience has to be learned by rote in an ocular ‘language’ which is as apparently artificial as FORTRAN. Her programming is in sound, smell and touch; and it all works well. Just as my with experience of the 1401, her sight feels to her too difficult to pursue. It is frustrating, nauseating, and perhaps not worth the effort.

Nova has been programmed for sound not vision. Kate, the second protagonist, has been programmed for subservience to male power. Kate can’t see the abuse, just a diffuse vision of fear. Like Nova (and me) Kate lacks the software skills to make her experiences with her husband comprehensible. The only thing she knows for certain is dread; and the logic of her programming is to look to the source of her abuse to protect her from what she dreads.

Both Nova and Kate confront a similar problem. Neither can think her way out of her condition. Nor can anyone else give them the secret (to them) knowledge of their situation. Each has to learn a new mode of existence, a new logic of survival, from the fundamentals on up. Perhaps there’s mileage in some mutual assistance. The story flows somewhat predictably from this set-up.

The real interest in the book are the eponymous rules of seeing rather than the characters or the story-line. These rules constitute the software that sighted people never think about. To have these rules made explicit is fascinating, among other reasons because they are so complex and so ambiguous. Yet almost all sighted people learn them even more readily than they learn their native language. It is obviously a natural human skill but codifying this skill into its component parts is a very unnatural skill - much like programming a 1401.

Some of the rules are straightforward: Things further away appear smaller than things which are closer. But the simplicity and consistency of even this rule is undermined by the issue of how big a thing should appear to someone who has never seen it before.

Other rules are maddening: A glass window is both transparent and reflective. What could this possibly mean to someone who has never experienced either transparency or reflection much less both phenomena simultaneously?

There are dozens, hundreds of such rules. Some of which contradict each other. Others of which are conditional upon which rules which have already been applied: The less ambient light, the darker colours will appear; therefore if there is low light re-calibrate your colour spectrum so that the apple you’re looking at stays red (this of course also presumes you have learned the rules for red as distinguished from orange and brown).

This learning to see through the implicit rules of seeing is like learning a language through grammatical rules as an adult (a really tough one like Finnish or Ancient Greek with their complex syntax, combined with Hebrew with its ambiguous tenses; comparatively speaking, FORTRAN is baby-talk). Only learning to see is even more difficult because there are no textbooks which lay out visual syntax nor are there dictionaries which clearly define basic shapes and colours much less the pragmatics of facial expressions.

A physiological process like seeing, therefore, is difficult to re-programme. An emotional process, which combines physiology and social interactions - like survival in an abusive relationship - has an even greater level of difficulty in unlearning and learning the rules of successful relating. The real value of Rules of Seeing is in the mutually revealing metaphors of physical and emotional blindness. In this it is a remarkably eye-opening book, and far more enjoyable than my 1401 experience.

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