This is not meant to be some serious philosophy, these are my own thoughts on perception and light without having done any thorough research on it. Enjoy!
The eye is a tunnel, a single passage with two entries and two exits, what enters in one end leaves through the entry of the other. An active passage as seeing charges objects to make them seen, its the difference in what eyes see and what is seen. We however don’t see very often, it is only when we are seen that we see, becoming a virginal witness to be gone and open for the world to pool in us. When somethings seen it’s as if our eyes coat an object in paint and it’s shape appears after the coat reveals it’s surface; like painting an invisible sphere white. If we are seen, we are coated and blind to ourselves. We can also think of eyes as laying a literal film over the perceptible world or what we call reality, a silk web holding us between the world that stretches as time flows into our past from the present.
Eyes are receivers, capturing the surface of light reflecting off of objects, receiving that which is anterior to the body through the light passing between the eye and object. Nothing escapes illumination (except shadows), light fills space and removes the distance between objects. Sight does not perceive space or distance itself, for there isn’t a direct space to encounter. Distance and space is perceived a posteriori as the objects appearance changes depending on its spatial orientation and distance relative to our bodies and others; sight alone does not reveal the objects changes but contains them. This can be noted from the impossibility of all sides and dimensions of an object to be disclosed simultaneously. To see all sides of a glass it must be rotated in space, there is nowhere to see the object in it’s totality and entire spatial form. However, the glass’s entire dimensionality does exist as the glass’s appearance changes without it’s own material or physical composition changing. Thus, its composition is constituted by a multiplicity of indexes as no object is homogenous to itself in perception, no points seem to resemble others (we are using index in terms of the ratio of one dimension of a thing to another dimension). The eye builds from the indexes of the glass and their heterogeneity is held in memory or thought, creating a spatial passage from the glass to our body; I say from the glass because these objects are spatially stagnant (not temporally) and we orient ourselves to it by reconfiguring all perceived properties in memory to one of it’s indexes at a point in time.
As previously mentioned, sight eliminates the illusion of separation between objects in space when that which is in sight is taken in as a whole. Removing the habitual and instinctual discretions of objects vision bleeds into a discontinuous unity, like having your eyes unfocused and there is nothing to recognise. As funny as it sounds, the objects in vision don’t necessarily know how they are seen since we add properties to them after seeing; we don’t necessarily need to attribute visual properties to them because our expressions are immanent to it. Objects aren’t discrete, sight out of habit and resourcefulness creates distinctions between objects as we have shown that the perception of objects in light is continuous due to the flexibility of space itself. We could then claim that in the eyes receptive manner, space between the viewing body and the objects is interiorised and reduced in memory as a frozen image, removing and nullifying (akin to forgetting) the imperceptible void between objects in sight. The void is the distance light hides, consider the following example. In sight we isolate an object (that is beyond reach) from it’s surrounding environment, we then place our hand in front of the object in sight without touching it, contravening our perception of the object without the object itself being affected by our hand (note that the environment which the object was composed in is not altered from any other perspective but our own, our hand changes the objects environment in relation to us and not the environment itself since we are constituted within it). Before our hand entered into the field of vision however, we couldn’t deduce from perception itself the distance between the object and our hand. Sight alone cannot determine the distance that constituted the perception of the object, objects constitute the distance available in perception itself; simply put, the distance or space between our body and a perceived object determines how it is perceived and thus that distance isn’t perceptible without those objects. Our hand thus intercepts in the same void between our eyes and the object. Taking our hand away from vision changes what is perceived but not what’s in the perceptible field.
Light is in the void (space) and the void is its material, it is reminiscent of those scenarios where a twin absorbs the other in the womb and so only one is born; the void is the absorbed twin that light lives off of. Objects fill the void, and it is light which is not extensive but exteriorises something of the object, namely its figure and colour (in reductive terms). The objects projected onto our eyes can never solely be the object in space as we don’t necessarily orient to light as a homogenous entity itself, otherwise everything would be simultaneous. Light is rather the common trace sight follows, it is the constituent of a memory of another object/body. Light lets us see in the void and leaves light itself unseen.
The memory of vision when evaluated on a purely perceptual level is the mimetic duplication of a particular past spatial arrangement appearing in light that is shared with an object in time; the space is captured as an inscription of light. But the flow of time between us and the surrounding objects is relative, we can never be sure whether us or what is seen will perish first. Nevertheless, a moment of these objects entire lives is retained in the memory of light, our eyes can never see such moments again but can will its return presently in memory. As the memory is impressed upon us it couldn’t be said to look like anything in the present perceptible world, these two moments are irreducible to each other. Rather the comparison would be made between the present world appearing as a memory of itself, the world resembling our memory of it. Memories are thus like an image stripped off the illuminated world that is gone, yet retained in forms beyond the retina. We can think in light, light that has past (let’s call it light-thought) and it is as if seeing a shining star that has already died, but like a star we never know when it dies or died. What is certain is the light-thought’s source is gone outside of itself and is only knowable as dead to the agent of memory. We are not light (thought and language are nor reducible to it, vice versa) and yet witness it again after it’s passing and without looking at anything, we are not what we see and yet simultaneously cannot take away or choose that which is. The memories of light are moments brought to us by another who may never see the light between, thus we ought to write of light in words.
