Bringing Dimension to Life

...the freedoms of finding and living from our depths...

Photo Cliff Scholz

Last week it suddenly occurred to me that maybe when checkerboard patterns were first introduced to floors and other architectural features, the people who did so were in fact experiencing the checkerboard as an optical illusion. After all, it’s a well-known optical effect that black squares tend to “sink” or “move back” in the field of vision, which would cause the white squares to apparently “rise” toward the perceiver by contrast. The visual tension arising from these rising and falling design elements creates a “space” because of the apparent distance emerging between them.

I can only imagine what it was like for the early people who included these kinds of patterns in their homes and temples, often on floors. And I’m curious about that, but not quite curious enough to undertake the rigorous research needed to verify the historical aspects. Instead I just thought back and recalled my own response to floor tiles arranged in a checkerboard pattern in early childhood. I was kind of enthralled by the design, and a little nauseated by it at times, too. I wondered why others didn’t seem to notice that as we walk such floors, we are walking not just on a surface but through a kind of visually ambiguous space. And I conjecture that’s exactly the point, or may have been when these designs first became popular. I think the intent may have been to elevate the living experience people who were likely habituated to earthbound modes of being.

One piece of research I did do, however, was to look online for images of the paintings from the Northern Renaissance, which I recalled had checkered flooring patterns. Sure enough, when looking through the catalog of the work of Jan van Eyck, I found a couple examples of checkered and similar kinds of patterned flooring in paintings dating back into the 1400s. I’ve linked you a couple here and here.

Thing is, when I previously looked at these artworks, I had assumed that van Eyck had included the checkerboard pattern in his paintings because of the ways in which it strengthens the illusion of depth when combined with that era’s newly developed perspective drawing techniques. You’re basically looking obliquely into the distance at the flattening and shrinking pattern of trapezoidal or rhomboid squares. It didn’t occur to me until recently that, if it were possible to inhabit the consciousness of the people in the paintings, those floors would have created the illusion of depth for them, too, even looking straight down at the tiles below their feet.

Same with an ordinary checkerboard. There’s depth to be seen there, just looking straight down at the perfectly flat surface. And, if there is any validity to my historical speculations, that means that early players of chess and checkers may have experienced these designs that way. This means, rather amusingly, it’s all 3D chess. Nothing about the game is flat, and even the board is a visually ambiguous space. Wait a second, I thought: How had I missed this for so long?

The strange but simple answer is that I made a concept of it. I’d see the pattern and then I’d think: “Oh, that’s a checkerboard.” And sure enough, after I thought, “It’s a checkerboard,” I didn’t see its potential for depth and visual ambiguity in the same way anymore. That was all it took to cancel it out, and flatten it again.

So then I started looking at plaid, a pattern that has become kind of standard uniform for men’s casual wear in recent years. I have a lovely plaid wool shirt in Stewart tartan, gift from my sister, and perhaps because my eyes got re-tuned since I started diving into the visual arts again over the last couple months, I realized that it’s possible to see plaid not as a flat pattern, but as a space into which one can look, this space being implied by the rising and falling of various color stripes in the plaid. Warm colors tend to rise, cool colors tend to sink. As with the checkerboard, this creates an illusion of depth or visual ambiguity. In plaid, that illusion is further augmented by the variations in the width of the stripes and their partial obscuring as they overlap one another and interweave in the fabric’s warp and woof. Because again, fabric is never really flat.

In houndstooth we see the same thing as with plaid, but in a more abstracted pattern, scalable to larger design elements. Houndstooth can be seen as a kind of geometric transformation of a checkerboard. Again, an experience of visual ambiguity and space results from this pattern.

So (if I may channel Rod Serling for a moment), “Imagine, if you will…” a society inhabited by people to whom basically everything seems flat and dull and dead, everything reduced to its mental concept, where experience is flattened, emotion is flattened, and where even the miracle of vision in both illusion and reality is obscured. It’s also a reality in which our mental concepts of one another tend to render people as flat. Labels are thin. People, on the other hand, are fully dimensional, strange, wonderful and ambiguous in our topography. Therefore in my view, every time we reduce a person to a label, that’s an act of violence, a projection of a compressive hell that comes from the projector and crushes the projectee, leaving both with a shittier, darker, and more limited experience of the world

It’s worth pointing out that in ways both subtle and not-so-subtle, we are being actively trained and encouraged to do this.

There are many other factors affecting our experience that can tilt the balance away from dimensionality and towards a general flattening of life in all its dimensions. Let me list a few here: dull routine, physical hunger and poor nutrition, drugs, lack of sleep, chemical or electronic pollution, and most media, at least in the ways people typically experience them. Then there’s perpetual frenetic activity, chronic stress, physical confinement, excessive scheduling, economic immiseration, shocks, and fear. There’s also reduced general mental acuity and loss of vocabulary, and regarding vocabulary loss, I just have to say as a writer, that’s double-plus ungood. A kind of flatness also results from the destruction of human memory and thus our capacity to compare our experiences and perceptions through time.

In sum total, these common features of modern life add up to being socialized and rewarded for reducing and flattening our experience and being discouraged or penalized for moving in the other direction, toward our multidimensional fullness. And like the checkerboard, we tend to lose our sense of depth and all its ambiguous possibilities when we replace our life and our reality with symbols, concepts and images rather than bringing our own depth and livingness to these things.

This whole topic has been the subject of a number of my writings here. It’s implicit in the “inner worlds, outer worlds, and the connections between them” part of my Substack channel description, and I’ll link a couple previously written pieces here and here for anyone adventurous enough to want to go back and view a previous piece of writing through the lens of the current one. Just a guess, anyone who does so will find another dimension to the signals I’m generating.

I sometimes speculate about the “who benefits?” aspect of the ongoing flattening of humanity that seems to be in progress, and I encourage my readers to ask this as well, because we basically live mostly not in the “real world” but in an artificial, engineered one. The fact that many features of modern life trend toward limiting and flattening our experience didn’t “just happen”. Yes, true, people and even whole groups of people do make dumb choices, but it’s also worth noting that certain tech gets funded, certain tech doesn’t. Certain infrastructure gets funded, others don’t. Funny how it’s usually the socially corrosive, isolating, toxic, and dangerous technologies and infrastructure that get the most lavish funding. Why is that? Established policy quite foreseeably guaranteed steeply rising rates of chronic disease, and have now demonstrably done so. Chronic disease is a useful proxy measure for lower vitality levels and lower functioning in general. The net effect is to mercilessly crush and shrink people down. Most of this destruction is unnecessary, except I guess in the larger, karmic sense of what humanity has to learn by destroying itself or being complicit in our own destruction. So yes, I have to wonder as I inhabit this world and its human structures: Who benefits from the limitation of our depth of vision and feeling and the native vitality that is the prerequisite for these things? Who benefits from us lying weakened and sick in the prison of a thin, flat, papery mindset with a correspondingly limited range of acceptable expression and feeling? I think this could be a worthy line of inquiry as long as we don’t get too obsessive about it.

But the bigger, more immediate thing we can do is to reacquaint ourselves with and get comfortable inhabiting depth in all its many dimensions: depth of thought, depth of vision, depth of feeling, depths of ambiguity and paradox, depth of insight, depth of expression, depth of connection.

If we want to really dive into reality, I suggest the deep end.