Dinosaurs out of Context

On vacation last year my wife took a picture of me standing behind the fossilized skull of a triceratops dinosaur on display in a museum. The skull was huge. I made a dinosaur face as she snapped the photo. I liked the photo, and after she shared it with me I sent it via text to a bunch of my friends back home.

I went through a series of different captions as I began down my list of people to send it to. At first I simply identified the fossil and let the photo speak for itself. Then I thought it would be more entertaining if I captioned it with something like, “I think I look younger standing next to a dinosaur fossil.” I found this funny. But after several sends, the joke lost some of its luster and I wrote instead: “I’ve been pointing out to people how much younger I look standing next to a dinosaur fossil.” This I found even funnier.

Naturally, I feel this says something about how the universe works.

First, a picture of me making a dinosaur face might be funny, but it’s certainly funnier when I’m standing next to a real fossilized dinosaur skull. In net effect the two heads in the photo contextualize and thus recursively redefine one another through the viewer’s reflection and comparison between them. Next, the successive captions kicked the recursion and contextualization process up a notch. The last caption, I’ve been pointing out to people how much younger I look standing next to a dinosaur fossil, brings the implicit social context of my sharing more clearly into the picture. In this story, that’s the last interpretive context provided so far. So, it’s not just a photo of a person, or a person standing by a gigantic fossil, or even just a captioned photo of a person with a fossil: it’s a captioned photo of a person with a fossil being shared by a person with a purpose. But suppose someone were to take a video of me with my phone in hand, pushing letters on the screen, pondering over how to caption the photo? Bigger context. Gets a bit weirder, even. I sorta like the idea. Then again, that’s a bit like what I’m doing by writing about it.

Note how each added dimension of interpretive context changes the way we see things. And I would argue that despite the distinction people habitually make between “objective” and “subjective,” that distinction is provisional and transitory. In fact, I suggest that the captioned photo not only means something different, in some very fundamental way, it is different. Let’s put it this way: If a crowd responding to a “subjective” sense of a perceived threat starts to stampede, a person caught up in that crowd can get “objectively” trampled. Regardless of the merits of any “objective” assessment of the perceived threat that prompted the stampede, any person caught up in it will be objectively at risk.

This process of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ trading places is continuous, and it doesn’t require anything as dramatic as a human stampede. It happened when I posed by the triceratops skull and made a “dinosaur face” in the photo. But it started even before then, when I saw the skull and felt drawn to it. I was drawn by a “subjective” feeling, but then, my subjective experience manifested as objective reality as I traced a physical path toward the skull, a behavior no doubt documented in the museum’s security video archive. As I neared the display, I felt into it. I felt sort of “dinosaury.” Then came the face, captured in the photo. Then came all the other layers of how I felt and what I did about it, detailed earlier.

This process of internal/external, subjective/objective, recursive, multilayered, mutual and expanding redefinition is…

“…reality”.

Thus, for example, if we perceive an approaching stranger as a threat or as a potential friend, we will exhibit behaviors that tend to arouse in that stranger either defensiveness, or possibly, trust. Note, that doesn’t mean the person is not a threat or will certainly be a friend, but it’s helpful to know, first, that we are indeed contributing to an evolving dialog. It’s helpful to know that we can engage with and change reality sometimes, and that even a subtle shift of our inner posture or attitude can lead to very different outcomes.

But even more fundamentally, although it may be uncommon, for example, to think of a lamp on a tabletop as being in conversation, I’m pretty sure this is what’s happening between the two. Different style lamps can be paired with different style tables in ways that convey many things, from understated refinement to whimsy to conceptions that come across as provocative, splashy, cutesy, or absurd. Then, as soon as anyone looks at it, that person becomes part of the conversation. And while putting a lamp on a table may seem fairly prosaic and ordinary, deep down it’s pretty much the same as digging up a fossilized skull in Wyoming and putting it on display in a museum on the other side of the country. Whatever else that skull may be, it’s really not the same, and neither are the people who come and see it. Just watch.

And why does all of this matter? For starters, I’m hoping we can recognize that the easiest way to shift interpretations, and thus attitudes and beliefs (and thus reality), is to change the context through which we view things. Context changes everything. People who want to shape public opinion make use of this. In a basic sense this amounts to what a camera focuses in on or leaves outside of the frame. For example, a camera may focus our attention on what’s happening at the US/Mexico border, or it may not.  If it is brought to you as a picture as part of a news story, the news anchor might not mention anything about the last 200 years of US involvement in the region, which I’m guessing might shed some light on things. And I’m also guessing that’s why it’s seldom mentioned. Multiply this across every story you ever see. You’ll see choices being made.

Context and framing, my friends. Not everybody out there is looking for ways to shift contexts in ways that are funny or enlightening. So, when it comes to taking charge of our own perceptions, it’s really up to us. We absolutely can broaden and deepen our contextual fields of view. We can do both the inner work and the sleuthing for relevant contextual frameworks that help us see things in new ways. We can take responsibility for our perceptions. And we can participate more effectively when we are aware that we’re participating in a world that works through internal/external, subjective/objective, recursive, multilayered, mutual and expanding redefinition.

Important postscript: When I shared this essay with my wife, she said she was unaware that I had been making a “dinosaur face” in the photo. Needless to say, this changes everything.