Noticing. How often we don’t notice…
But: not noticing is useful self-protection. If you noticed everything, all the time, you’d end up a quivering pile of jelly. You need time to think about what you see, maybe that’s why we notice such a small percentage of what’s available for us to take in.
You notice something. Think of the photograph you might take. At the time of exposure, you may see one particular image, and think a particular set of thoughts about that image. Your camera controls are at a particular group of settings, so your camera is takes in that image in a particular way. You think you have taken a particular picture, and yet, when you look at it a second or third time, you see other things, things you weren’t aware of when you actuated your instrument.
Add post-processing to the mix, and what may be found in your image increases enormously.
At rehearsal the other night I noticed something.
Evening was upon us, and the western sky still had strong light, which was coming through the patterned curtains, which reflected from the keyboard. The camera was nearby.
The standard keyboard dispenses a universe of music from eighty-eight keys. Even a few notes can open up a world of sound, of feeling, of intensity.
A modest bit of image manipulation picks out the last blue notes from the sky outside.
Blue notes.
Think of The Blues.
The Blues are but a grain of sand on the Beach Of Music.
But, as the Poet Blake might have said,
What a Universe in that Grain of Sand…