“It grabbed my attention”

I came across a spikey conker shell in my garden, and without the conkers in place it looked like an owl face looking up at me!  In that moment, it grabbed my attention.  It made me look twice!  “Made you look, made you stare!”

I’ve been reading an essay by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, where he emphasizes that the artist encounters the world when he is fully present, in body and sight.  In a lovely sentence, he puts it this way: “Immersed in the visible by his body … the see-er does not appropriate what he sees; he merely approaches it by looking, he opens onto the world.”  And when he approaches, there is a kind of “crossover, when the spark of the sensing is lit“.

I read that after I had encountered the conker shell, and I thought, ‘Yes, he’s right!’.  I just have to be more present, more open to what the world wants to show me, more attuned to what ‘grabs my attention’.  Merleau-Ponty calls it “This strange system of exchanges“.  I’m looking forward to it!