Too much information

While on a recent holiday on the isle of Skye in Scotland, we had exceptionally “good” weather, ie 24C with clear blue skies. This is very enjoyable until you think of the climate change reasons for it and even then it’s still pretty good. However, after a while I started to feel some visual overload with so much detail laid bare by the searing light. Detail which would normally be shrouded by cloud or mist or rain or snow or all of it somehow together…now in a harsh spotlight demanding to be looked at.

Occasionally the cloud would do the honourable thing and provide some visual modesty and it even rained a bit, but for most of our 5 days the sunlight prevailed. I began to long for some mystery and obscurity so that my imagination could be activated to see the unseen and imagine into the misty murk. Something was missing in the glare of everything and my senses were diminished on the rock face of pinsharp detail. I craved the cloud of unknowing.

Jean-Paul Sartre had a perhaps similar kind of epiphany when contemplating a tree root in all its complexity: “All at once the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have SEEN…The roots of the chestnut tree sank into the ground just beneath my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. Words had vanished and with them the meaning of things, the ways things are to be used, the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping over, head bowed, alone in front of this black knotty lump, entirely raw, frightening me… And then all at once, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the dough out of which things were made, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the patches of grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous lumps, in disorder – naked, with a frightful and obscene nakedness.”

The object of this description of by Sartre is seen as oppressive nothingness by James Hibbard in The Art of Cycling* ( a great book by the way), but I would contest that reading. From my limited understanding of Sartre I see here a revelation of the spiritual from the physical – existence has become painfully obvious and frighteningly quotidian. It has passed beyond the ordinary into a gross state of extreme banality. It needs to be clothed with false illusions and hopeful dreams otherwise it will crush with too much detail. At this point the spiritual has to take over to release us from the endless fruitless pursuit of material meaning.

The road to meaning comes from understanding the wider context of unrelated detail. The peripheral view where details fade away into unseen details and the brain can leave them outside the conscious mind while still knowing they exist. This is perhaps what I took away from my time on Skye.

There were many tourists tring to capture the essential moment with a well aimed selfie every 5 miles along the road. They might have been successful but I doubt it. I helped a young couple from Italy to take a shot where they were smaller in the frame and part of a wider landscape, which they seemed to appreciate. We all need to understand why we are in a place at a certain time and how that place impinges on our existence then. A moment of epiphany that can come at any time.