On Looking: Poet Lia Purpura on the Art of Noticing

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most spirited letter. “As a man is, so he sees.”

Because how we look at the world shapes the world we see, every act of noticing is an act of worlding. The Latin root of notice is to begin knowing, to have an instrument of recognition, and yet human consciousness is a prediction machine that recognizes only what it already knows, sees what it expects to see...