One Down! – A birthday on doomsday

Moon Under Water is one year old! And on the same day that the world is due to end! Great!

Twelve months ago to this day the blog started with no real direction. It began as a series of meandering posts on various topics, with each post designed to respond to the last in some way. It has been a busy year, both in blog-world and real-world, and I just wanted to set aside a post to say thank you to all readers both regular and irregular (or “odd”).

To any who aren’t already aware, all past posts can be found in the archive things in the menu bar at the top of the page, and all new posts are released through Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and e-mail (if you follow the blog). I’d just like to round everything up with a quick top-three blog moments of 2012. Continue reading “One Down! – A birthday on doomsday”

Seeing Scene Seen – Everything we read is art

four symbols representing words - "ewe can reed art"

From the moment we learn to read the English language (presuming you can if you are reading this), we learn to decipher a series of characters twenty-six letters long, give or take. Each character has a sound associated with it, and we hear these sounds as we read. The characters are all symbols, each with its own significance to our understanding. SSSSSSSSSSSS can represent a long, hissing sound, just as KAKAKAKAKA could be a machine gun. We learn this system of graphics, recognising the line across the top of a T as opposed to the one that is missing on an I, and we make sense of the words that are written by scanning these graphic signs and creating words from our understanding of their sounds.

Far before we learn to read and decipher the graphic symbols of this Latin alphabet, we learn another language. This is the language of the visual, and it involves the same method of deciphering what we see into other forms, but it is different as with this language we do not necessarily have a spoken language to go along with it. At our youngest and most naive, we decipher the symbols of the people raising us, seeing their representations as those of family or friends, but we do not recognise any link between these people and language. Instead, we simply categorise and recognise, realising that there is something different about these people to the people that we pass in the street. Continue reading “Seeing Scene Seen – Everything we read is art”