The main characters were a blind boy and his family. The movie takes place in hills and fields on the Iranian plateau; most viewers are probably shocked by the land's beauty. The usual groups who would like to invade Iran, for the usual reasons, might learn something by looking at the topography in this movie. When you think of a Muslim country, the first thought is probably of camels and sand. My geo-bigotry made me resent the existence of a lowlander's religion, Islam, in such beautiful high country. (And believe it or not, Mr. Mobile Codger, I had no thoughts about Islam other than that.)
The boy reacted intensely to every sound and smell, and to everything that he could touch with his hand, in part because he was blind. But seeing this started me thinking about how much of our non-visual senses are wasted, un-exercised, and whether it is because of the Age we live in.
I have memories of the outdoors from the days when I was the age of the boy in the movie; the most vivid ones took place on a farm. And they were smells more than sights. They weren't always agreeable, but they were so lively compared to the antiseptic boredom of living in an ultra-clean house back in town. I used to walk to the mailbox across gravel in my bare feet. It hurt, but I liked it.
Once, after a violent thunderstorm, I stomped through puddles and was surprised at how warm the water was. It hardly ever is. Running through memories like this I also remembered leaving the monotonous scenery of the Midwest and seeing Colorado for the first time. The scenery disappointed me. I know at least one blogger who considers this sacrilege; but that's what I experienced.
When did newspapers begin featuring photographs on the front page? Surely the Hearst chain had them by 1900? The flicker movies started only a few years later. The boob toob took over around 1950. I grew up in this first generation of boob toob addicts. I remember looking at the photos in Life magazine and National Geographic when I was a kid. Nixon is said to have lost to Kennedy because of how he looked on the first televised debates. We have watched live pictures of assassinations, beheadings, and tsunamis.
I am not denigrating photography or its practitioners when I say that we have lived in a image-saturated age. What can any of us do photographically but add to the saturation? Nothing makes me roll my eyes more than a newbie RV travel blog who goes to Monument Valley and then splashes red rock topography across his blog like it's some new discovery.
What William James said about art applies just as well to our senses in the outdoors:
"Most
of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain
poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through
which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole
into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become
mere polished surfaces for us...
We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility."
(Varieties of Religious Experience, chapter on Mysticism)
We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility."
(Varieties of Religious Experience, chapter on Mysticism)
That is why I want to focus on under-developed senses --sounds, smells, and touch-- in the outdoors, like the blind boy in the movie. The pressure on my feet, the aerobic strain of my body, seem like a sixth sense. Every bit of progress in that direction adds more to the richness of outdoor experience than anything we could do visually.
