For better or worse, my own mind is radically wired for vision.

I understand that this is generally true for all human beings. Our species’s primary sense is sight, and our visual processing apparatus, relative to other animals, is hypertrophied. But experience has demonstrated to me that I rely on visual intelligence more heavily than most. I use the visual mode of understanding for cognitive functions other people might (and maybe should) assign to linguistic or logical or even kinetic intelligence.

My over-reliance on visual intelligence allows me to understand things other people miss, but it also makes me mentally incompetent wherever visual intelligence is the wrong tool for the job. Luckily, visual intelligence is a flexible instrument, and I’ve gotten it to do all kinds of things it shouldn’t. But where it fails, I fail. And it fails in some pretty simple workaday competencies that people reasonably assume is basic to adult functioning, where nobody even suspects failure is possible. Polite political euphemisms normally obscure painful truths, but applied to me “differently abled” is revelatory.

Anyway!

I understand reality in geometric and topological terms. I do this despite knowing that this necessarily introduces distortions, blindness and nonsensical noise and artifacts into my understanding. I try to rely on “complementarily abled” others to compensate.

And a central operation of understanding for me is eversion.

I recently read in a trusted source that inside-outside is the primary relationship the horizontal, worldly plane, and that above and below is the relationship on the vertical plane. I can’t decide if this means that I am unconsciously trapped in a horizontal mode of understanding, or if eversive knowing (eversivity) is a synthesis of verticality and horizontality.

Weird post, I know.

Thanks for reading.

(I live on that magenta line.)