SEEING AND BELIEVING

I first noticed it in Amsterdam, relaxing in a friend’s borrowed motorboat as we pottered around town and out into the countryside south of the city. Summer 2012, it must have been.

That afternoon, lounging in the bow, I watched plane after plane leaving white trails in a blue sky — trails which twisted like ribbons, ruffled at the edges, spread out and formed a haze. By early evening it had spread into strangely featureless cloud-cover, a lid over half the sky. I’d heard about this phenomenon – ‘chemtrails’, they called it – but I’d never witnessed it myself.

How many times have you heard someone say: I would never have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes?

But on the other hand there’s a old Mafia saying: If I hadna believed it, I wouldna seen it.

Which one is right?

In his seminal 1922 book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann argues that the interaction between memory, imagination and visual information is essential to the act of seeing.

“We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them […] And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception […] For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see.

In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.”

For me, the more arcane mystery lies in the converse act of not seeing. What the culture has not defined for us, we may not perceive at all.

I was working in Bangkok at that time, and a friend’s apartment had a great north-westerly view of the city skyline and out towards the airport. Again, I saw planes laying trails, which spread and merged and formed a haze, rolling out over the city. In England a couple of years later, spending the summer with my father, I was shocked – the spraying was much heavier than I’d seen before, and seemed to be happening at lower altitudes. I was seeing big, fat, smoky trails like great hazy caterpillars. Later I saw it again very clearly in South Berlin, as I lay on the grass in a park near my hotel, staring up at sky that was blue but only for a while — and again in Malaysia and Bangkok, where it was just as heavy, visible in the gaps between the cumulus. In fact I haven’t been anywhere in years where I haven’t seen it, except for Sevilla in Andalucía where there was a little jet-scuzz over the airport but the rest of the sky was the same intense unbroken blue I remembered.

Once Bangkok had chewed me up and spat me out, I dragged myself to Ho Chi Minh City, where I rented a skinny little house behind a temple in District 3. There, my life had a soundtrack of temple drums, bells and chants. Not much sky in those narrow streets. After a year, my relationship with the cockroaches and ghosts having reached an all-time low, I moved to a light, airy modern apartment with acres of window, a mile outside the city, nearer to the international school where I’d found a part-time job.

The enormous living room had a fourth wall composed entirely of sliding glass doors, so you could fold them away and completely open the apartment to the night. Now I saw it every day. Not so much planes in the process of laying down lines, but every morning a drift of trails and horsetails, shapeless mats and hazy veils of dead white stuff blowing in across the city from the sea. Alumino-cirrus, occluding the sky as the day went on, lurid as neon at night. Some evenings as the sun went down the whole sky would ignite like a furnace.

And you can look at a sight like that and perceive whatever has been defined for you.

But seeing must surely, at the very least, be wondering.

Ho Chi Minh City. Photo by Paul Dunbar, 2015

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