Single-Point Perspective

Barley, a dog, stands on a sidewalk that extends straight ahead to a vanishing point. Because the surrounding yards are lush in their floral appointments and fencing, this vanishing point is the only one available within the frame.

I’m a big fan of “just walking around a bunch,” but the professional grind of adult life has been such that, until I became a dog owner, there wasn’t usually time to do so. My favorite experience of walking around is getting a feel for a neighborhood. Even neighborhoods that feel bad or dull are interesting for their ability to evoke such feelings. I recognize, though, that my ability to turn my experience of a neighborhood into an overall conceptual object I can ponder after the fact, requires a big-picture perspective on the world that Barley probably isn’t bringing to the table. I imagine her worldview is far more fragmentary and disconnected. “Oh hey, I can smell the ocean today, cool (End of thought).” My impression is that she has a pretty poor navigational sense for any space larger than a small house, so it may well be that the idea of “a neighborhood” is already too large for her mental buffer.