1 rich Libsyn https://www.libsyn.com 90 600 I keep walking past the same stretch of river. Most days I cross over it. Sometimes I stop. There is a place along the New Jersey side of the Hudson where you can stand and see the water moving in two directions at the same time, depending on where you fix your eyes. The surface goes one way. Beneath it, the deeper current is going the other way. The Mohican word for the river is Muhheakantuck. It means the waters that are never still. When you say the word, you have already been told what to look for. This is what I have been thinking about for the last several months, while finishing a book that came out this week. The book is called RelationShaping: Field Studies. It is the companion volume to The Scientific Aesthetic, and it asks one question across ten different settings: what changes about a person when they become trained to see something the rest of us walk past? The book's working claim is that relational seeing is a competence. A real competence, the kind you acquire the way a child acquires reading. Reading is acquired somewhere in the practice. After several thousand hours of reading across genres, against difficulty, with attention, the capacity arrives. There is no moment to point to. Sentences just appear and you know what they say. Reading French is the same. The capacity arrives somewhere in the reading itself, after the exercise sets are done, after several thousand pages have crossed the eye against difficulty. Human Meme https://humanmeme.com <iframe title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/41164690/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/88AA3C/" height="90" width="600" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe> https://assets.libsyn.com/secure/item/41164690