“Don’t you mean second sight?” Tiffany queried. “Like people who can see ghosts and stuff?”

“Ach, no. That’s typical bigjob thinking. First Sight is when you can see what’s really there, not what your heid tells you ought to be there.”

– Terry Pratchett

First sight has its disadvantages, but it’s certainly preferable to what my “heid” currently forces me to see. Whether it’s that I need to paint my skin with coffee to be forgiven for the “sin” of being white or that the most rational explanation for someone not answering the phone is that they’ve been burned to death, my head’s version of events isn’t very comfortable.

I have been drawing a lot lately. Mainly, I have been drawing pictures of wood.

When I was a small child, I would sit and draw for hours. The drawings would be exclusively of things I had imagined. I didn’t see the point of drawing the things around me. What was the point of drawing what I could already see?

>A less than inspiring art teacher, other interests and my frustration with my inability to accurately reproduce the pictures in my head on a piece of paper meant that I gradually drew less and less.

It is only recently that I have started taking interest in drawing the things I could see. And I drawing them, I discovered that though I could see them more often than not, I didn’t see them. For years I have walked past the same masterpiece of swirling lines on a chairleg without seeing it. It was only when I had to draw those same lines that I saw them. It was only by forcing myself to notice each ripple in the grain of the wood, how they grew thicker and thinner, the pattern of flecks, straight lines and curves, that I truly saw them. I never noticed the shadows falling across the table until I smudged them onto paper with charcoal.
Sometimes, it takes more imagination to see what is really there than to imagine something unreal. To imagine something unreal, you have to throw together ideas and fit them together to make something that doesn’t exist. To see what is really there, you have to force your mind to abandon what you think is really there. You have to have the magical ability which the witches of the Discworld refer to as First Sight – the ability to see what is really there. You have to see the detailsyour brain filtered out because it didn’t think they were important, and then realise how beautiful and important they really are.
I hope I develop the power of First Sight. Not just because my sight distorts things to ugliness, but because things as they are are beautiful.