Reconstructing Andalucía

Written By Virginia Ziulu

On Debussy, Bats, Satellites, and the Many Strange Ways of Imaging the World

Let’s take a walk through a small village in Andalucía. What do you see? Perhaps you notice the whitewashed houses lining narrow streets. Balconies overflowing with flowers. Terracotta roofs glowing beneath the afternoon sun. A few orange trees casting scattered shade. A small plaza opens ahead, where people linger over tapas, unhurried. The village unfolds as a complete visual scene, rich in detail and sharply defined.

But what if you couldn't see? How would you build a useful mental representation of the village? What remains in the absence of light? Perhaps the warmth of the sun on your face. A rough wall beneath your hand. Uneven cobblestones underfoot. The scent of orange blossoms drifting through the air. Voices rising and falling nearby. The village has not disappeared. Yet it is no longer arranged as a visual scene. It is gathered instead through texture, temperature, scent, and sound.

Now imagine something farther away. Much farther away. A satellite passes above the same village, nearly 700 kilometers above the Earth. Its sensors record reflected light. Individual houses dissolve into blocks. Cobblestone streets become thin lines. Orange trees become textured patches of green. This version of the village contains neither the warmth of the sun nor the scent of blossoms nor the murmur of conversation in the plaza. The village resolves into geometry. Flattened. Precise. Detached. Still recognizably the same place. Yet no longer a scene to inhabit but a pattern to interpret.

Now consider a bat passing through the village at dusk. It moves through pulses of sound and returning echoes, continuously probing its surroundings. The whitewashed walls become smooth surfaces returning clean echoes. The orange trees become clusters of returning echoes, their leaves dispersing sound in every direction. Distance, direction, texture, shape, even movement are inferred from the echoes alone. The village no longer consists of houses, trees, or streets. It becomes an invisible architecture of relationships, all assembled from sound.

And then, one final leap. An orchestra begins to play Claude Debussy's Iberia, from Images pour Orchestre. There is no Spanish village before you. No walls. No streets. No orange trees. Only rhythm, harmony, timbre, and shifting orchestral color. And yet, as you listen, the village returns. Not exactly as before, but unmistakably familiar: a plaza, changing light, movement through narrow streets, perhaps even the orange trees. And isn’t it evocative—and quite telling—that Debussy called these pieces Images? Nothing is visually depicted. Everything has been suggested. The village exists only as possibility, conjured by the imagination.

Five observers. Five images. Five ways of reconstructing the world.

We might be tempted, looking back, to arrange these five reconstructions into a kind of order. A ladder, perhaps, neatly transitioning from the objective to the increasingly abstract.

At one end of this ladder, there is the village as we see it with our own eyes. This feels immediate. Unquestioned. It is simply how things are. At the other end, there is the village made of sound—Debussy’s village. More elusive. No longer self-evident. Clearly interpretative. In between are the villages that belong to other ways of sensing: the blind traveler’s village, the satellite’s village, the bat’s village…

Yet all of these images are reconstructions, including the ones produced by our own eyes. In human vision, we simply fail to notice the reconstruction taking place. We tend to mistake familiarity for immediacy and objectivity. What we call seeing is already underway before anything becomes a conscious image. Photons strike the retina. From that limited signal, the brain reconstructs depth, distance, and shape. But even this act contains a transformation. The world outside is three-dimensional; the image on the retina is a flat projection. What feels like direct perception is, in fact, an act of inference.

Each observer thus reminds us of the same truth: every image is already an interpretation. The listener of Iberia gathers pressure waves. The bat gathers echoes. The satellite gathers reflected light. The blind traveler gathers texture, temperature, and sound. We gather photons.

The ladder thus begins to disintegrate. We often imagine realism and abstraction as opposite directions: one moving toward reality, the other away from it. Jules Laforgue saw it differently. Discussing impressionism, he argued that what seemed more abstract was, in fact, a more ambitious form of realism. What looked less faithful to the eye was actually more faithful to the act of seeing. Instead of freezing a single instant, the impressionists painted the changing play of light, the shifting atmosphere of a place, the passage of time itself. They sacrificed precision only to recover a richer reality. Perhaps our five observers invite the same conclusion.

Before we leave human vision behind, there is one final turn. When two people look at the same scene, do they form the same mental image of it? Are the images formed in different minds something stable, something shared, something common?

Let us pause briefly at our village made of sound. Different listeners of Iberia will almost inevitably form different inner representations from the same sequence of sound. This feels uncontroversial. Almost obvious.

But what about sight? Two people stand side by side in the same Andalusian square. They see the same whitewashed houses. The same movement of light across stone. We tend to assume that the same scene produces essentially the same image in each mind.

And yet this assumption also begins to fracture. Some people experience no voluntary mental imagery at all. Others can summon images with striking vividness. Between these extremes—aphantasia and hyperphantasia—lies the full range of human mental imagery.

Thomas Nagel famously argued that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. Centuries earlier, Saint Thomas Aquinas observed that even the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly. Taken together, their insights reflect a common epistemic humility and remind us of two complementary limits: even the most familiar realities exceed the grasp of any finite mind, and the experience of the world from within one mind can never be fully accessed from another.

Yet perhaps the unsettling realization is how small this distance already is. We may never know what it is like to be a bat. But neither may we ever know, completely, what it is like to be another person. Even standing side by side in the same Andalusian plaza, we may inhabit villages that no one else can fully enter.

Let us return, one last time, to our small village in Andalucía. We have explored it through five different observers. These are not progressively blurrier images of the same village, but different entrances into the same reality. None is complete on its own. But none is empty. Together, they reveal a reality richer than any single perspective could. The village itself has not changed. Yet it now appears more expansive than when we first encountered it.

But even this is too small a frame. Across the electromagnetic spectrum are forms of sensing forever closed to human vision. Throughout the animal kingdom are countless other observers, each assembling the world from a different set of signals. And beyond these may lie possibilities we have not yet discovered, or even imagined.

Perhaps the most humbling realization is not how different these perspectives are, but how limited any single perspective must necessarily be. And in that incompleteness lies a reminder of how much we still don’t know.

Yet this very incompleteness also invites curiosity. The desire to venture a little farther into the unknown. To expand our understanding—if only by an infinitesimal amount—and reveal a more intricate and wondrous world within the one we already inhabit.

Isn’t that a worthwhile enterprise?

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Virginia Ziulu
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