Where He Knows What He Knows

Yesterday, as most days, in the afternoon I went for a hike. So, it was raining. One must go out into the mountains nevertheless (or especially …)

As usual, while walking in the lovely quiet of the middle-of-nowhere wilderness that is so familiar to me, I was thinking about whatever I happened to have been reading before I left home. In this case it was two items, the first of which was from a post on Felix Grant’s Growlery blog in response to my question about when a picture is made (in my Deviant Acts post of a few days ago). Felix says (among other things):

… the photograph is made at the moment when I previsualise … whether I actually release the shutter or not. But, while true, that’s not the whole truth.

… And, to be honest, I do (deep down) feel my previsualisation to be provisional, fragile and fugitive until I hear the click of the shutter…

The other thing that I that I was thinking about was this admonishment, this scolding, by Dr. C in comments to my Unsaying post of a while back. He says:

I can find no way to reconcile a style that is both paradoxical and empiric. What are we to believe when we read a statement? Is it “true” or is it “paradoxically true”. It is a defense that many people (one’s self?) uses to avoid the terrible nature of empiric reality. It is a cop out to say something very forward and then to take refuge in paradox rather than face the consequences of your assertion.

Words must mean what they mean in the first instance, otherwise we have chaos.

How to reconcile Felix and Dr. C? Where and what exactly are Felix’s previsualized photographs? How to get to the “empirical reality” of that previsualization?

I needed to have a look inside of Felix’s head to see if and where the pictures were. Obviously, the nose offered the largest portal to the inside.

First, I immobilized Felix by shooting him with a (#2) dart from my Tagmauni blow-gun. Then I recruited Dr. C to help me look up his nose (that’s what doctors do). Not only were the pictures there, there was all kinds of other stuff.

I won’t give you the details of what else was in Felix’s nose (some of it astonishing; some of it quite puzzling) or what else happened with the assembled cast of characters. Suffice it to say that on several occasions during my hike (in the rain), I was laughing so hard I thought I would ‘rupture myself’ (a favorite phrase of local old-timers).

Had I died of such a ‘rupture’, where would the act of killing have happened; what the cause and how would blame be assigned?

It’s not easy being empirical.

 

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

— Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/