who i am is sleep

Geof Huth, "who i am is who" (14 November 2011)
There is no clear structure to thinking. Everything is held together in our minds by a web of webs, and there is no knowing where one strand may hold onto another, just right, to allow a thought to pass, an idea to come.

That is why Jack Spicer knew the Martians came and left the ideas in his skull. He could not imagine what he could imagine. He could only imagine it into being.

There is not necessarily a connection between a picture and the words we place upon it (or between words and the picture we put behind it) but proximity makes it so.

We are animals of connection ("Only connect!"), and we yearn for pattern and purpose for the images that blaze before us. And then die away.

Some say that the world of text has left us, that we are multimedia now, returned to the senses, without need for the encumbrances of our coded symbols, now so ancient.

But it is not at all so. We are more dependent on the text. Sometimes it tells us what we're seeing. Sometimes it tells us who we are.

Yet the image might not seem connected to the text, even though the first generated the second. Yet not every text that captions an image is a caption.

Sometimes text and image live in limbo, neither greater than the other, neither more necessary, neither particularly connected to the other. Yet both always completely intertwyned, intermyngled, intertwyngled.

How do you separate the image from the text? (With a crowbar.)

As the crowbar flies through the air, so do our thoughts move, one to the next, never quite forward, but around. Every thought is swallowed into the body, which action is a kind of flushing.

Every thought is flushed out through the bottom. What washes through us is experience. We hold onto it for a while, but nothing is forever.

Sometimes, if we could pay for it, we would ask for the world to be remade, so we could see what it all means.

But then we remember that the meaning makes the most effect upon us when it seems a little off, when the thinking of someone else (even through the artifacts of text and image they leave behind) causes thinking, even very different thinking, to course through our own bodies.

Sometimes we think that coursing is the movement of blood or breath, and we imagine that we are still alive.

Geof Huth, "light is the only kind of wind" (14 November 2011)

ecr. l'inf.