It fascinates us by taking life to bizzare extremes,
by emphasizing the kinship between nightmares and dreams.
Beauty and ugliness morphing and dancing, figure and ground,
like in the faces and vase illusion, flipping around.
Fear and joy swing and sway, push and jam,
knock us and jerk us.
Life only sometimes is a cabaret, old chum –
sometimes it’s circus.
When I look at an iris
I don’t see eye to eye with it.
Not even if I crouch down
and level with it,
and stare at it.
For all its name,
all it can do is reflect the light.
Beautiful colours, but pointless and utterly blind.
Now my irises
have black holes into the space
that can suck up the light
and give that iris
its name and face.
Pictures are more ambiguous than words
and that is their attraction.
If I say, ‘girls, horses, cracks in your window on the world,’
it is just a phrase.
Too trite.
Too didactic.
Too empty.
I can pad it out a bit,
but there is still too much me
and too little you.
But the picture invites you to enter.
It has a smoky room with a warm glow of companionship,
the mounting excitement of expectations,
the exhilaration of the win,
the emptiness of loss,
unarticulated similarities between sex and betting,
an articulated sense of defeat.
It has voids to be filled and cracks to be expanded or patched up.
Fill the void and there is no room for excitement.
Patch up the cracks and your view through the window is obscured further.
But the alternative is to remain cracked and unfulfilled…
So much more in the picture:
more feelings,
more ideas,
even more words.
But also more work.
Ambiguity gives you all that you are willing to put into it.
I see the world through windows.
My preconceptions form perceptions,
creating a coherent picture,
a picture in a frame.
It irks me.
The limitation to my field of vision
is like an itch.
I want to leave the frame,
to stick my head beyond it into space,
to see the world just outside it
exciting, new – it has to be, I know;
I also know it is not an option –
the frame is in my head.
In his preamble to ‘Life – A User’s Manual’ Georges Perec talks about the contextual nature of perception, as seen in jigsaw puzzles. He explains how, by manipulating the cut of the pieces and thus taking them out of context, the puzzle-maker can completely determine the puzzle-solver’s experience, ‘the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles’. I can, of course, sympathise with his desperate hope that the author can determine what the reader experiences while reading his book. But it is delusional. Our perception of an image, a text, or, in fact, a reality is largely determined by our biases and habits of thought. Politicians and advertisers prove it over and over again by inducing a large percentage of the population to ignore what is – in favour of what they think ought to be. So, don’t get unduly upset at writers and artists. They want to believe that they are movers and shakers – and who doesn’t? In fact, they are at best co-conspirators.
Observation changes the event,
expression changes the thought
but the event does not exist without observation and thought – without expression.
Observation is an integral part of an event, as language is of thought,
they give them their shape.
Good and evil,
mind and body,
love and hate –
they are just words
simplifying the complexity of experience into language.
And yet they determine who we are and what we do.
Do you see dead flies or dew drops?
Is it about death or life?
Is it ugly or beautiful?
Is it about you?
Song of Innocence
The orange light
of the setting sun:
it tells everyone
that the day is done.
It’s time to unwind,
set the day apart,
to empty your mind
and to fill your heart.
Song of Experience
The bloody light
of the setting sun,
it tells the night
that the day is done.
There is no suspense
for the die is cast,
you can drop pretence
and relax at last.
