Sunday, November 02, 2008

Cloudburst with Ossicones

The memory of a pencil box, or is it a shoe box? A box of empty brown apothecary bottles. It is a shoe box, and it's the box of memories from Amélie, a borrowed memory. It was raining that night in Providence, going to the Cable Car. A rainy night at Cinema 21. Plum blossoms on Irving. They're umbrellas. Inside the umbrellas giraffe dioramas. Brilliant puddle mirror giraffescapes inside the umbrellas. Ossicones wiggle. A filmic palpability–and what is palpability after all? A rain shower? What is this experience I now have of having come in from a rain shower? A recurrence. It feels real, I can even bring myself to shiver, as if coming in from a rain shower were one of life's certainties.


The recurring image continues to be a problem. I question the idea that sameness is a prerequisite in order for there to be a continuity of imaginative acts. How does sameness come to be? I have feelings of imaginative continuity, cinematic sweeps from one tableau to the next, drawn out adumbrations of the image, intimations of a phantasmagoric continuum, explorable, alive, and I feel at times an uncanniness of the same, an unplacability of the recurrent image. Was the image current before it was almost (and thus never) settled as recurrent? The almost settled. The having come in from the rain smell. I will let my life define what is vivid, and what has depth. The image of having come in from the rain can be explored. Well, do we explore it as image, as memory, or as experience? I don't know that analyzing consciousness this way tells us anything. I don't know what to do at this point with an analysis that leads us away from the vividness or the realness of having come in from the rain, or the realness of phantasmagoric continuities, currents (isn't that leading away?). An open model, open to recurrence, naturally, but recursively open to the problem of the model. Could a consciousness without such an open model be capable of imagining at all? (So it does matter how we define imagination, how we analyze it.) Are images genuinely unexplorable?

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posted by Fido the Yak at 9:22 AM.

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