Open up your umbrellas to the giraffes and notice how they shimmer. What I call an imaginative experience is not the projection of a single image, or the production of a single image, but a moment of reverie composed of incalculable images and blurs between images, even blurs between manifestations of what appears to be the same image. To paraphrase Lyotard, I have a faith in the inexhaustibility of the imaginable. This is entwined in my being entwined in my imaginings, and when I talk about the experience of imagining this entwining is not to be excluded. But is this apodictic? Is there no doubt revealed in the shimmer? Is the shimmer of giraffes perhaps as close as we come to the image that would also be a question, or the imaginary question? Does the imaginary question have no presence? Does the shimmer? What can we say about the shimmer itself that would be descriptive of imagination, and not merely be an exercise in reflective analysis, a catching up that never quite made it, a learning that always asked for more unlearning? A rhythmic presence–not an oxymoron, but a description true to experience. And yet perhaps not true enough. A shimmer.
Labels: Casey, doubt, giraffes, imagination, Lyotard, questions
3 Comments:
That's just it, you say, "How can we SAY....?" In other words, what noise captures it. Beep beep boop beep, might be a good start. I'm not being sarcastic.
Can one capture a stubbed to with, "Son of a b#$ch!"? Am I understood there, or is that just what a stubbed toe sounds like?
Is there comfort in associated noise? So, we're all connected without strings by the verberations through the air. The transformation of love and pain by vibrating anothers toe.
You're understood, I believe. However, in my descriptions of imaginative experience I would not rest satisfied with intelligibility. I wish to have at my disposal my whole existence, or the whole of existence, including the whole of language, so as to call upon as much as feels right to provide a satisfactory description. I'd like to say again that language is more than reference without denying that language is used to refer to things. The theoretically important arbitrary relation between signifier and signified is not the whole story of language.
That I am understood is not really a fair statement; the most you can say is that I’m understood rationally; as I’m lending myself to a certain rational simplicity, but I am not reason just as you are not. There too, reason is hopelessly empty.
Mr. Yak, I don’t get it…. Yet.
In this context language is definitely reference. I’m just reading words here. If I have no reference to meaning, I’m simply looking at scribbles. I grant a consciousness behind the words I’m reading (and not just randomly generated internet babble), but in a way it’s not much different then interpreting a painting.
How can one ever, “understand”, outside the context of they’re own experiences? How can I understand you without myself getting in the way? Is there a rational explanation for your endeavor?
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