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
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?
Labels: Casey, giraffes, imagination, movies