Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing.
14 July 2014
Watching swifts far
above me, against a hazy blue sky. It is early morning and this blue
sky is a sign of a beautiful day to come.
Swifts, tumbling,
soaring. Their flight is elating. They fly so high that they come in
and out of my range of vision, sometimes they're there, sometimes
they're not. Tiny tumbling black spots in my eye. When they're closer
I can see the crescent arc of their wings.
When they're gone my
eyes are searching and the tiny shapes of stuff on my eye and the
imaginary residue of stuff in my eye and on my brain become visible
in the searching, against a blue sky. Barely discernible shapes and
fuzzy motions that I may or may not have invented. Tiny shapes moving
in my eyes, tumbling and elating in their freedom and flight, and the
flight of the swifts blur with my own looking – all that activity.
Swifts of and in my eyes, my flight with them.
There's nothing passive
about seeing.
Speed. Flight. Seeing. I would have liked video as well! But then it is just as well that there is a still that expands into all that it is not. That is perhaps how stills are to be framed; the way you have framed the still in such a way that its motion is apparent. This seeing, of-seeing-speeds, is anyway going to be far outside any motion picture. Rather, you have shown in this instance the inadequacy of calling cinema the overcoming of the photograph and being the ultimate art of the visible. There are other arts of seeing, still.
ReplyDeleteObviously one can ponder about the phenomenology in the post. One can refer to the late texts of Husserl. But what you have suggested here, appearing in your vision as action, is the seeing. It would be the unsee-able for Husserl where abstraction and protension alone can work. I like speed. And there is a lot more to be said here about it. But not here. Not now. Not so fast.
Blog on demand is great!!!
Thanks for your comment. When I read it through first I couldn't see the reference to speed in my writing - didn't seem a word I would use, but then I saw it in James' quote. Nice how your comment gives a possible knitting of the three elements together - whereas I hadn't given a lot of conscious thought to the combination. Nice thinking of the myriad ways connections can be made, and can be productive, whatever is missing or is not.
ReplyDelete