02
The greatest mystery all-time without a close competitor is the Psyche that forms the nucleus around which we revolve. The old definition of God being a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere is as close as we are likely to ever get in talking/thinking about the Psyche. Words make no sense because words are only references to things that make sense, and can't say things about things that are beyond our ability to comprehend without sounding like nonsense. We are left with word-pictures, or poetry, that circumambulates the Psyche without pretending to explain it, or describe it, in any meaningful way. What controls/determines how we see things? How we think about things? What we call important? What we consider to be insignificant? Useful? Useless? Good? Bad? Right? Wrong? What governs our perspective? Our perception? Our designations of "meaningful" and "meaningless"? How good is the good we call good? How do we know? What makes us think so? On what basis do we evaluate our values? Why do we think the way we think and not some other way instead? How many different ways of thinking are there? Why do we think some are right and others are wrong? Right in terms of what? Wrong in terms of what? What guides our boat on its path through the sea? What directs our life? Toward what are we living? When something resonates with us, what is happening, where, how? When something repels us, horrifies, appalls us, what is happening, where, how? What determines what we say "Yes" to and "No" to? How do we know we are right about what we say "Yes" and "No" to? What is the central source of direction and guidance in our life? What is in control of our "Yeses" and "Nos"? Around what do we revolve? Toward what do we live? What makes us think we know what we are doing? How do we change our minds? How does our mind change? What is the most incontestable, most unshakable, most constant, most certain, most dependable, most reliable, most true thing about us? How many of us are there? What are the contradictions that shape our life? How do we integrate our opposites? How do we draw lines among us and not us and also us and no longer us and not yet us? What governs the relationships among all of these "uses"? Who's on first?
–0–
01
All seeing is interpretation. It is saying what we see. It is saying what is meaningful about what we see. If we cannot interpret it, we can only look at it, we cannot see it. All looking is a search for meaning, is looking for what is meaningful to us. Modern art is meaningless because we do not know what we are looking at, and we cannot see it, and say it makes no sense. We can only see what we look at in light of what we have seen up to that point. Babies fresh from the womb cannot see anything though they look at everything but nothing makes sense. It is all meaningless. A meaningless swirl of colors, out of focus with something saying "I'm your Mommy!" How does meaning happen with newborns? Where in our life are we all like newborns? A modern art museum might be one of those places. A book on inorganic chemistry might be another. A lecture on advanced calculus might be another. The hero comes back to the Wasteland from her journey to realization, awareness and understanding with the message of truth. What chance does she have? The one who sees in the land of the blind is crucified. Or ignored. or locked away. We cannot comprehend what we cannot relate to, what we cannot interpret, what we cannot make sense of. We are babies fresh from the womb! Calling the One Who Sees blind! How does meaning come about with newborns? That is how meaning comes about with us! Sit before the meaningless, looking, looking, until something shifts. Until, somehow, we can relate this to that. Make connections. Separate foreground from background. See our Mommy for the first time. And watch as everything falls into place around that. Not-knowing what just happened. Not-realizing how many more times it will have to happen throughout our life. Maybe, hopefully, remembering that we are blind to all we cannot see, and that there is much we cannot see, because we have no experience with it, and no way of making sense of it, so we have to sit, looking, waiting for the mud to settle and the water to clear, for Mommy to become apparent and real. Thinking that now, at last, we see.
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 