Dancing Naked Around The Bonfire posted 10/5/2008 7:01:28 PM | 5 kudos what's this?     report abuse

Martin666

This morning, I took my cup off coffee down to the rocks overlooking Lake Superior and watched the sun come up—yes, it was a bright cloudless blue sky (thanks for imaging with me, folks!)—and part way into my cup it occurred to me that prior explanations precede our perception of phenomena.

Let me explain…

There was the smallest wind along the lake, just enough to ripple the surface and break up the light into countless restless sparkles…reflected sunlight, of course—every child knows that. “Sunlight dancing on water” is the saying. The Ojibwa even named this place after it. To them, Lake Superior was “the shining big sea water,” if Longfellow is to be believed. Of course, the actual explanation for “sparkling water” involves the precedent understanding that the light we see at the surface comes from somewhere else. According to Mr. Science, “Sparkling water is created when sunlight and wind interact with the lakes surface at just the right angle and intensity relative to the observers position.” And voila! Sparkles sparkle. But the sparkles themselves are not actually a property of water. Water itself does not sparkle.

And that’s how we perceive objects in the world, isn’t it? Not the thing as thing, but as something more created by the chance intersection of precedent explanations originating outside of the thing with the thing—other associations that we bring with us to the instant of perception.

But now back to the sparkling waters. What if I didn’t already understand the concepts of “reflected light” or of “light waves” “beaming” through “space” from a distant “star”—if such notions were simply not a part of my mental dot.doc and dot.giff folder at the instant of perception? What if objects could be perceived in and of themselves, free of any precedent explanation of their existence?

Sooooo – these sparkling waters would no longer be reflected sunlight from a distant star. Suddenly, it would be the water itself that appeared to be sparkling, the source of its own phenomena. So water that sparkles is “sparkling water,” which makes it a different kind of water from water that doesn’t sparkle, or from water that turns red each evening at sunset. And what if leaves could be seen to flutter because they were fluttering leaves, and not because they were caused to flutter by the wind?

“I walked through the forest and the trees fluttered their leaves at me in greeting; the flowers nodded.”

And who is to say that the daffodil reflected in the puddle at my feet is not a daffodil in another world looking back at me, as it appears to be.

Maybe this is how Primitive Man saw the world, or for that matter how my cat sees it still—at those rare times he’s not sleeping outside under the mulberry trees.

Now, you can think this irrelevant, quirky, and/or stupid, but really its kind of cool. Why didn’t I learn this in school? Wasn’t I supposed to learn everything I really needed to know by the third grade? I did not learn this. I should have been told that there is a way to watch The Movie other than by the constant accretion of precedent explanations onto objects; that the challenge of perceiving the world can be not to always sticky-note as many info-bits as possible onto a rainbow.

If the sky is clear tonight, I think I’ll come down to these rocks again and look up at the stars and subtract every single thing I know about them from the seeing—get myself stump dumb about stars. Make a big bonfire out of the millennium-deep windrift of sticky notes that has accumulated around these mysterious points of light, and dance naked around it. Then maybe I can actually perceive them the same way my ancestors did millions of years ago while hanging upside down from tree limbs by their tails. Maybe I can actually see the world around me in a way of my own choosing, rather than the way you want me to.

…and yes, you’ve probably already guessed that I don’t mix well at cocktail parties.

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Blogs by Martin666: The Invisible Hand - Part 3 The Invisible Hand - Part 2 The Invisible Hand - Part 1 My Mental Deterioration Dancing Naked Around The Bonfire