A new character has appeared, to whom the narrator is speaking. Without a name, or identification. Will he or she reveal themselves further? Or only remain in an antagonist position just out of view...
Do I hallucinate you? Who are you?
My hallucination of nature doesn't agree with your hallucination, that's all. Or to you it's not a hallucination, but reality, and you strengthen your position with references to nature writers and by being in a group who believe similarly.
Except it isn't. Reality, I mean. You're taking a position on reality, writing your own essay of it, complete with a thesis statement. Only it's all your thoughts on it, a master narrative, if you will, that continually runs through your mind shaping what you see according to the story you carry.
Which is fine, is good. We'd go mad without our stories. They cohere us, put us in social and historical context; they organize reality for us.
Reality probably needs organizing! For all I know about it.
Everything we can say about Nature, the original substratum, the wilderness is constructed.
Sure, bring the sun in. We don't know what 'sun' is anyway. It's just a word!
Whatever that is in what we call sky is not sun, light, right, might, sol invictus, or illumina...
___________________
Culture creates the overlay.
The overlay enables us to all live together, but it isn't true.
___________________
Can I burn under the artificial sun
in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Museum in London?
Will the fog
of the weather project
hide me?
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
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ReplyDeleteMakes me think of the Whorf Hypothesis of how language defines our "reality" -- which differs among human populations, let alone the rest of the world. As for the rest of the world, our visible spectrum is severely limited; our sense of smell can't come close to competing with a dog's. Etc. In many respects we live in our own Flatland.
ReplyDeleteYou are making me dance intellectually, e_journeys! Rather the opposite of determinism... here's the piece that inspired me (although I feel it's also very Buddhist, the approach I'm exploring):
ReplyDeleteThe signifier is thus neither the subject's mental states or representations nor an object out there in the world, but is rather a third entity (or better yet, a third in the form of a system of relations) that intervenes BETWEEN the organism and the world, mediating the relations that obtain among the two. This third domain (what Lacan calls the symbolic) is not a mental entity because it is transubjective or social (meaning the psychic individual does not create language and the codes of culture, but finds herself enmeshed within these codes from the very moment she is born), but it is also not an object because a signifier (as Derrida has pointed out and as Lacan emphasizes) is not a thing that can be seen, touched, held or even heard (as Saussure reminds us, the signifier is not the actual sounds we hear in speech). Rather, the signifier is a bundle of differential relations organized into a system. For this reason, we can never say "this is a signifier", because it's impossible for a signifier to appear alone. Unlike a rock that can appear all by itself, a signifier is such that any so-called individual signifier (which is already a metaphorical or analogical way of speaking which invites confusion of the signifier with sound) already entails the entire system of signifiers. For if the signifier only arrives at its identity through its difference to other signifiers, then it follows that no signifier can appear without implying immediately these other relations. Larval Subjects