Door In The Wall
I've been reading Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception.
"By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies -- all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes." (pp. 12-13)
Huxley quoting Dr. C. D. Broad: "The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening elsewhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge..." (pp. 22-23)
"The untalented visionary may perceive an inner reality no less tremendous, beautiful and significant than the world beheld by [William] Blake; but he lacks altogether the ability to express, in literary and plastic symbols, what he has seen." (p. 46)
"The outer world is what we wake up to every morning of our lives, is the place where, willy-nilly, we must try to make our living. In the inner world there is neither work nor monotony. We visit it only in dreams and musings, and its strangeness is such that we never find the same world on two successive occasions." (p. 46)
"To be shaken out of the rut of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large -- this is a experience of inestimable value to everyone..." (p. 73)
"We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. we must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction." (p. 74)
It is very easy to go from here to William Blake's observations about innocence and experience, and, even more readily these days, to wonder what it is that Solomon sees when he stares rapturously at the Klee print we have on the wall. And not just there, but everywhere he looks. He hasn't been taught anything, so he has no "generic lables or explanatory abstractions" to attach to what he sees. He just sees.
I was reading some magazine in the waiting room at the doctor's office a few weeks ago and I stumbled across an article about a man who, after 43 years, was getting his sight back. He had been able to perceive very general shapes and colors, but nothing distinct for his entire life and now he has partial sight in one eye. He tells the story of the first time he flew in an airplane following the final operation. As they were coming in to land, he leaned over to the person next to him and asked, "Excuse me. Could you explain to me what I am seeing out the window?"
writing
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.
THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.
SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.
LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.