acheiropoietos and pareidolia pt 1

For some reason, I recently went though a period of seeing faces and forms everywhere: clothing piled on a lintel post became s golfer in plus fours, a pile of stuff on the floor took on landscape dimensions. Everything around me seemed to be congealing into recognizable forms of one sort or another. Cloud watching gone wild. Of course pattern recognition is something that humans do very well, even to the extent of imposing patterns when one is not there. We don't like to live in a wilderness I guess. And Hermann Rorschach thought that it could serve subject analysis well, this finding of patterns in apparently randomness, as a psychoanalytic tool for diving into the wilderness of the unconscious and giving clues to the formations of consciousness.

And now, ever since the intense scientific focus on Mars, both from Martian orbit and from ground crawlers, the Rorschachian phenomena of pareidolia, or seeing shapes, some with formidable presence, emerging from the Martian landscape. Of course this began much earlier in more primitive viewing conditions with Lowell's canals of mars and then later the face on Mars, and now with animals, figures, pieces of technology, architecture and more being seen. Obviously the phenomena is very scale-able, with increased viewing power merely increasing the extent and fine grainedness of the phenomena.  From my living room to the stars.

And then there are other instrumental set ups that try to penetrate the enigmas of consciousness, like the Turing test and even the lowly quiji board, all of which are basically one step, technologically, above the pointer stick, the foundational tool of all analysis of whatever kind, (I'm thinking now of the scene in The Blob where  a guy pokes the blob with a stick and the stuff, goes rapidly up the stick eventually killing him by completely engulfing him. Perhaps this is a good model for the inescapable workings of tech in its most primal state....and all the problematics which develop from that in regard to inside/outside, subject/object and so on: what constitutes a stick, where does it begin and end and then methodological procedures re: how is it to be grasped, where, under what conditions and then metaphysical questions to the effect of, is the brain simply a big sophisticated stick or is it somehow more than a stick...but then  back to where does the stick end, if it does, and where does it begin, if it does. In other words questions which begin to seem theological.

Which brings us to the concept of sticklessness or acheiropoietos

selling my library

The title of this post, I'm sure you know, is reference to Walter Benjamin's essay 'Unpacking My Library'. In my case this post lacks sthe luminosity of benjamin's reflections but perhaps it will retain the melanchoic reflectivity.  At any rate, it reminds me of a simililar episode where I had to sell off my 2500 item record collection. This narrative reminds me of Kafka's hunger artist. At the same time I'm parsing them out slowly as an Amazon reseller so I don't have to just basically give them away. Picking up each volume usually has a vibe or aura about it, locating it in some emotional gridwork, even if the book has not been read. At one time I tried not to buy another book until I had read the ones I had bought, but that doesn't work for obvious reasons (one being the exigencies of publishing). At some point following the skein of connections became all consuming, more even that the point of reading the book...after all how many books can one read in a lifetime, even if that is all that one does, and then one has other problems. But practically speaking there is a problem with eyesight and reading a printed book has become increasingly difficult. notwithstanding the pleasure of the heft and feel of a book. But now the problem, if one wanted to label it such and sometimes I do, is that the level of access to pdf books has becomeway beyond any sensibility of colection. I might even say that 'collecting' ebooks doesn't make much sense since all the stories about physical volumes which collectors like to extol, like provinance, age, condition, printing history, are not applicable anymore. So perhaps other facts can come into play in terms of 'collection'. But as Benjamin himself noted in another essay, collectability can't can't be determined by physical uniqueness. Perhaps aura can be disolved and reformed around immaterial 'sorting' or assemmblage...but it seems to me that it then becomes a pale substitute indeed if the pleasures of physical collections are what is being sought.

one stop shop

Is it true that the extent of our world is defined by our gestures? That the intimacy of our world is all there is? Certainly it would seem that the familiarity of our gestures is a comfort and a limitation at the same time. Discomfort with our indexical apparatus, all those semiotic shortcuts the body frames for us, the positing of the formation of signs, the way that the body's loquaciousness linguifies with the tongue. But, like a small town, it can give the impression that all that can be gestured to/at/with/against, is all there is, no other codings are possible. The formation of a gestural  'ball' or hull traffiked though the body on top of body layered strata, the circumscribed flux of energies all meet the demands of the gravity field of the body, social, private, esoteric call, arc back to the fleshy core.

But what if gestures are masks, camouflage covering over a void, a null set. The original hollow sphere would not be the first intelligent machine but the first human. No wonder then, the arduous attempts to peer beyond the veil of fleshy ardor (think that medieval drawing of the head stuck through the firmament of the earth to see the stars in their infinite wonder) and the disbelief that often results. The figurations and interactions of these hulls or husks carries their own narcotic hooks and intoxicating fervor, as well as limiting valves or governors. To go beyond leads to angels and dragons. Best to say--and stay-- in the village itself, says the local soothsayer, propheteer as he gestures hello (same gesture for goodbye).