“I See,” Said the Blind Man (As He Picked Up His Hammer and Saw)

[Image: Eudoxia, by “Zike Questi.” For more information, see the note at the foot of this post. To enlarge, click the image; to see the thing in its full-size glory, right-click here and select “Open in a New Tab/Window” (or your browser’s counterpart). Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing other than the apparition of the non-apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, the comprehension of the incomprehensible, the utterance of the unutterable, the access to the inaccessible, the intellection of the unintelligible, the body of the bodiless, the essence of the beyond-essence, the form of the formless, the measure of the immeasurable, the number of the unnumbered, the weight of the weightless, the materialization of the spiritual, the visibility of the invisible, the place of the placeless, the time of the timeless, the definition of the infinite, the circumscription of the uncircumscribed, and the other things which are both conceived and perceived by the intellect alone and cannot be retained within the recesses of memory and which escape the blade of the mind.

(John Scotus Eriugen [source (among others)])

…and:

The Now is as it is because it cannot be otherwise. What Buddhists have always known, physicists now confirm: there are no isolated things or events. Underneath the surface appearance, all things are interconnected, are part of the totality of the cosmos that has brought about the form that this moment takes.

(Eckhart Tolle [source])

…and (from whiskey river):

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The visible, tangible, ponderable, and constantly moving universe is composed of invisible, intangible, imponderable, and inert atoms.

(Camille Flammarion)

…and:

Song-Riddle: Asian Box Turtle

Questions for a zoologist
starting with anatomy
concluding with love:

Is a turtle’s skin loaned?
True or false: weight of his shell
is lighter
than the light of drums.

What is the under-shell
and is it tough as a mangrove?

Can he see through his shell-box?
Can he see out the rear
to this sea of ours?

Does he exist in the order of things?
How does life begin, when does it end
and is that good or evil?

Yellow margin over a cuttlebone,
domed carapace
is it a lonely world

of sow bugs, cutworms, and God?

(Karen An-hwei Lee [source])

…and:

Piute Creek

One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.
The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks
Warm.   Sky over endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers
Even the heavy present seems to fail
This bubble of a heart.
Words and books
Like a small creek off a high ledge
Gone in the dry air.
A clear, attentive mind
Has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen.
No one loves rock, yet we are here.
Night chills. A flick
In the moonlight
Slips into Juniper shadow:
Back there unseen
Cold proud eyes
Of Cougar or Coyote
Watch me rise and go.

(Gary Snyder [source])
____________

About the image: I’ve featured work from the Second Life virtual universe site before here at RAMH. (My favorite was probably this post, from 2013, as much for the conversation with that image’s creator as for the image itself.) I found the image above in a Flickr album for a user who presents herself there as “Ziki Questi.” Ziki Questi did not created created the images in that album; however (as she explains in a comment below) they were built on “virtual spaces” created by others. Ziki Questi’s work and the regions it’s built on were among the participants in a 2012 collaborative art exhibit at Second Life, called Invisible Cities. From her corresponding blog entry:

The brilliant Italian novelist Italo Calvino has long been one of my favorite authors. Always pushing the boundaries of literature, he wrote with an amazing flair to vividly conjure up imaginary places and situations. Among his most famous works is Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili), published in 1972…

In the book Invisible Cities, the explorer Marco Polo tells the aging emperor Kublai Khan of the cities he has visited, each city being a short vignette. By the end of the book we are not quite sure they are all real, or even if they are different cities. For the Second Life installation, the artists selected four of these cities: Eudoxia, Armilla, Isaura and Emeralda.

The image I selected here — again, by Ziki Questi — was built on a region created by user “Marcus Inkpen,” and represents the “invisible city” of Eudoxia. Ziki Questi again:

It’s the most “traditional” of the cities, suggestive of an old European space, but there’s a surreal, dreamlike quality to it. Perhaps in a Kafkaesque way, all paths that lead off the main square seem to go nowhere, and are all nearly but not quite identical.

And, from Calvino’s story itself:

In Eudoxia, which spreads both upward and down, with winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels, a carpet is preserved in which you can observe the city’s true form… It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia.

I love this picture.