Mistaking the Tool for the Material

[Image: “The Day the World Went Away,” by Sabbian Paine. (Found on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!) The title refers to a song by Nine Inch Nails, and the Flickr writeup quotes from the song’s lyrics and directs us explicitly to a video of the song’s “Quiet” version, assembled from outtakes of the music video for the “original” version. The image itself is one of many created by Sabbian Paine using tools originally built for the Second Life virtual-world social network.]

From whiskey river:

Words tend to last a bit longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked. Entire categories of objects disappear—flowerpots, for example, or cigarette filters, or rubber bands—and for a time you will be able to recognize those words, even if you cannot recall what they mean. But then, little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing just collapses into gibberish.

(Paul Auster [source])

…and:

The Goddess Who Created This Passing World

The Goddess who created this passing world
Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction
Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled
Cars & the variously shod feet were born
And the past & future & I born too
Light as airmail paper away she flew
To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley
Or both but instantly
Clarified, composed, forever was I
Meant by her to recognize a painting
As beautiful or a movie stunning
And to adore the finitude of words
And understand as surfaces my dreams
Know the eye the organ of affection
And depths to be inflections
Of her voice & wrist & smile

(Alice Notley [source])

…and:

Art is an engagement of the senses; art sharpens the acuity with which emotions, and the other senses, are felt or imagined (and again, here, it challenges reality: What is the difference between feeling happy and really being happy? What is the difference between imagining you can taste something and really tasting it? A hair’s breadth; a measurement less than the thickness of a dried work-skein of ink on paper).

And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the ‘real’ world – rock, bone, wood, ice – and elements of the real – not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself – inside stories and tales and dreams.

(Rick Bass [source: can’t cite any other source at all for this (which drives me crazy… what’s the Internet for if not to answer every question?!? (laughing))])

Not from whiskey river:

The Ships of Theseus

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians… for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
— Plutarch, Vita Thesel

The answer of course is that the ship
doesn’t exist, that “ship”
is an abstraction, a conception,
an imaginary tarp thrown
across the garden of the real.
The answer is that the cheap
peasantry of things toils all day
in the kingdom of language,
every ship like a casket
of words: bulkhead, transom,
mast steps. The answer
is to wake again to the banality
of things, to wade toward
the light inside the plasma
of ideas. But each plank
is woven from your mother’s
hair. The blade of each oar
contains the shadow of
a horse. The answer
is that the self is the glue between
the boards, the cartilage
that holds a world together,
that self is the wax in
the stenographer’s ears,
that there is nothing the mind
won’t sacrifice, each item
another goat tossed into
the lava of our needs.
The answer is that this is just
another poem about divorce,
about untombing the mattress
from the sofa, your body
laid out on the bones of the
double-jointed frame, about
separation, rebuilding, about
your daughter’s missing
teeth. Each time you visit
now you find her partially
replaced, more sturdily
jointed, the weathered joists
of her childhood being stripped
away. New voice. New hair.
The answer is to stand there
redrawing the constellation
of the word daughter in
your brain while she tries
to understand exactly who
you are, and breathes out
girl after girl into the entry-
way, a fog of strangers that
almost evaporates when
you say each other’s
names. Almost, but not quite.
Let it be enough. Already,
a third ship moves
quietly toward you in the night.

(Steve Gehrke [source])

…and:

We’re used to thinking of active machines as digital machines; when we talk about the possibility that unliving things might think, we mean computers. We might be very shortsighted. All the processes we attribute to brains and computers alone might fill the world. In the same way that the legs code the program of walking, unknown information is inscribed in the patterns of grains of sand as the wind tosses them on an empty beach; the frenetic interconnections of the internet and the spoken world are thrumming in a field of grass. The thinking machine thinks; it has its processes and its functions. And the world of inert objects might think too, in slow and strange ways which we can only borrow for a moment, and which disappear again into what sounds like silence.

(Sam Kriss [source])

…and:

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

(Iris Murdoch [source: interview by Rachel Billington, “Crusading in a Fantasy World,” the Times of London, April 1983])