The Reflected

Yesterday, Plain Sight looked into the mirror-smooth surface of a concert tour bus parked in Morristown. Today, what I saw when I aimed the camera in the other direction.

Click "read the rest of this post" to see full picture...

The bottom picture is yesterday's, in case you missed it or don't feel like going on a wild goose click.

Now on to today's post...

Explaining a picture may be just as pointless as explaining a joke. I'll just say that I like this top picture, partly because when you first look at it, it's hard to tell what the point is, or even if it has one.

Some pictures are made to be stared at stupidly.

Well, not stupidly, but blankly. Or without a rush to judgment.

By stupidly I think I meant that you have to let your eye take it in without your mind getting in the way.

Now that does sound stupid. But I didn't say brain.

Your brain can neither be in the way nor out of the way of what your eye sees, because it is what your eye sees with.

But your mind can reject a picture (or an idea or any number of other things) the way your heart would reject a stent if not for immunosuppressant drugs.

But when it comes to ideas (or pictures or music or any number of other things) your mind makes it own anti-rejection drugs. Without these rejection fighters, no new idea would ever take root in your consciousness. In other words, you would never learn anything.

But if your intellectual immunosuppressive system was overactive you would become the slave of any invasive idea that comes your way.

But let's get back to looking stupidly. Is it the visual equivalent of repeating a word or phrase over and over until it become gibberish?

And is repeating words stupidly in that manner a way to cross the boundary between sense and nonsense, breaking down language into pure sound and then putting it back together? Which is, in a way, dizzying, because it reverses evolutionary time, then returns you to the present, all in an instant. And it's funny, too, giggly funny, because it shows you that language is a construct. An add on. The original mix in flavor!

I've drifted off course again.

I like pictures that don't fall apart when I look at them a long time.

Is it a game of chicken, then, between me and a picture, even one of my own? To see who will blink first?

Put another way, will it exhaust my faculties? Or will I exhaust its possibilities?

I much prefer the former.

Does that make me a masochist? Or a bully who likes to be stood up to?

Neither, really.

To come at it from another angle, life is meaningless without wonder. Awe. Agape.

The inexhaustible.

One thing about the inexhaustible:

It will never exhaust you.

                  -----{:}-----

I wish I knew what I was doing.

That's why I have to keep going.

To find out.

Tags: Morristown | photography

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