Peripheries, or What Are We Looking For on the Margins of Imaging and Naming?

In the existence of the poetic word and the work of art, there lies an utterance that is autonomous-and just as an autonomous sentence demands dialectical presentation, so too does a work of art require interpretation, even though no interpretation can ever fully exhaust it.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Language and Understanding

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
“But which stone supports the bridge?”
“The bridge is not supported by this stone or that stone,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch they form together.”
Kublai Khan remains silent, meditating. Then he adds:
“Why do you speak to me of stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”
“Without stones, there is no arch.”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

The world is a family of relations-a whole that we experience as a particular phenomenon-the tenderness of objects towards other objects.
We often demand answers to the question of the nature of objects themselves; what is the possible fullness of their being, apart from humans? In truth, they are the only accessible thing, constructing merely an image of our world. Objects live alongside us. On the margins, on the edges of our everyday functioning. They even fill these spaces and do not seek our attention in the least. It is we who provoke situations in which certain objects, at the expense of others, call out to us and build relationships with us. We impose our will on them, so that they become part of an established and named reality. What interests us is the superficial similarity of these privileged objects to our selfish needs and natural instincts, while at the same time we push aside everything we do not see, do not want to see, or that, despite our best efforts, involuntarily escapes our field of vision. In this way, a rigid boundary arises, dividing things from things-a point of no return. Unless, in fact, we are searching for that which we cannot predict; we move toward that which happens independently of us, but the trick is that it happens with us and for us. And we do not ask questions with a calculated thesis, because those most often serve to reinforce our illusory conviction of the rightness of our judgments and opinions. Perhaps this is one of the hardest tasks to undertake: to observe objects as they are (along with what they bring with them).

What we are dealing with is, in fact, an active projection of reality-regardless of whether we call it Plato’s cave shadow, Buddhist maya (Sanskrit: illusion, delusion), or a biologically and evolutionarily produced deepfake by our senses, which balances on the border between what we recognize and what we do not know. Good form is not visible;
similarity is the preliminary condition for noticing difference.¹ The question that emerges is: do we want to see it?
Let us therefore propose a thought experiment: if something catches our attention (or we catch the attention of something) and we assign it a certain meaning and specific value as a result, is that thing more real than others?

Our problem is that the power of thought enables us to construct symbols of things that are different from the things themselves. This ability also includes creating symbols-certain representations-of ourselves, which are not us. Since such a representation is much easier to grasp than reality, and a symbol lasts much longer than a fact, we learn to identify ourselves with the representations of ourselves. Hence that subjective sense of “me,” who “has” a mind, that feeling of a self-contained subject who-against its will-is given experiences.²

Objects look at us from hiding. They do not judge the spirit of our times, the omnipresent zeitgeist, whose weight we steadily build day by day, casually tossing our pebble into its (our) garden. We do not feel their gaze on our backs, but patiently and quietly they observe how we try to navigate our daily lives.
The titular question does not have a clear answer. In fact, it has no answer at all if we expect some measurable effect or tangible evidence. For a very simple reason: creative action is action toward that which cannot be predicted or planned. We can only hope that what we have noticed, and the image that consequently comes to us from that perception, will turn into a picture (in the broadest sense of the word). More a picture of movement, or the vectors indicated by particular meanings and objects, than specific representations or images of particular things.³
We are unable to see the whole picture. We have only fragments-sensitive, meaningful particles-and even if we can throw them into a set called “the whole,” the whole is still something more than the individual elements that build this set-bridge.

Sebastian Trzoska

¹ R. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, trans. J. Mach, Łódź, 2022
² A. W. Watts, The Way of Zen, trans. S. Musielak, Poznań 2020
³ The perception and imagination of an object does not aim to solve the problem of representing the object (its image), but to form the image as a circumstantial whole.