VERBAL ANIMATION

Andy Goldsworthy

LANGUAGE

While I agree with the old saw, “You can’t think about what you think with,” I also posit that one may sneak up on the mysteriously agile gymnastics of the mind by using words. Like the reflector patches affixed to objects and actors in motion, the individual paths of etymorphology may be traced, recorded and used as data in computer simulation of the fleshed out body and activity of our sublime suspect. Care must be exercised for such indulgences can suck one further into the bondage of language by one’s proclivity to fall in love with the process of untying the hard knots of premature conclusions and never notice one is free of them due to the thicket of new, always premature conclusions that sprouted in the newly cleared enlightenment.

I love words, innocent as falling leaves. Pressed between pages of a book, they evoke the parts of who we are that knows them. Strung together in colorful chains and novel patterns they enhance where we are and weave worlds that never were with metaphors as transportation. Tossed in the air by the playful handfuls, they praise nature’s eternal beauty in poetry and song. Raked into prettier piles and burned in sacrifice of meaning to lie’s purpose they can lead the gullible to follow smoke rings. Loving words is appreciating them for having a meaning all their own, while empathizing with them for the abuse to which such precision leaves them wide open. Once one is in love with words, marriage must not follow, for their precision’s a tautological prison beyond whose walls curiosity finds its satisfaction and imagination its color and wisom its originaity.

MIND AS HOLOGRAM

Every point in time/space can see and reflect the universe of which it is a part. For where and when I am, I perceive and behave in the universe by observing its changes on both sides of my skin and the system through which such relations and observations pass. The degree to which I can account for the influence the mirror’s curvature has on the shape of its reflections reveals the truth of my perspective from within the universe and helps me conceive of the whole from without, as an uninvolved observer of a hologram projected from a mobius strip.
Any two sides of any issue opposed enough to formulate a good argument intended to get to the “truth” of the matter serve as two mirrors who’s relatively perfect reflections of each other too often only distract the original search for the inexpressible truth that lies somewhere between them with the habit of debate and argument to declare one side the winner and true, the other invalid and false. Logic lurches along having to decide which foot to use at every step, leaving a path in the tall grass mowed by debates’ conclusions, a swath cut through the analog wilderness labeled true or false, good or evil, god or devil, generally strewn with the 0s and 1s of digitized duality fit only for programmed minds. As testimony to the story of creation of digitized logic the Bible speaks of day one, light and dark; day two, sky and water; day three water and land; day four, sky markers as calculator aids; day five, life forms commanded to multiply; day six, man given charge of the calculator and told to multiply. Civilization demands square tomatoes. Adults keep off the grass and pave jungles. Fodder. Cropper. Chopper. Hopper. Who’s serving you today? To whom?