Perception: The Dark and the Light

By Clive Hicks-Jenkins



“In the spring of 1962, a Haitian peasant aged about forty approached the emergency entrance of the Albert Schweitzer Hospital at Deschapelles in the Artibonite Valley. He was admitted under the name Clairvius Narcisse at 9:45 P.M. on April 30, complaining of fever, body ache, and general malaise; he had also begun to spit blood. His condition deteriorated rapidly, and at 1:15 P.M. on May 2 he was pronounced dead by two attendant physicians, one of them an American...The body was placed in cold storage for twenty hours, then taken for burial. At 10:00 A.M., May 3, 1962, Clairvius Narcisse was buried in a small cemetery north of his village of l’Estere, and ten days later a heavy concrete memorial slab was placed over the grave by his family.
In 1980, eighteen years later, a man walked into the l’Estere marketplace and approached Angelina Narcisse. He introduced himself by a boyhood nickname of the deceased brother, a name that only intimate family members knew and that had not been used since the siblings were children. The man claimed to be Clairvius and stated that he had been made a zombi by his brother because of a land dispute.”

A series of personal questions were asked of this man, all of which he answered correctly. A copy of the death certificate was taken to Scotland Yard, where the fingerprint “signing” Clairvius’ death certificate was verified as that of his sister Marie Claire. The 1980 version of Clairvius was then definitively identified as the same man who had been buried 18 years earlier (Source: The Serpent and the Rainbow, by Wade Davis).

In seeking a possible pharmaceutical cause for the creation of a zombi, Wade studied the history of Datura: “...throughout medieval Europe witches commonly rubbed their bodies with hallucinogenic ointments made from belladonna, mandrake, and henbane, all relatives of datura. In fact, much of the behavior associated with the witches is as readily attributable to these drugs as to any spiritual communion with the diabolic.A particularly efficient means of self-administering the drug for women is through the moist tissues of the vagina; the witch’s broomstick or staff was considered a most effective applicator.  (Our own popular image of the haggard woman on a broomstick comes from the medieval belief that witches rode their staffs each midnight to the sabbat, the orgiastic assembly of demons and sorcerers. In fact, it now appears that their journey was not through space, but across the hallucinatory landscape of their minds.)
That the plant is capable of inducing stupor is suggested in the origins of the name itself, which is derived from the dhatureas, bands of thieves in ancient India that used it to drug their intended victims. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese explorer Christoval Acosta found that Hindu prostitutes were so adept at using the seeds of the plant that they gave it in doses corresponding to the number of hours they wished their poor victims to remain unconscious...A more macabre use was recorded from the New World, where the Chibcha Indians of highland Columbia administered a close relative of datura to the wives and slaves of dead kings, before burying them alive with their deceased masters.” (38)

Then he discovers that the Puffer Fish is involved--remember that in Asia, this is considered quite a delicacy, is highly sought after as a meal, and why? because just a little has a nice effect. More than that can kill you. And yes, several people there have been almost buried alive as a result of eating it, because they appeared, for a time, to be quite dead, even to trained physicians. Most interesting here is that Datura actually ends up being (warning: semi-spoiler) part of what “raises” the corpse from the dead and turns him into a zombie--not what puts him in the ground. One mixture makes the victim to all intents and purposes dead, and the other mixture raises him (or her). This person has now not died--he or she has worse than died: the person so poisoned, in the Japanese cases (where, in one case, a person “came to” on the embalming table) and in the Haitian cases, is aware of everything going on; he simply cannot respond to it. He cannot move. He watches himself being interred. And he knows what has happened.
That part is important. In Haiti, he knows that he has been taken to be a zombie. Because this is part of his culture, part of being Haitian: you know about zombies. You know what happens to them, what they become. And that’s important because, once the person is dragged out of the grave, beaten severely and then dosed with datura (those hallucinations, remember), his belief system swings him right over the threshold, and he--you could almost say willingly-- gives himself over to a lifetime of slavery.

(The zombie is fed; from the movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)

That’s what I want to talk about here, is the impact of knowledge, in this particular case. I want to talk about Weltanschauung.


Weltanschauung:
This term was well-defined by Freud in his lecture “A Philosophy of Life:”

‘Weltanschauung’ is, I am afraid, a specifically German notion, which it would be difficult to translate into a foreign language. If I attempt to give you a definition of the word, it can hardly fail to strike you as inept. By Weltanschauung, then, I mean an intellectual construction which gives a unified solution of all the problems of our existence in virtue of a comprehensive hypothesis, a construction, therefore, in which no question is left open and in which everything in which we are interested finds a place. It is easy to see that the possession of such a Weltanschauung is one of the ideal wishes of mankind. When one believes in such a thing, one feels secure in life, one knows what one ought to strive after, and how one ought to organise one’s emotions and interests to the best purpose.

In English, we have translated the component parts: Welt (world) and Anschauung (Wide-View) to create “World View.” The original Weltanschauung is, however, more all-encompassing and is therefore often used untranslated in English texts.

In his lecture, Freud goes on to mention a contemporary criticism of the Weltanschauung of scientific culture for the narrowness of its field (a criticism he then refutes, but I remain unconvinced by his argument):

...it is distinguished by negative characteristics, by a limitation to what is, at any given time, knowable, and a categorical rejection of certain elements which are alien to it. It asserts that there is no other source of knowledge of the universe but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations, in fact, what is called research, and that no knowledge can be obtained from revelation, intuition or inspiration. It appears that this way of looking at things came very near to receiving general acceptance during the last century or two. It has been reserved for the present century to raise the objection that such a Weltanschauung is both empty and unsatisfying, that it overlooks all the spiritual demands of man, and all the needs of the human mind.

Narrowness of one’s Weltanschauung is what creates an empty and unsatisfying life, whether it be this particular narrowness (scientific) or another; this particular narrowness, however, is one that interests me here, because what I would like to claim is that our own intuition and inspiration is the source by which we can improve the world that we’re accepting as real right now. Science, in its mechanics, limits our conception of what’s real to that which can be logically accepted by following the tenets of a belief system already in place. This means that we can’t really change the world, as to do so we would necessarily have to alter some of our beliefs. For example, in a scientific experiment, we are required to be able to reproduce a certain result over and over again. Well, that is of course to remove the possibility of accidents and “coincidence.” But whose life is like a sterile laboratory? What can be repeated in a lab often cannot be repeated in reality, and vice versa. An example of this: a woman’s child is hit and trapped under an automobile. She reaches over and lifts the car off the child. Holding it up with one hand, she pulls her child out from underneath. Could she do that again, for example at a gym, as a repetitive exercise? Only, I would think, if she can, by dint of that singular event in her life, change her total Weltanschauung which includes her beliefs about what a human body is capable of and also her beliefs about what she is capable of. Science uses the fact that she has never before managed such a weight to convince her that it is an accident, and can never happen again. She accepts that postulate because she accepts the Weltanschauung of the scientific world. Why, instead, does she not tell herself: obviously, I am able to lift a car. None of the things that have tired me before should really be tiring to me. I can do much more than I think is possible--I limit myself daily to the activities I think I should be able to do, based on what others tell me.  

Yet another example: in labs, there has been quite some difficulty to prove the existence of what we call Extra Sensory Perception. The tests often go something like this: I have a pack of cards. I will lift a card and look at it, and you (wherever you are, probably in another, sealed room) will try to “see” what card I am holding by attaching your sight to mine. Here’s a problem: who cares what card I am holding? It’s a boring task (like bench-pressing cars), and unlikely to stimulate heretofor unused brain cells into fresh activity. Try memorizing a list of 700 names. Can you? Yes. How likely is it? Not very. If, however, the scientist were not trying to create such a particular, repeatable, clean experiment, he would also not be removing any and every reason for the subject to actually try. Whereas again, mothers often “hear” a child’s voice, over many many miles, when that child is in trouble. Science, which once opened doors for us in the process of releasing us from other constricting views, is now busily closing them (ironically, it is doing so in an attempt to look less like the previous constricting views, by proving itself more rigorously real). I will repeat here that Freud does not--or did not, at that time--agree with me. He was very concerned with relegating “illusion” to the field of the unreal as opposed to the field of the not yet real to me, which is squarely where it belongs.

Peter Serwan’s Weltanschauung (Does the scene seem familiar?) (comments?)

In his article, The Microbial Weltanschauung, Elio notes that what we are able to see greatly changes (and has greatly changed) over time. For example, there are many more stars than we ever imagined before the invention and improvement of telescopes. But there are even more prokaryotes: 

We now know that bacteria comprise about half the biomass on this planet, a stunning realization. This is not just a numbers game: it is a fundamental shift in how we perceive life on this planet. Suddenly, participation of the prokaryotic cells in the chemical and physical transactions of this planet has taken center stage. Microbes are directly involved in the exchanges of matter via biogeochemical cycles, in shaping the geological landscape, and even in altering the weather. Although some suspected such crucial roles for microbes, such fanciful notions were generally discounted until the new numbers appeared in our consciousness.

In every square centimeter of clean skin on the inside of your elbow, there are about a million bacteria. And they hail from six different “tribes” of bacteria, according to Dr. Julia Segre of the National Human Genome Research Institute and her colleagues. An article recording their findings in RedOrbit News states, “Because humans depend on their microbiome for various essential services, including digestion, a person should really be considered a superorganism, microbiologists assert, consisting of his or her own cells and those of all the commensal bacteria. The bacterial cells also outnumber human cells by 10-1, meaning that if cells could vote, people would be a minority in their own body.”

These bacteria help us, and have to be replaced after a round of broad-action antibiotics.

Another lesson in Weltanschauung which we see in our sciences is the opposite end of the bacteria spectrum. In the past,surgeons only rinsed the visible dirt from their hands between patients, and as a result, there were very high mortality rates during childbirth. These mortality rates, oddly, were not nearly as high when a child was delivered by a midwife. Ignaz Semmelweis made the intuitive connection between the other tasks of a surgeon during the day and the negative impact they might have on the health of a mother and her newborn, and he suggested washing hands between patients with a chlorine-lime solution. He was ostracized from the scientific community for his troubles, and later died in an asylum. Why? Because at the time, you couldn’t see bacteria. The visible dirt was washed off with water. It was possible to see a difference in results if a surgeon did wash his hands, but the scientific community scoffed at the very idea, as it did not fit in their Weltanschauung, and so they would not.


So, your Weltanschauung can be very important: it can work in your favor, or it can work against you. We’ve established that. A lot of The Serpent and the Rainbow is about, in its own way, Yin and Yang, the ambivalence of the distinction between good and bad, and the ability of one thing--for example, Datura, or the Puffer Fish--to be both. Not just that there are both, but that there must be: it is necessary to have both a dark side and a light; for there to be both. I was following along with that theory just fine until I came to a passage in which he sketched out certain very difficult images from slavery in US and Haitian history. Then I thought: really? Why is that necessary? What’s wrong, actually, with a world filled to bursting with only light?

And, I had no answer. Except for the one that Agent Smith gives in the first Matrix movie, when he’s talking about the multiple variations of Weltanschauung the machines have given the humans before settling on the current, sort of unpleasant form. He says that they had tried to give the humans a dream of a dream, perfection itself. And we wouldn’t accept it. We kept trying to wake up. (I’d like to read your comments about that)...

(Screenshot from the Matrix)

Now, I want to talk about magic.  I’d like to start by quoting pieces of a lecture by Marcel in Michael Gruber’s Tropic of Night, where he talks about how we define magic, and how we disregard it:

A hundred thousand years ago, people with the same sort of brains we all have, speaking languages no less complex, lived, worked, loved, and died. Recorded history, however, begins between eight and six thousand years ago, coincident with the development of agriculture in several regions of the Old World. Before that, a great silence, some ninety thousand years of silence. And so I wonder, what were those people doing with those so excellent brains all those endless days and nights? Not working all the time. Hunter-gatherers in bening climates do not work very hard. Their tools are simply made, as are their shelters. Most hunter-gatherer tribes work fewer hours a week than Frenchmen; far fewer than Americans. So what do they do? This to me, is one of the great tasks of anthropological science, to penetrate the great silence...So I ask you, what would you do, with your marvelous brain, all those centuries? No books, no writing, few man-made things, little pressure from the environment, no television or radio, no newspapers, only the same hundred or so people to talk to? I think you would play with the envirmonment, Homo ludens, after all, and you would become intimate with it. You would invent art, to symbolize this. You would develop an intimacy with your environment so deep that we children of industrial civilization can scarcely imagine it, an intimacy deeper, perhaps, than we have with our lovers or our children, perhaps even deeper than we have with our own alienated bodies. They would be participants in an environment that was alive in the same way that they themselves were alive, whereas we are merely observers of an environment that is dead. All the little particles, yes? Yes. And another thing we would play with would be the most interesting thing in our environment, which is the human mind, our own minds and those of others. And with this, very slowly, centuries and centuries, remember, a technology develops. This technology is based not on the manipulation of the objective world, as our own is, but rather on the manipulation of the subjective world. Now, you may be familiar with the statement by the British scientist and science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, in which he states: any sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic. Just so. And what I am proposing is that among traditional cultures there is a sufficiently advanced technology of which we know very little, and what little we do know of it we denigrate, yes? And for want of a better term, we call this magic (88)

At this point in the lecture, the professor performs quite a feat. I will leave it for you to go and read about it, because the whole of the book, as far as I am concerned, is itself a work of magic, and should not be missed.

In its place, though, to put your head in the correct space, I would ask (beg) that you watch this video. Here, you will see magic:




VIDEO: Ted Talk
http://www.ted.com/talks/keith_barry_does_brain_magic.html

After Marcel performs, he comes back to his idea:
“So, let us deconstruct what you have just seen. I am French, therefore I deconstruct. First, all of us bring to this phenomenon a cultural load. We do not observe it objectively; there is no such thing. And this load tells us that there is no magic. What you are observing is merely legerdemain. You cannot tell me how I did it, perhaps, you cannot explain what you saw, but you have utter confidence [in your belief that it is merely a trick].”


That is our Waltenschauung. No magic. How sad is that? But here’s the interesting thing. We keep coming back to magic. Even science, our latest protection against believing in things that the unimaginative and power-hungry know to be dangerously untrue, is heading back in the direction of magic. We have, of course, the new physics. But we also have psychology...we have the study of perception, and dreams  (link both of these to previous posts) and we have hypnosis. Gruber’s professor goes on to talk about Shamans who use similar techniques:    

Among traditional peoples where the shamanic technologies are well developed, the manipulation of consciousness has advanced to a much higher degree. We have ample evidence that, for example, shamans and sorcerers can enter the dreams of sleeping people and stage-manage the dream state. Sorcerers can elicit in their subjects psychic states that are somewhere between dreaming and sleeping, so that the subject entertains elaborate illusions that seem undeniably real, a kind of induced psychosis [remember the hypnosis experiments]. Sorcerers can play with some skill on the interactions between mind and body, an area in which scientific medicine is almost entirely incompetent. We speak, for example, of the placebo effect in a drug trial as junk data. We toss it out, yes? We are only interested in the drug effect, so we design the double-blind trial, no one knows what is the pharmaceutical and what is the sugar pill. The patients who get rid of the cancer or whatever with the sugar pill, we don’t worry about them. They are of no interest. And when someone is sick, or in pain, and we cannot find an organic, a material cause, we dismiss it. It is only psychosomatic, we say. And the mental diseases (90-91)...

Those mental diseases and that placebo effect, those are pieces of your Waltenschauung. Waltenschauung is the same as the idea of your central image that I have explored here before (link), the little painting in your mind that encapsulates in mood, symbol, space, color, and possibilities of the entire world which you rarely, if ever, do anything to other than animate. You develop that image very young, before, probably, the age of 5, and after that, you may shift a hip, a leg; you may paint a wall, enlarge a window slightly, but the whole of the image itself remains basically the same, unless you focus very, very hard and exert a strenuous conscious effort. Unless you change the world, actually. The day you put out your palm and stop a bullet, or pass through a wall, that’s the day you’ve stopped animating your childhood drawing and started taking an active role in your own existence. [As William James pointed out, “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”] We have many mythologies in which characters do such wondrous deeds, but we understand them to be myths, and we understand myths to be lies, untruths; or we understand the actor to be one of a kind, and we just have to wait for his return.

Somehow, the existence of evil is much easier for us to grasp and believe. Is that the understanding of a small child, too small to think he/she can manage big monsters, too overwhelmed by that impatient lack of understanding when things don’t go his/her way? Is that why we grow up and believe in the impossible advances in weaponry, in the insane power of psychotics worldwide, in the oppressive “Reality” of the job market, of corporate control, of criminal activities--but not in equal measures of “good witch” powers?  

In The Haunted Screen, Lotte Eisner describes the way the Expressionist style worked to bring inanimate objects to life; motion and emotion was inherent in the style. She describes objects of the Caligari set vibrating “with an extraordinary spirituality:”

The Germans, used as they are to savage legends, have an eerie gift for animating objects. In the normal syntax of the German language objects have a complete active life: they are spoken of with the same adjectives and verbs used to speak of human beings, they are endowed with the same qualities as people, they act and react in the same way. Long before Expressionism this anthropomorphism had already been pushed to the extreme....On the one hand the poet becomes a ‘field fissured with thirst’; on the other hand, the ‘voracious’ mouths of windows or the ‘avid’ darts of shadow pierce ‘shivering’ walls, while the ‘cruel’ leaves of ‘implacable’ doors slash the ‘moaning’ flanks of ‘despairing’ houses.

Language and mythical history both create and reflect the Weltanschauung of the German people and that particular world-view (latent image ); one aspect of it is that of objects being infused with life. When you study a dream, the building or room or mountain or woods that you are in all reflect the aspect of your person and your life (and your latent image) the dream is dealing with. Is the house old, new, well-built, shabby? What are the predominant colors? Are you in the basement (the foundation of the house); is it dark, scary, gloomy, or finished and well-lit? Are you suddenly discovering a rash of opulent extra rooms you never knew existed in your home? Are you on a balcony with a dizzyingly gorgeous view? Is there a sense of unease and danger in the woods that you are picking your way through? These settings are as important as the action in a dream; they are not background. So, too, in your “waking” life, and this is something that Expressionist artists paid close attention to.  These ideas return and return again--now they are here in the modern physics, as scientists tell us that we are all, us and our surroundings, gazillions of jittering atoms in a constant exchange. I sit at this table writing, and the atoms in my body are exchanging with the atoms of the table. The history of the wood it was made from thus becomes a part of my (genetic, bacterial) history, and vice versa. Everything is living. Pantheism---everything is imbued with spirit.

Describing the Prague ghetto of the set of Golem, Eisner says:

In some mysterious way these streets contrive to abjure their life and feelings during the daytime, and lend them instead to their inhabitants, those enigmatic creatures who wander aimlessly around, feebly animated by an invisible magnetic current. But at night the houses reclaim their life with interest from these unreal inhabitants; they stiffen, and their sly faces fill with malevolence. The doors become gaping maws and shrieking gullets (23).

During the day, you are enacting the same mood that filled your dreams. This is because both moods are based on the same understanding of the universe. It is as if you dream one thing during the day (are you feebly animated?) and then get to see it in a slightly different setting at night. This gives you two opportunities to recognize what is working for you and what is not.

Now, maybe it’s just me, but shrieking gullets is not the way I want to see the doorways I walk through. That particular perception of the world does not excite me much. Yet watching the nightly news can easily make such rose-colored lenses your most-worn pair. Nuclear weapons, sadistic leaders, oppressive regimes, growing poverty. Going to work every day, for many, can be much like stepping on a moving belt that topples you right through the fiery jaws of the monstrous spirit of the Metropolis factory. The surroundings seem dim, and they overpower one. And we comfort ourselves, saying, everything is necessary, darkness and light.

But. What I want to argue here is, that is an imbalance of darkness. That is a feeble light, and an immense dark. That is not yin and yang, making a harmonious circle. It isn’t. 

Darkness is the unknown, the woods at night, the steps downward into the cellar. Walking into them is you facing that unknown, you exploring territory you are unfamiliar with. That is difficult; it is a fear you overcome. Darkness is the mystery of life. It is what you enter instead of turning on the television and accepting whatever prefabricated dreams already exist in your world. The way we have defined darkness is unhealthy. It is unacceptable. Think back to the post on the Vodoun loa Erzulie, to the general acceptance, beautifully worded by Maya Deren, that her expectations of endless luxury and love and attention are that of a child--understandable only because a child knows no better. But it isn’t true. A child knows better. Erzulie requires that we take the time to make ourselves beautiful, to make our offerings beautiful, to remember that each motion and act is an art, more of an art than the finished product, and that it matters to take the time to make something gorgeous. And once we have done that, the rules we broke to make it no longer have blanket authority. We can weaken them by the edges, and work our way in. 






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Colette Colascione’s lush remake of Max Ernst’s collage from Une Semaine du Bonte

Back in The Serpent and the Rainbow, Davis describes how the setting of Haiti had such a different mood that it altered his own. His mindset, coming into the task he’d been sent for, was freshly altered from previous events, when he had quite suddenly decided he was bored with his usual anthropological studies and, having pointed to some strange location on a map and wildly thrown himself at its correlating physical location on the planet, he found himself waist-deep in flood waters, crossing unmapped territory and studying plants he knew nothing about with total strangers. This was a man willing to go down the cellar steps at midnight. In the following passage, he describes his hotel:


“The hotel appeared to have shifted its mood yet again. In the daylight when I had arrived it was a white palace, fragile and pretty, a gingerbread fantasy of turrets and towers, cupolas and wooden minarets decorated in lace, which paint alone kept from collapsing into the sea. By late afternoon it had fallen into desuetude, its beams swollen by the moist heat, its atmosphere dense from the impending storm. Later, in the wake of the deluge that tumbled every day like an avalanche onto the tropical plain of the city, the building’s facade washed clean, it glowed again with warmth and beauty in the soft air of dusk. Now, by night and a shrouded moon, it had grown morbid, abandoned, overgrown, staring out over the city with shuttered windows, its gates bound by lianas, its gardens unkempt and wild.”

So, he is becoming more and more aware of how his mood (as well as his beliefs) can affect his physical surroundings. Then an unknown gentleman approaches him:

“‘And you, mon cher, what are you here for?’ The words startled me, and I turned to face a narrow man dressed in fine linen, perched on the edge of the hotel veranda like a shorebird. In his right hand spun an ebony cane inlaid with silver. 

‘A journalist, no doubt. And which of the many faces of this land shall you see? Shall you see the misery, the suffering, and call it the truth?’ (45)” [Note: this mysterious character reminds me of the loa Ghede, who has the particular talent of being able to see more than one world at a time]

Think of that! The misery and the suffering: is that not what we call the truth? Do we not call it the news, reality? Do we not exhort others to “face reality?” Like the bumper sticker says, If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention?  Let’s revisit Erzulie for a moment. Let’s realign our expectations with something closer to what we would like to expect. How will we dream a world which is amazing, if our perceptual screen, if our Weltanschauung does not make space for the amazing?

PART TWO:


“Your knee is not working smoothly. We must give you some clay to make a statue of a running woman,” Hippocrates diagnosed.

Now, remember the Remedios Varo quote at the top of this blog? That is how we will escape.

Back in The Serpent and the Rainbow, Mr. Davis remembers a visit to the Andes in which he saw something similar to that quote in a curandero’s treatmant of a man ill to his core:

My tired thoughts broke into fragments that landed on a distant night, cold and clear as glass, in the high Andes of Peru. A brown dusty trail curved past agave swollen in bud and rose to an open veranda flanked on three sides by the adobe walls of the farmhouse. Against one wall sat the patient, alone and strangely solemn. He had been a prosperous fisherman a season ago, before the currents shifted and the warm tropical waters came south to strangle the sea life of the entire coast. As if conforming to some bitter law of physics, his personal life had mimicked the natural disorder [italics mine]: his child had taken ill, and then his wife fled with a lover. In the wake of these events the poor man disappeared from his village, only to reappear a month later, a simulacrum of death, naked and quite insane.For two weeks the curandero had sought in vain to divine the source of such misfortune. With his inherent eye for the sacred he had laid out the power objects of his altar--stone crystals, jaguag teeth, murex shells, whale bones, and ancient huacas that rose methodically to touch an arc of colonial swords impaling the earth. In nocturnal ceremonies he and the patient had together inhaled a decoction of alcohol and tobacco from scallop shells carefully balanced beneath each nostril...(p. 35)  

Here we are, remembering that the objects around us are infused with our being (and we with theirs) and full of meaning and power. Their placement is part of our latent image, and it is part of where we are now. Usually, we sit and stand and move around only in that image, only acting under its underlying rules. Now, if we move objects in a way that makes no sense, if we connect things that don’t belong together and alter things that we have never before thought to alter, we change our environment and open up room for something that doesn’t belong to it to exist. We shift the underlying rules; we shift the actual latent image. So, like Varo, we move these things together, and then we draw some connection (however arbitrary or silly it may feel) between that motion and some other event that occurs afterwards, and then we create a meaning for it. We note and understand that we have created a change, that we have practiced magic. And once we have understood that, well--we have broken many underlying rules, haven’t we? And opened many new doors. And all of a sudden, we are breaking down walls and our architecture has swung wildly from Gothic Cathedrals to Frank Gehry swooping, curving windows. All of a sudden, the bomb that’s been whistling towards us drops to the ground with a plink, nothing more than a minor explosion of dust.