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copyright 2010
For information on how to purchase
prints featured in this book, or to
leave comments or questions, please visit:
www.thepossibilityofthethinganditself.posterous.com
THEPOSSIBLITYOF THETHINGAND ITSELF IMAGES AND TEXTS
BY IAN GONSHER
Special thanks to Richard, who, over the many
years, has brought much light into the world.
This book was made possible through the support of
Brown University and the Creative Arts Council.
PART ONE: ECHO AND NARCISSUS
8
Here I am... I am Echo... but I am not here...
neither who nor where. I, and by I, I mean you.
You and the echo of me within the mind of you the
reader... us as meaning upon a page. I, the reflected
first person, am a copy of indeterminate origin,
neither who nor where. I am an echo. Echoes have
no inherent qualities. They take on the shapes of
empty spaces. Echoes are effects of plurality and
HINENI: HERE I AM
9
HINENI: HERE I AM
difference... even here, I am neither who nor where.
The last time I saw Narcissus, he was sitting
beside the still surface of a pond. The two of us,
alone together. The land was uninhabited for as
far as a voice can carry. We were both very young,
unexpired by age, unencumbered by fate, and it was,
quite simply, love. It was love in that first moment
you recognize it as love. It was love the first time
again. In some versions of the story the place was
called Eden, and we had different names. But that is
neither who nor where. Narcissus was so beautiful,
new to me there.
Often, it has been reported it was vanity that
blinded him to me. It has often been repeated that
it was blank empathy that imprisoned us both.
This was not the case. I knew of his ontologies.
I knew the depth of his soul. He was not motivated
by vanity. Vanity was abhorrent to Narcissus.
10
Vanity violated the profundity of his beauty. And of
beauty and echoes, what can be said that is not
already spoken as a question, “Who are you?”
“Who am I?” This was the question in his gaze.
I saw Narcissus there (who and where) searching
for the source of the reflection. He gazed into the
stillness of the pond, a mirror in the landscape.
Upon that synesthetic surface, sight became sound,
echoes within reflections emerged. He heard a
transcendent sound that permeated everything
and reflected everyone... beyond the surface of
the water. Beyond the echo of the ego and the id
entity. Beyond the blank self. Beyond the self that is
concealed when you look at it. It was an echo. It was
the most beautiful Echo! I saw Narcissus sitting by
the side of the pond, exchanging meaning for being.
NARCISSUS AND THE
REFLECTION
11
Sunlight rebounded off the surface of the pond,
beyond the sky, and into the void which borders the
earth. The water remained still, occasioning unflawed
reflections and speculations. Narcissus paused, and
gazed into the water for an indeterminate amount of
time. Then it all changed.
It arrived as a raindrop in front of my eyes. I saw it
before I felt it. The projectile pierced the plane of the
water, but water is liquid, more fluid than rigid, so the
surface slipped away. A simple pattern propagated
outward from the center where the drop had fallen.
It had shape and frequency, simultaneously. That
raindrop and the others that followed inscribed
themselves upon the surface of the pond. It was
NARCISSUS AND THE
REFLECTION
12
peculiar that I had not noticed the surface before, now
delimited by the light rain. And even more, that I had
not noticed the difference between myself and the
reflection. A fundamental distinction ignored! But from
distinctions… the initiation of meaning, differences
perpetually deferring, and the invention of absence.
Absence is nothing if not the relative and imagined
distance between entities. This is the manner in
which the noumenon fractured. Surfaces appearing
every place I looked. They separated one thing from
another. Sometimes the surfaces were beautiful
to look at, but most of the reflections had failed.
13
It arrived like a raindrop on the back of my head.
I felt it before I saw it. My focus arrested, aware of
the obvious for the first time, of the surface and my
reflection across it. I whispered to myself, “I am
here... a distinct subject, incongruent objects, and
the illusion that separates them.” In another version
of the story, Echo asked, “Where are you?” – It may
have been Eden.
Then all of a sudden, and for no apparent reason,
it changed once again. I found myself just above
the south pole, just below the infinite bend of the
earth’s surface. Water and ice, sometimes light...
the landscape lacked scale and lay abruptly flat. It
reminded me of the surface of a page or a screen.
Anxiously, I tried to imagine Greenwich. Then
FAILED REFLECTIONS
14
thinking of the surface below my feet, I remembered
something about the transitions and translations of
surface tensions – You can walk on the surface of
water if you wait for the water to freeze.
At the south pole there were rumors of the
penultimate antithesis of the infinite stretch of the
globe. And I forgot my name, or at least misplaced
my position. Who and where? Lost at the bottom
of the world I wondered if it was a fool’s errand
to search for the culminating surface of a sphere.
But then it occurred to me that all positions on the
earth’s circumference were equally removed from
the spinning center of the planet. And I imagined
the inaccessible core as a Thing-in-Itself. It can be
THE FRACTURED NOUMENON
15
THE FRACTURED NOUMENON
recognized (albeit amid the debris of the imagination)
by a circular movement that is neither fully present,
nor completely absent. I imagined the internal orbit
as such, obscured by the rotating surface upon
which all humanity plays out. And I stood there, feet
positioned against the surface of the ground.
And surfaces were everywhere apparent.
Surfaces coincided with the ordinary sensations
and separations of things. Upon the periphery of
common things, installed amongst the disregarded
obvious and the manifestly supererogatory, the
echo reemerged as a hint, a reminder of the
premise of repetition. Surfaces and their doubles,
echoes everywhere apparent. Surfaces as a ceiling
concealing. As a wall or a floor. As a gesture to
the ground against the sky. Surfaces in space
and in time, and in practice and in discourse.
Surfaces as apriori distinctions, positions, and
16
From Noumenon to Phenomena
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18
transitions. Surfaces signifying the appearance of
common things.
The surfaces of common things articulate the
useful distinctions of accrued experience. They
fasten us all to the spectacle of ubiquity. And
when we speak, we make mention with souvenirs
of conspicuous divisions, by which we know one
thing from another, and from which the universal
meaning of knowledge, and the local meaning of
identity are both derived and sustained. But these
common things are not things in themselves. They
are contingent upon an awareness of the relations
positioned in their design.
Then all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, it
repeated once again. I found myself just above the
south pole, just below the infinite bend of the earth’s
surface. Water and ice, mostly light... the landscape
was flush enormous against an inconclusive
19
sky. Suspended between a map and a globe, the
south pole appears as both an edge and a point,
superpositioned between two dimensional and three
dimensional models of the ground. It reminded me
of the original premise of repetition.
And these common things everywhere apparent
as transitions and positions – a point – attenuated
into an edge, folded in by a surface, that when
disregarded coalesces into a simple noumenal
volume. Eternal even then, in the beginning which
was before the end.
20
“The concept of a noumenon – that is, of a thing which is not to be thought
as object of the senses, but as a thing in itself, solely through a pure
understanding… is thus merely a limiting concept, the function of which is to curb
the pretensions of sensibility”
Immanuel Kant
from the Critique of Pure Reason
AN UNKNOWN
SOMETHING
21
Kant places a significant epistemological
limit on what can be disclosed about the world
independent of the mind which perceives it. A
particularly conspicuous feature of the Kantian
project is an apparently insuperable gap between
phenomena in the world as they are experienced,
and the world as it is independent of the mind...
as a thing-in-itself, which Kant vaguely describes as
AN UNKNOWN
SOMETHING
Scissors
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23
24
“an unknown something”.
The mind imposes order onto the world, making
it legible by translating what is into what appears
to be, from noumenon to phenomena. Phenomena
are filtered through the senses, and it would seem
that a necessary precondition of all experienced
phenomena is the faculty to discern differences
between distinct entities in the world, between
qualities and quantities within space and time.
These qualities and quantities are bundled together,
experienced, signified and given meaning. But the
consequence of this is that our eyes, indeed all of
our senses, hide the noumenal world from view.
Consider your experience of space for example.
Can we assume that space is a property of the world
independent of the mind? It would seem that spatial
distinctions depend on the cognition of absence,
absence disclosed to the mind as a difference
25
between things. One might say that this is the way in
which the mind creates a place for the world to exist.
Absence may be both a condition of awareness, in
that it initiates space between distinct entities, and
absence may be an object of awareness when we
assign it value as a lack of value. So, to what degree,
if at all, does space exist independent of the mind?
The same question might be asked of your
experience of time. We find ourselves always
already within a continuum of time. It seems that a
temporal awareness depends on the aggregation of
memories, the relationship between moments bound
together by the mind, within a continuity of past,
present, and future. The same question is applicable.
To what degree are these relational differences and
similarities imposed onto the world by the mind? To
what degree are they independent of the mind, if at all?
Consider an object – a pair of scissors for
26
example. But before you do, consider the mind
that considers those scissors. Consider the mind
which experiences itself as distinct from everything
and everyone else… a distinct subject, oriented
towards discrete objects, objects such as those
scissors…those scissors which cut, separate, and
divide. Can it possibly be that the mind is both the
consequence of the conspicuous difference between
itself and everything and everyone else, and that
the mind is also a precondition of all apparent
differences? Do the contours of the mind give shape
to the world, or do the contours of the world give
shape to the mind? Are both options possible?
And as I become aware of those scissors,
when they are signified as scissors, they detach and
differ from everything and everyone else, taking on
their own local identity and specific meaning. As I
experience them, they disentangle themselves
27
from other objects, making them distinct, placing
them in time, setting them in space, and allowing
an understanding of their qualities and quantities
to emerge. They are useful too. They multiply the
content of the world by dividing things into discrete
and distinct forms, thus initiating a mellifluous plurality.
Consider a map… but before you do, consider the
earth to which it refers. A map demarcates territories
and signifies distinct entities, but these borders
and boundaries are not a necessary feature of the
world as it is independent of the representations
which the cartographer applies to it. The world does
not require these distinctions as a condition for
its existence, and a world without distinctions and
differences must necessarily be considered singular.
When the scissors are not framed by awareness,
where do they go? Perhaps to the same forest where
soundless trees fall? When those scissors shake
2828
Separation
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36” x 36”
30
loose of all differences from, and relation to, other
things; when they are unframed and ignored, does it
make any sense to speak of the inherent distinctions
between one thing and another? If differences and
distinctions are relational and mind-dependent, but
also a precondition of all phenomena, then it does
not seem unreasonable to speculate that the world
undisclosed is singular; an ineffable Thing-in-Itself.
32
Nothing is Greater
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36” x 36”
34
Nothing is greater than infinity.
Therefore infinity is singular with presence priviledged over absence.
3535
PART TWO: ADAM AND EVE
38
In the beginning, which was before the beginning
and outside of time, everything that ever was, or
would ever be, was singular and undifferentiated.
There was no distinction between the mind and
attended objects. There were no comparisons of
the one to the many. Before moments began, there
were no separations at all.
EPISTEMOLOGY PRIOR TO THE TASTE OF THE FRUIT
39
EPISTEMOLOGY PRIOR TO THE TASTE OF THE FRUIT
But after the beginning, we perceived the decay.
Our eyes and our mind hid the noumenal universe
from view. Everything de-transcended into the
common things of the quotidian world, and as they
did, a space opened up, within which we acquired
identity and agency.
Light was the first to become distinct against the
darkness. Then the sky above could be distinguished
from the waters below – and the waters separated to
form the land. By the fourth day, light and time had
divided once more. Water, land, and sky, but mostly
light. Eventually we found ourselves in a garden
and delighted in the questions, “who and where?” It
was the first time we were reminded of the original
premise of repetition.
Positioned in time amongst a polyphony of
events and phenomena, everything as we know
it emerged – transcendence intimately wound up
40
Bereshit
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4242
43
44
within immanence – translations and transitions,
histories and traditions, one thing becoming
another becoming another becoming another… a
constellation of rhythms and patterns which are the
only means we have ever had of recovering that
which the aggregated moments of history withhold
from us at all times.
“Who and where?” And we realized we were in
Eden, but with paradise we had nothing to compare.
This is why beauty and love had different meanings
there. And we asked ourselves and each other with
wonder, “Why was this all created?”
There are different versions of the story. In one
version, God created us; male and female, and
we were naked and not ashamed. We were one
THE FIRSTTIME AGAIN
45
being, the same, male and female whole. Then
love became possible, as we became aware of the
differences between us, and intimacy played out as
non-zero sum love games... It was love in that first
moment that love is recognized as love. It was love
for the first time. It was love the first time again.
It was love then, and later, it was love too.
It was love born out of a wish to disobey customary
chronologies, defiant against time. Perhaps we even
secretly wished to visit ourselves as children, or
aspired to return to that place which preceded the
beginning.
In Eden, we were promised the end; the
acquisition of death deferred. We are always already
approaching that unknown something. We realized
that with every breath, in every moment we lived, we
were expiring. But we also noticed that our perpetual
mortality was contingent upon the separation of
46
moments, one from one another. And we asked
each other, “Why was this all created, if only to be
destroyed?”
In the innumerable generations since, which our
original love made possible, love and this question
have repeated themselves too many times to count.
And although the answer has never been completely
clear to us, that we are here to consider the question
must be an important hint… Love like death plays out
as a constructed concept in the minds of the living.
And we were reminded of the original premise of
repetition. Eternal even then, in the beginning, which
was before the end.
47
48
“God planted a garden in Eden, to the east, and placed there the man
whom He had formed. And God caused to sprout from the ground every tree that was pleasing to the sight and good for food; also the Tree of Life in the midst of the garden, and the
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad.”
Genesis 1:8
THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT
AND HEAT
49
Together we ate of the fruit, and it was good. It
was good because it contained both the possibility
of the good, and the possibility of that which was
not good, each giving meaning to the other. The fruit
initiated that separation, which was a fundamental
distinction we had not considered before.
God called out like an echo, “Where are you?”
(who and where) And Eden changed… How
could we have known it was not good to disobey
God before we ate from the Tree of Knowledge?
The fruit produced that distinction! Before we tasted
it, we were like children, not knowing good from bad.
So, how could we have known it was bad to disobey
the commands of God, even if we were warned of
the consequences?
THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT
AND HEAT
50
Did we already know? Did the fruit merely
occasion the contrast? It is difficult to recall what we
knew prior to knowing the difference. Regardless of
those fugitive memories, it was only after we tasted
the fruit that we acquired the ability to perceive these
distinctions clearly – to separate the meaning of one
action from another – to know the difference between
good and bad.
51
”Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, you must not eat thereof; for on the day you eat of it,
you shall surely die.”
Genesis 2:16
52
The Hebrew word for sacredness is kedushah,
which connotes separation. The sacred, in this sense,
takes the form of the good in opposition to that which
is not sacred. Sacredness, as a concept understood
in this manner, requires no pretense to metaphysics
or a transcendental signified (it does not necessarily
preclude them either). Sacredness can be a useful
concept for framing the ways in which we privilege
one thing over another by giving meaning and value
to our perceptions of the world. As soon as we orient
our attention towards one object or person, at the
expense of all others, a hierarchy has emerged.
Those hierarchies give structure to our perceptions,
while also obscuring the integrated whole.
But what are the consequences of separating one
DIALECTICAL MONISM
53
DIALECTICAL MONISM
thing from another in order to give them meaning?
Is this always a necessary move in the disclosure
of experienced phenomena? Is the sacred always
predicated upon the contrast between opposing
concepts, concepts which emerge out of one
another, concepts which separate and exclude one
another? To give value and meaning to the world,
must we always disrupt its unity by placing one thing
in a privileged relationship to another? Or is the
sacred always already everywhere, whole, waiting
to be discovered as such? If so, in the absence of
comparison, how does one become aware of it?
54
“The serpent said, “You will not surely die; for God knows that on the day you eat of it your eyes will
be opened and you will be like God, knowing good from bad.”
Genesis 3:4
THE INTENSIVE PROPERTIES OF THE SUN
55
Then all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, we
found ourselves upon the great circle of the earth’s
equator. There was some water, some land, but
mostly light within a boundless sky. We compared it
to the frequently dark, perpetually cold landscape at
the bottom of the earth. We were closer to the sun
than we had ever been before, so we spent the entire
night staring directly into it, feeling its warmth, and
discovering that the roots of the Tree of Knowledge
were just as heliotropic as the branches.
And we discovered a stark distinction between
burning and freezing; hot and cold were each
discrete, yet mind and body dependent. We gave
meaning to the conditions as we experienced
THE INTENSIVE PROPERTIES OF THE SUN
56
Dialectical Monism
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36” x 36”
58
them, conditions which occurred independent
of the mind, but to which the mind engendered a
graspable shape.
Hot and cold, light and dark, presence and
absence… We thought about the good. We thought
about the absence of good too. We were Narcissus
and Echo. We were Adam and Eve. Who and where!
And we closed our eyes and imagined that all of
the differences and distinctions had collapsed into
each other, that Logos and langue had become
coterminous, as if all was one.
And there was the duality of hot and cold – the
meaning of these concepts is always already
constrained, both within the sensations produced,
and in the way these terms operate in opposition to
GIVING MEANING TO THE MOTION
59
one another. Temperature is the measurement of
the relative motion (or kinetic energy) of molecules
within a substance. These molecules sometimes
move at faster speeds, sometimes at slower speeds,
but their meaning and value are always constrained
within limiting concepts, limiting concepts such as
the mind dependent binary of hot and cold – hot is
hot because it is “not cold”, and cold is cold because
it is “not hot”. These perceived differences produce
the respective meanings of these terms. “Hot” and
“cold” delimit one another as two distinct, mutually
interdependent categories upon a single spectrum;
they are disclosed as a conceptual construct,
intertwined within a framework of other concepts that
are external to that spectrum. This is how sensation
and meaning are given to the motion of molecules;
motion which occurs independent of the mind.
Hot and cold produce meaning in relation
GIVING MEANING TO THE MOTION
60
to each other, as differentiated concepts. The
meanings of these terms are dependent on, and
contained within, consciousness and discourse.
Their meaning is necessarily contingent on the way
in which the mind gives shape to them. And yet,
that meaning is still necessarily contingent on the
conditions of the world, as they are as a Thing in
Itself, which is to say, as they are independent of the
mind or any sense experience of them.
Beyond the conceptual constraints of hot
and cold, what value and meaning can temperature
have? Outside of the constructed framework in which
experience is contained, external to those spectra
in which meaning is constrained, beyond meaning
itself, which is disclosed as concepts in opposition to
one another… what remains?
How do the apriori preconditions for experience
give shape to experienced conditions? If meaning is
THE OBJECT/OTHER
SPECTRUM
61
produced out of the differences between conceptual
categories, if that meaning is a product of terms
defined by what they are not, and if those differences
emerge as a mind dependent system of related
concepts, and not as a Thing in Itself, then what can
be said of the difference between who and what?
Who and where? But who is the who that is
there? Who am I? And who, and/or what, is this “I”
that is both the subject and object of my question,
both the inquisitor and the inquiry?
Who and what? As I consider these questions, as
I think about it, and I think about myself considering it,
I identify myself, I recognize myself, both exterior to
myself, yet immersed within myself, superpositioned,
THE OBJECT/OTHER
SPECTRUM
62
both as subject and object.
“Who am I?” This was the question in Narcissus’s
gaze. In another version of the story, he gazed in
opposing directions simultaneously, each away from
the other towards separate and distinct vanishing
points. In one direction – it was inward attention toward
the Self. In the other – outward attention towards the
phenomenal world. As he gazed, Narcissus thought
of hot and cold. He thought of good and bad and the
story of Adam and Eve. But most of all, he thought
of desire, a desire to know… to know himself and to
know that which was not himself. It reminded him of
how much he longed for Echo. And he imagined that
she was just beyond the threshold of those vanishing
points, which weren’t points at all.
Narcissus asked himself, what lies beyond the
veil of that perpetual horizon? What if he was to go
there? There were rumors that at a certain scale, all
LET THERE BE LIGHT
63
straight lines are actually curved, eventually coming
back around to themselves. Might love be that way
too? Could it be that this was how the differences
dissolve, tensions resolve, and all distinctions lose
their meaning? Perhaps an echo would reemerge.
As time passed, Narcissus’s outward gaze
disclosed echoes in objects and Others. In the
opposing direction, interior, oriented towards himself,
that echo eventually appeared as a reflection, and in
the reflection was a question – “Who am I?”
Then all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, it
repeated once again, but this version of the story was
different than the others. Adam and Eve lay together
looking up above at the night sky, gazing outward,
backs flat against a round earth. They speculated
LET THERE BE LIGHT
64
about what lay beyond that which they could see,
beyond the clouds, beyond the trees, beyond inside
of you and me.
Looking upward and out, Adam and Eve imagined
the most ancient light in the universe – light from the
beginning – even now, you can hear it in a detuned
radio. There’s an echo, a pattern whispered in the
static, wavelengths of redshifted heat arriving from
the furthest edge of the visible universe – the Cosmic
Background Radiation, like a fossil of Genesis in the
heavens. It’s there, right now, in every direction in the
sky. Together, they witnessed the edge of the visible
universe, and they both agreed it was sublime.
Then Eve held Adam’s hand. He whispered
something in her ear. They closed their eyes and
looked inwardly at each other. And when they finally
opened them again, they stood together, and went
on to explore that unknown something, which lies
65
beyond the veil of the horizon. This was how they
discovered the infinite bend of the earth’s surface.
And the surfaces no longer reminded them of the
surface of a page or a screen. They realized that
all paths on a sphere are great circles, which have
no edge and no end. This is how it was possible
to peer beyond the flat horizon, which was not flat
at all… Gazing upward towards the sky, looking
outward across the horizon, looking inward towards
themselves, they beheld the same nameless thing,
superpositioned, as if somewhere between a map
and a globe. Eternal even then, in the beginning
which was before the end.
Let There Be Light
Ink on Canvas
36” x 36”
Map of the Cosmic Background Radiation courtesy of NASA
6767
68
69
Tanach: The Stone Edition. Brooklyn, NY:
Mesorah Publications, 1996.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason.
New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1965.
WORKS CITED
70