against casting tape fiction

“Photography is alright if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops—for a split second,” he said. “But that’s not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world.”

In our ancestral environment, there were no movies; what you saw with your own eyes was true. Is it any wonder that fictions we see in lifelike moving pictures have too great an impact on us? Conversely, things that really happened, we encounter as ink on paper; they happened, but we never saw them happen. We don’t remember them happening to us.

This is the sort of thing I tend to think about. I ponder the paradox—stare at it as if it were an object on the desk in front of me. I stare and wait for ideas and intuitions to gather, but I do not unpack my instruments of reason.