Years ago I knew a woman who told me a story about a Salish woman we both knew. Briefly, the Salish woman would say “track bear” when she was pointing (or referring) to a bear track. She was a Salish speaker and the underlying sense of reality that was instilled in her early years (and was recorded in the rhythms and syntax of her first language) stayed with her. She explained (to the woman I once knew) when asked, that to say “track bear” is obvious since you see the track first and then you see the bear.

Little bits of knowledge like this are like prisms. Turned this way and that they break up what we thought was a singular modality. The relationship between what our bodies receive from the world and what we perceive, and then communicate to ourselves (let alone others) is like white light. It isn’t singular.

For humans there isn’t a case where the world is either about objects and subjects or about events. Demonstrably it is about both. The decision about what to make central (either the subject/objects or the events – the space between) is a cultural decision made in the development of a group of people in space over time. What interests me is the movement a mind can make between bear track and track bear. This is the world of the liminal, the cultural translator, the mind that slips on its own (un)certainties.

I’ve been rather sick for several days. Bad, bad headache and since my daughter is also sick, it’s been frustrating. Can’t think, but still have to operate. Can’t even read much because it ratchets up the pain after not very long. Still, I did read “The Noble Rider” which is an essay by Wallace Stevens from his collection of essays called The Necessary Angel.

I mentioned this book in the August 17 post on Phenomenology, poetry and sense when I felt a connection between the “thing” and what Stevens’ thinks about poetry, imagination and reality. Mind slippage of the sort that track bear track represents is what happens (or what enables) when the certainties of event/or/subject-object are fractured. The slivers left, the “questioning” I talk about in the last thing-post is like the rainbow the prism enables us to see. It is important to remember that the prism doesn’t create it, by the way, it just makes visible to us the constituent frequencies of what normally appears as “white.”

This is why I think that the rock is just as real as the thing-in-itself (last paragraph of that Aug 17 post). White light is not unreal. Neither are the constituent frequencies the “really real” light. They are just as much a product of our visual equipment and our resultant interpretation as is white light. What seems critical to me is that our visual equipment obviously includes eyes, nerves, cerebral processing modules as well as the world of electro-magnetic frequencies and photons: what we perceive is a result of the relationship between what we have evolved to be and what we have evolved within. What I question is where does track bear track come into it? Where does this cultural imagination – the various cultures’ certainty of correct and obvious interpretation of what is seen – obtain? I suppose it must be in the “processing” that imagination has its abode.

All this has led me to question imagination. What is it? I mean there are the Romantics who are sure they know, and Stevens (and other poets/artists of course) has things to say about its relationship to reality and to the mind, as do the Philosophers and Cognitive Scientists. So that’s what I’m exploring.

For me, all of it is still tethered to the idea of “thing”/”thing-in-itself” and in my head “thing”/”thing-in-itself” and “imagination” relate, but how? No idea yet. Just a feeling. It’s a bit like a Tarot card I’m not quite sure where to place relative to others already chosen, and if you read symbols of any sort, you know that position is critical. A new card can seriously derange what one thought was (finally) understood.