It Takes Time
A man once spoke about how difficult it might be to explain clouds to someone who has never seen a cloud or even the sky, for that matter.
Another man once gave a talk in the shape of an icicle because he could not find any other way to reproduce the shape of a particular icicle without it melting in the process.
Another man once spoke about how in mathematics the infinity that lies between any two numbers is larger than the infinity you reach by counting from zero to infinity.
Yet another man said that if one can imagine a group of people at the same time, regardless of whether they are distant from each other right now or that it has perhaps needed time and maybe even some moving around to learn about all these people, perhaps an image can be produced where they are all together just as if they are together in one’s thoughts; obviously, he said, they don’t need to be in the actual image.
If all these people were only divided by space, he asked, would it be enough to just remove the space between them and have them side by side? Still they wouldn’t need to be there, of course.
This same man spoke about how if you have an image of half a thing, that image often has more information in it than the image of the whole thing: imagine a biology atlas in which one half of a head explains things but the whole head would make little sense.
This last man was Mateusz Sadowski. I remember wondering, while speaking to him, whether thoughts are or are not like electricity. I know very little about electricity but what I know makes me wonder if a thought needs to move in a closed circuit in order to form: if a thought can only form when there is a very clear end to it from the beginning. I imagine this as an image of a thought waiting at the finish line for a version of itself to hit the line and then, fully formed, it claims the idea.
I am not sure if it helps to imagine thoughts as electricity or as animated race horses to understand how they work, especially since it requires sending a thought along that first one to observe how it does it. I mean, I’m not sure you can really send something along that same path twice.
You would probably need to split the whole thing into at least two to make it finish two lines at a similar time. Mateusz is good at this.
I am not sure it helps to imagine this in images at all but that’s what I usually do too.
– Virginija Januškevičiūtė