Creative writing and artful observations

[Magical Realist]

Consciousness as kind of seeing that is also the light by which it sees. The light shines upon the world, at once making it visible thru the transparent clarity it is shining thru. Seeing doubled back upon itself, as what is shining back again thru its very being shined-upon. Consciousness is the mystery of how shine becomes shown.

[Magical Realist]

On the fractal nature of seeing..

Seeing is never just one discrete one-time event or action. Seeing always and only takes place in already seeing, which takes place in yet more seeing, on and on forever amen. It's contained only by itself, and so uncontainable by anything else. This is why no matter where you look and however much you zoom out or in there is always more to see--infinitely more! The same eye that can magnify a tree down to a single cell can also magnify a distant light in the night sky into a whole galaxy. Seeing is thus fractal-like in nature and infinitely recursive, bounded in scope yet boundless in scale. It just keeps spiraling outward and into itself like some harmoniously self-assembling jeweled apparition--like a twisted kaleidoscope constantly manifesting new things to behold!
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Wittgenstein had some interesting thoughts about vision:

1. The Limit of the Self

"The visual field does not really form a class of things with a sight. This is because you can’t see the eye in the visual field. Nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye."

What he meant: This is Proposition 5.633. Just as the physical eye is the invisible center of what you see—you see everything else but you never actually see the eye itself—the "metaphysical self" is missing from the world. You cannot look out at the world and locate "yourself" as a physical object inside of it.

2. The Limit of Life "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits."

What he meant: This is Proposition 6.4311. Wittgenstein argues that your life's boundary is like the boundary of your vision. You never actually see the edge of your visual field—there is just no vision beyond it. Similarly, because death is the total end of experience, you can never live to "experience" it; the boundary of the world simply moves with you as long as you live in the present.
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Thus is it the case that seeing, as well as consciousness itself, is always open-ended and transcendental, because the eye that is seeing is itself unseeable and the subject that is experiencing is itself unexperiencable or noumenal. Because their center is outside themselves, there is no possibility of a circumference.

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Everything you need to know and can know about the color green can be immediately grasped in the instant of seeing it. It's a package deal, downloaded at once into your consciousness in total. Nothing more is needed to understand it and nothing more CAN be added to it. At the same time, this knowledge can in no way be described or put into words. It is utterly private and exclusive to yourself. The only way we can share it is just by pointing others to it, thus sharing the experience of just seeing it. Thus while the color green is a totally private and subjective experience, it is still a public objective fact of the world that most everyone can confirm directly for themselves.

[Magical Realist]

Word for today: "eremition"

"There is an unspoken strength in eremition—the graceful withdrawal from the world, not out of defeat, but out of wisdom. It is the quiet art of stepping back, of choosing solitude not as an escape, but as a sacred return to the self. In a world that constantly demands performance, connection, and availability, eremition is a soft, steady rebellion. It is the whispered truth that you are allowed to rest, to recalibrate, to reclaim your inner peace—without apology and without creating chaos."