On the Origin of Image and Consciousness
We all have been born into a curious world. Already here by the time I arrived were such wonders as color television, grocery stores, language, and the atomic bomb. This world’s teeming exuberance displays itself everywhere: Traffic signs instruct me, radios scream for my attention, posters display moody scenes from the latest round of blockbuster movies, birds sing. In the window of a dentist’s office, newly whitened teeth grin from a happy mouth, while in the park across the street someone rides a silver scooter. Squirrels chatter. People on TV suggest I should treat myself to hamburgers and electronics. Everything disappears into this fog, and everything emerges from it in turn, seizing me.
What chance does consciousness stand in all this mess?
I want to go back. I want the time before television and radio, before posters and professional athletes. Way back there is a time when the world human beings had managed to make was no more than a tiny scrap overlaid upon the larger, more chaotic earth. Those humans were born into an earth with more animals than tools. Walking between villages that were always remote, people might not see a single thing made by human hands for days at a time. The only trappings of civilization were what they could carry.
But even that time is too late. I want to go further back, before there were any tools at all, when there was no world. Only the earth. Strictly speaking, we were not even human yet. We walked through an undifferentiated earth. What we saw was a collection of blurs, perhaps, or a seething morass of the inarticulate, the unarticulated. There was not yet speech, not yet language. I struggle to portray such a world in language, to use language as a tool for discussing non-language. Maybe it can’t be done. But try. Imagine what a weasel sees in a continuous flow of sense input, the world received mutely, unregistered and most likely unremembered. Perhaps we catch a whiff of this world when we’re driving and someone abruptly pulls into our lane. We swerve without thinking, yet somehow we aim our car to an empty patch of road. Now subtract the moment of relief, leaving only the pounding heart, the way oxygen suddenly acquires a taste, as every part of our sensory apparatus attunes itself more closely to the world, obliterating our rational filters and leaving us with only two abilities, to fight or flee. In the world to which I’m trying to return, we wouldn’t remember our near-miss. It would leave the moment we sniffed food, or sex. Don’t realize that death is coming; don’t understand anything at all about time. There is only the haze of the moment.
Eventually, perhaps by the engine of evolution or the grace of some god, differentiation began to resolve the earth. The haze clarified into an image, or we focused onto some patch of the haze and determined that there was, for instance, a rock. We sniffed at this new thing first, of course. The nose receives the world most purely, with just a thin membrane between the particles we smell and the brain making sense of them. We had not yet forgotten the acuity of the nose. What was that thing? What made it different from everything else?
I like to imagine that the source of images lurks there, in that moment of differentiation. Because once the rock was a thing, distinct from the rest of the haze, an explosion of insight was sure to follow. There were, for instance, other things under the rock. The haze began ceaselessly to resolve into things, and to this day it continues to resolve down to things we can’t even see.
Soon these things needed a name. Images showed us the way to language. The image of the rock, differentiated from the haze, sitting at the base of a tree, allowed us to see the tree. The tree allowed us to see bark and leaves, soil and sky. I wonder if our first words were nouns, if we began our long journey to worshiping things by honoring them with names.
When did we see fit to seize control of these things by describing them? When did we inscribe hardness on the rock, or height upon the tree?
Only much later, when we had managed to find ways of using the rock as a weapon or a hammer, did we discover work. And just as the rock showed us the tree, this thing called work showed us another thing: time. After all, we work in order to benefit ourselves at some point in the future. Work gives nothing in the moment of working, and its fruits can be enjoyed only when the work is finished. Suddenly we posited a moment not happening right now, a moment we would eventually inhabit. Nothing could stop that moment from coming; time would always call us to reckoning. And once we began looking into this strange new thing called the future, we inevitably saw all the way, to the end of the future, to our own death. It waited for us as it waited for the animals we ate, as it waited on the forests that burned.
Perhaps image and language are the source of human consciousness, and differentiation the source of them both. We indulged an ultimate hubris when we began dragging things out of the earth and bringing them into our world. Differentiation had one final, vicious turn for us: we also were things, called suddenly to take our place in the pantheon of things. How cruel to become conscious of ourselves as things in a world of things. We have never resolved that dilemma; it haunts every one of us, the price of our hubris.
This consciousness demands that we think, drags our thoughts inevitably back to ourselves. Bringing with it our awareness of our own death, our anxieties about being merely things, perhaps it’s no wonder that we flee from consciousness. The blockades we throw before consciousness draw upon an infinite power, which is our fear and self-loathing. A cruel irony lurks in our use of images to keep consciousness back when it is images that ushered us into consciousness.
However, we too easily forget that consciousness can only be held at bay. The future holds something even more terrifying and wonderful than our own death; it promises a moment when consciousness will break its tethers and stand before us, in the quiet hours after midnight, commanding our attention to bear upon everything we have ignored. Commanding us to know ourselves, yet incapable of offering a way to know ourselves.
Lost and afraid, we ask, what is the way?
What chance does consciousness stand in all this mess?
I want to go back. I want the time before television and radio, before posters and professional athletes. Way back there is a time when the world human beings had managed to make was no more than a tiny scrap overlaid upon the larger, more chaotic earth. Those humans were born into an earth with more animals than tools. Walking between villages that were always remote, people might not see a single thing made by human hands for days at a time. The only trappings of civilization were what they could carry.
But even that time is too late. I want to go further back, before there were any tools at all, when there was no world. Only the earth. Strictly speaking, we were not even human yet. We walked through an undifferentiated earth. What we saw was a collection of blurs, perhaps, or a seething morass of the inarticulate, the unarticulated. There was not yet speech, not yet language. I struggle to portray such a world in language, to use language as a tool for discussing non-language. Maybe it can’t be done. But try. Imagine what a weasel sees in a continuous flow of sense input, the world received mutely, unregistered and most likely unremembered. Perhaps we catch a whiff of this world when we’re driving and someone abruptly pulls into our lane. We swerve without thinking, yet somehow we aim our car to an empty patch of road. Now subtract the moment of relief, leaving only the pounding heart, the way oxygen suddenly acquires a taste, as every part of our sensory apparatus attunes itself more closely to the world, obliterating our rational filters and leaving us with only two abilities, to fight or flee. In the world to which I’m trying to return, we wouldn’t remember our near-miss. It would leave the moment we sniffed food, or sex. Don’t realize that death is coming; don’t understand anything at all about time. There is only the haze of the moment.
Eventually, perhaps by the engine of evolution or the grace of some god, differentiation began to resolve the earth. The haze clarified into an image, or we focused onto some patch of the haze and determined that there was, for instance, a rock. We sniffed at this new thing first, of course. The nose receives the world most purely, with just a thin membrane between the particles we smell and the brain making sense of them. We had not yet forgotten the acuity of the nose. What was that thing? What made it different from everything else?
I like to imagine that the source of images lurks there, in that moment of differentiation. Because once the rock was a thing, distinct from the rest of the haze, an explosion of insight was sure to follow. There were, for instance, other things under the rock. The haze began ceaselessly to resolve into things, and to this day it continues to resolve down to things we can’t even see.
Soon these things needed a name. Images showed us the way to language. The image of the rock, differentiated from the haze, sitting at the base of a tree, allowed us to see the tree. The tree allowed us to see bark and leaves, soil and sky. I wonder if our first words were nouns, if we began our long journey to worshiping things by honoring them with names.
When did we see fit to seize control of these things by describing them? When did we inscribe hardness on the rock, or height upon the tree?
Only much later, when we had managed to find ways of using the rock as a weapon or a hammer, did we discover work. And just as the rock showed us the tree, this thing called work showed us another thing: time. After all, we work in order to benefit ourselves at some point in the future. Work gives nothing in the moment of working, and its fruits can be enjoyed only when the work is finished. Suddenly we posited a moment not happening right now, a moment we would eventually inhabit. Nothing could stop that moment from coming; time would always call us to reckoning. And once we began looking into this strange new thing called the future, we inevitably saw all the way, to the end of the future, to our own death. It waited for us as it waited for the animals we ate, as it waited on the forests that burned.
Perhaps image and language are the source of human consciousness, and differentiation the source of them both. We indulged an ultimate hubris when we began dragging things out of the earth and bringing them into our world. Differentiation had one final, vicious turn for us: we also were things, called suddenly to take our place in the pantheon of things. How cruel to become conscious of ourselves as things in a world of things. We have never resolved that dilemma; it haunts every one of us, the price of our hubris.
This consciousness demands that we think, drags our thoughts inevitably back to ourselves. Bringing with it our awareness of our own death, our anxieties about being merely things, perhaps it’s no wonder that we flee from consciousness. The blockades we throw before consciousness draw upon an infinite power, which is our fear and self-loathing. A cruel irony lurks in our use of images to keep consciousness back when it is images that ushered us into consciousness.
However, we too easily forget that consciousness can only be held at bay. The future holds something even more terrifying and wonderful than our own death; it promises a moment when consciousness will break its tethers and stand before us, in the quiet hours after midnight, commanding our attention to bear upon everything we have ignored. Commanding us to know ourselves, yet incapable of offering a way to know ourselves.
Lost and afraid, we ask, what is the way?
posted by Peacock | 2:34 AM
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