Repetition and the Entanglement Of Other Things
In Mind and Out of Sight: Of Forgetting
Getting retrospective with my photographic history of late is getting somewhat entangled with my study of the wild man. One question regards the descriptions of emotions in the text. Never an easy issue to work out, why an emotional sense is deployed, descriptively, it’s relationship may lie in wider cultural concerns, rather than with an attempt to describe how a culture views its internal state.
See if I can untangle and note some correspondence in a somewhat mundane way.
I can’t say I have ever lost myself in a major battle and experienced vision of God resulting in complete transformation. I did however recently forget to buy a loaf of bread. I can also reasonable date that act to this moment when I became distracted by a lamp post just across the street from Scotmid supermarket.
Looking at the shot retrospectively, its useful and I have learned something from it, how to deal with the rather flat lightning conditions that are common in my environment.
I don’t need to note where the shot was taken, it’s a useful location, I wont forget it. The memory is further reinforced by humor. Returning home I edited this shot and remembered in a flash that I had forgotten the bread. A fact my son would not be to happy about.
Second Sight of an Object.
Laughter reminded me that my act of forgetting was directly related to becoming absorbed in my environment.
Absorption is the emotional state that my medieval texts focus on as a point of transformation of self, they also display an interest in alterations to the visual processes and relate it to memory.
Its a form of sight that throughout its history has an intimate relationship with the negotiation of identity.
In early modern Scotland the exploration of these ‘species’ of sight and sound with their distinctive altered sense of time were viewed as potentially leading to a new branch of philosophy. A project and a potential wealth of empirical data, lost to the renegotiation of identity in this period, as such subjects were not within the vision of the new, emergent empirical sciences.
Its identity would be forged in the forgetting of such things, memorializing and catching sight of it only in its laughter.
Trained in ethnology in the frozen North with its entangled relationship with history and psychology, I have a distinctly Scottish sense of humor in regard to the subject, as it is a part of who I am and where I come from. The history of my subject.