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Wednesday, 10 June 2020


In those old 'magic eye' puzzles you would stare at a print of small coloured patches arranged in a dense and near periodic abstract pattern and then if you could relax your gaze and expectations it would suddenly pop into three dimensions and you could make out a scene as if cut out of paper sheets of a ship or an animal or a landscape. One you saw it you could sustain it, but with a small constant effort, until you tired and it suddenly flattened again. The real trick it seems is to do the opposite with the enveloping life-world: to have it pop out of its apparent spatial and metaphysical articulations so that you can discover its original flatness. The key dimension that you need to collapse is the metaphysical one, namely the transcendental dimension of subject and object, of self-mind versus objective world. It helps if you can painstakingly 'deconstruct' the persistent illusion of duality, but that's not enough by itself. It needs also that inimitable relaxation of your gaze and of all the buzzing half-formed thoughts about the self - and it is not purely a matter of optics but of being (as a verb).

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