What underlies everything and What holds

Perceptual moments -- flashes that are experienced on a level somewhere between the mindful and the automatic – show our lives. We rush about town, and we are aware of it; we encounter friends, and there is an intense awakening, followed by lingering awareness of that awakening; we worry about money, right; we recall high school days, and we are not here. The fabric these flashing images form is about as close as we get to painting our own picture -- though the cinema is probably a better metaphor for the effect, which, conscious or unconscious, or as a combination of the two, is reeling.

This web site shows flashes of a life depicted as a career, a hobby, and sometimes as an homage to family and friends. For example, [in a dream one of our reporters wont say hello ... I call him up on that in the non-dream state... ] and we discuss In a Mist as performed by Geoff Muldar, and mention the weblog ... I watch Harvey Pekar f[see below, Fred] flick where he does Halloween, and I see myself dressed in Saint's costume waiting for bus ... Says Slim: You cant chew money like gras ... Reconstructing the crime scene outside a mafiso's eastside apartment in Milwaukee, waiting for shadowy figures to appear ... leaving the Racine Rialto with aspiring fugitives ... viewing the colorful Jello of L.A. one Sept day .... Panthering about in the place of the Cat People, thinking of Andrea Warhol Superstar Feldman, where she didnt actually splatt ... or panthering again a Chistmas train cross the swells of the carpet through oriental valleys in the Old Midwest ...

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Perceptual moment is sort of the modus operandi for the great comic book writer Harvey Pekar, who was turned into a movie, if you will, with last year’s American Splendor. This is our chance to pick The Moon Traveller film of the year so there it is American Splendor.

There isnt enough space here - on the web - to detail all the great perceptual moments in Pekar’s work. "Found art in ...ordinariness!" - Entertainment Weekly

But we note some in Americus Splendiferous: Going to thrift stores with Crumb, but no it wasnt the first time they met [this is one of those things about perceptual moments, they didnt quite happen as you perceived them] .... Shays restaurant .. and home fries in the morning, with ketchup... in line behind the old gal at the supermarket... despair in the medical records room. The green room of Letterman ... Change a few details, I been there - except for Crumb, but hey my spousal unit went to highschool with one of his CheapSuit Seranaders’ band mates - except for Letterman, but hey I was in the green room at least one early a.m. in Needham Mass Channel 5 Studios with Slim and Anthony Burgess. [They discussed Oscar Peterson.]

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What  underlies everything? What holds? The noodling here all comes about from a reading of In the River of Consciousness  by Oliver Sacks in The New York Review of Books. This is sort of a review of an absurd number [9] of books where Sacks, after many years work, states that it is not just perceptual moments but moments of an essentially personal kind that are the essential atom of being.

Sacks’ discussion of consciousness begins as it sites the great surrealist Borges and fixes quickly on the question of whther time is continuous or discrete – sort of one of the age-old quandries. He then discusses Hume and then William James, and he talks about James’ interest in the 18890s’ invention of the zoetrope, with due consideration of the apparent phenomenon whereby the discontinuous can take on the illusion of the continuous with the zoetrope, with cinema, and so on.

He posits a number of landmark thinkers along the way. These include:

*Bergson’s, who in 1908 he wrote of the cinematographic mechanism of ordinary thought;

*Muybridge – he of rapid -fire serial photoshots;

*Helmholtz, who discussed persistence of vision; and

*Crick, who in Nature Neuroscience in Feb 2003  speculated on motion perception and how visual continuity is constructed ["Most of the ideas we favor have been suggested before, but their combination is original."].

He asks: How do our frames, our ‘momentary moments” hold together? Big question for this old boy in these here days.

Sacks shows in subtext the extent to which artists and scientific thinkers traded insights on this subject of perception during the 20^th Century [Folks he doesn’t mention  but worthy of credit: Poets depicting the pointillist elements of consciousness should include of course the imagists, Yeats, Breton and the surrealists, Kerouac, Burroughs and Gysin.] He ends where he bean, with Borges, with a nod to old tea-head M. Proust too. It is not, he concludes, baldy physiological moments that underlie everything, but “moments of an essentially personal kind which make up being.

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What I dont get is what about those perceptual moments that actually didnt happen? Or that are successfully and repeatedly mis-remembered? Where does Across the Pacific or Batmen of Africa fit in? Where is Bob Watts tonight?

Last update: 4/4/2004; 8:46:55 PM.