Inventing Reality
Saturday, November 30
For today, a first in this newsletter’s history, I want to feature a painting: The Mask by Rozzi Roomian
One of the more difficult things for me to remember is that the world around me isn’t full of colors and sounds and structures. It’s really full of particles and fields, wavelengths and frequencies, and the simple presentation of these phenomena as discrete entities with intrinsic properties, say, a red apple, is something that my brain is hallucinating to help me make sense of things.
That’s not to say the red apple isn’t real — there’s a reason I’ve hallucinated its redness and its solid, cohesive form. That group of particles actually is unique, both in its history and in its composition, and it benefits me to have a simple way to recognize this. I’m glad that I see round edges and redness instead of, say, numbers representing the wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum hitting my eyes, laid out in some sort of three-dimensional array like a spreadsheet.
But the redness of the apple doesn’t exist in the outside world — it is created by my brain. So too does much of the meaning we attribute to the world around us — beauty, brokenness, the whole nine yards.
And, when we look close enough, we see this is true of ourselves. We imagine a cohesive, observing self — distinct from the world around us, and the other people in it — when there really is no such thing.
One of my favorite blogs is named Word Spirit Sock Puppet — a nod to this fact about the world, and one of the cleaner ways I’ve heard it described. As depicted in The Mask, at the core of it all, we’re all a part of the same soup as the world around us. We are the world around us. But that world sometimes holds up a mask, a sock puppet, imagining itself as an individual that is somehow distinct from the world.