Man does not seek knowledge; he covers it.
For the Ancient Greeks, the gods were not to be questioned. Later, the Christians would adopt the convenient ethical stance of refraining from questioning themselves. With the advent of photography, reality was not to be questioned further. The contradictory dogmas that attached themselves to each of these three phases, were they truthful or false, persecutory or sacrificial, indexical or staged, would only aid to strengthen the stranglehold of history, as it was unraveling, on Time.
The photograph covers; it does not reveal.
The human universe is one that has been explicitly and intentionally populated by homunculi at each of its nodes and levels. The human universe necessarily runs automatically and is devoid of beings.
Memory is reality; to lead oneself out of memory is to lead oneself into reality. This path is the moment of ‘the photographic’. The human brain is a metaphor, specifically designed to act like a unitary oversized homunculus. The theory of the cortical homunculus is essentially correct. The human brain is made up of an endless iteration of identical homunculi, one nested in the other just like Babushka dolls. The human brain, visualised in this manner, would supposedly lead one not to reality but to oblivion. Such a loss through a Fall would be prevented by the close proximity between the eyes and the thinking organ – ‘the photographic’ saves the day.
The metaphor, unlike the simile, is dislocated in time and space. The metaphor is the quintessential figure of speech. Metaphors are never lost in a Fall; they essentially always lead one back to reality.
The metaphor masks the reality of the reality of the metaphoric space… which is reality.
Featured Image:
Salvador DALÍ. c. 1954. Dalí, nude, entranced in the contemplation of five regular bodies metamorphosed in corpuscles, in which suddenly appears Leonardo’s “Leda”, chromosomatised by the face of Gala [oil on canvas]. WikiArt.org [online]. Available at: https://www.wikiart.org/en/salvador-dali/dali-nude-in-contemplation-before-the-five-regular-bodies [accessed 11 April 2021].
