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Particle Metaphysics

2021; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.2021.0035

1534-5815

Chris Arthur,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Particle Metaphysics Chris Arthur (bio) Snip one link, retie one knot of circumstance, change a moment's duration, accelerate or slow the tempo of a kiss, a step, and the whole pattern of a life may be scarcely altered, or it may shimmer into an altogether different shape, or simply be snuffed out. usually, the things around me seem self-contained. They lead only to themselves. They point to nothing beckoning in the far distance, forge no links except with whatever's beside them. For the most part they exist unproblematically, within the boundaries set by routine description. They wear without complaint the labels that ordinary vocabulary bestows, suggest no hidden depths or complications beyond their own straightforward substance. So, when I look around the room I see "photographs," "books," "pieces of driftwood," "a Buddha statuette," "a bowl of apples," "two bottles of wine," "a clock," "a piece of string." They're all just there, regularly encountered elements of the familiar space I occupy.1 It's easy to assume this everyday quietude of things is the way they are. Seeing them thus becomes the standard measure of our days, the baseline that sets the rules for how things are judged and labeled. They settle into the places we assign them, fixed in the docile obedience of existence. But as I've aged, I've come to think that I've confused something artificial for the natural state of things. [End Page 126] Much of my mundane world, all that I take for granted, is in fact manufactured, even fabricated. The categories I use are carefully laid over what underlies them. What we're used to can be a potent soporific, breeding an existential drowsiness. We pass our days giving scant attention to what may actually be real. ________ Sometimes my outlook changes. The everyday containment of things within the bounds we set is ruptured. The usual descriptions fail. The catechism of labels upon which I rely to make sense of what's around me rings hollow. Names lose their grip. It's often hard to identify the factors that lead to this, or to understand why it occurs just when it does. An image might help to clarify what happens: it's as if the surfaces of things give way like ice and I find myself floundering in the depths that were beneath me all the while, hidden by the thin crust of the familiar. We are held safe in the freeze of the commonplace, yet it is subject to sudden thaws. These unlock the hold of the quotidian. Its ice gives way, and we fall through to another realm. Or to picture it another way, the ordinary signature of things is written in the slow, steady current of low voltage. Its illumination provides the glow of what is recognized. But sometimes there's a surge of power, a different kind of electricity appears. It brings an incandescence that's so bright that the spidery handwriting of the quotidian is lost. The lacework of definitions and categories we normally rely upon is momentarily eclipsed, obliterated by the glare of this newfound brightness. In its dazzle the ordinary measures that we use to orient ourselves are temporarily blanked out. ________ To better illustrate the nature of this cognitive change of pace, let me bring things into closer focus with an example. There are all sorts of possibilities. I think almost all of our experience has the potential to shape-shift out of the garb of the ordinary in which it's clad and instead appear in raiment that dazzles and amazes. I've witnessed such metamorphoses across a wide range of things—pencils, leaves, seashells, fossils, paintings—but the example I want to look at here is the photograph shown in Figure 1. It's entirely ordinary—the kind of photo few people would look at twice. In our image-saturated world, we're used to the glance sweeping quickly over a whole array of pictures and rarely being arrested by any of them. Our attention skitters quickly across the visual surfaces with which we're presented, taking in a rough semblance of what they show, decoding signs, assigning names...