I've been thinking about Cheerskep's favorite admonition: Fuzzy. What is fuzzy? I mean what actual tactile sensation is fuzzy but not, say furry? I guess furry requires a longer sort of fuzziness, something like my cat's fur or something long and hairy. Oh, how does hairy distinguish from furry? Is hairy simply less thick fur?
None of this matters of course because for Cheerskep fuzzy is a metaphor akin to blurry or indistinct. He says some words are fuzzy, or some ideas or expressions are fuzzy. When we encounter (feel) fuzzy things we instinctively feel down to the hard base from which it stems. Or do we? The trouble with fuzzy is, well, it's so fuzzy. As an artist I think fuzziness is a virtue. In art it's hard to be fuzzy but so necessary to achieve any degree of genuine quality or symbolic content. Fuzzier the better I say. But fuzziness needs to be balanced so that one vague "stirring" (another Cheerskep logo) reveals another without altogether disappearing. And another, and so on. It's even better when one fuzzy stirring begets an opposite fuzzy stirring. Ah, paradox, the elemental life force, the anti-matter, the invisible other side of mass, the secret thought propping up the social thought. Name an artist and you name a fuzzyist. The poets call it, flatly, ambiguity. Why is Cheerskep so stuck on avoiding fuzziness? What would he have us do? Is his an insistence on the the old correspondence theory -- fully discredited in these days of cultural theory and melting (hmmm...melting is another sort of fuzziness, but more optical than tactile) divides between saying and seeing, or between reality and its symbols? He cares about communication whereby one person is able to verbalize a specific thought to another whose consciousness is "stirred" to reproduce the same thought. And the more successfully this is done the more useful the verbalising is. But is this how people really communicate? I think not. Most good conversations are like a mutual decorating of a Christmas tree with one person adding this, the other saying "how pretty" and then adding something herself, and so on...until the tree is all but hidden under a distracting but sometimes dazzling array of decorations. The process is to and fro, a collaborative event that often leads far from the original "stirring" and results in war or peace. Fuzziness is our lot, our prize, our burden, our fate, doom and salvation. Long live fuzziness! WC Let's embrace fuzziness. It feels good. WC
