It would be good to know, first of all, what a "notion" is. But assuming you mean something like a remembered image, I think the neurologists have confirmed that we reconstruct our memory of something each time we think of it. It's very hard to know exactly what a remembered image is (if it is) until we describe it or draw it or recite it and then the media has its influence too, remaking the image according to the media or/and our skill with them.
When the artist paints a remembered image I think he or she is reinventing a supposedly remembered image. There are formulaic ways to make some images again and again in the same way, by the same process, etc., but then we enter the realm of copying something from a model of it. That works fine for simple images but may be more problematic for complicated ones. Whatever consciousness is, it's changing moment to moment and thus whatever it fashions from memory is reinvented moment to moment. There are no "frozen moments" in memory as there are, seemingly, on the canvas. A memory is, they say, like a cage that encloses thoughts but since the context of those thoughts is always different, and thus the cage alters, the recollection is different even when we think it's not. What does IIMT stand for? I'm not so sure about that wave. Although drops are arbitrary units of measure only, and not actually there in the ocean like beans are in a jar, the wave action itself may have measurable dimension. I've read somewhere that a wave is like a rolling ball that topples over itself when its lowest point hits the harder surface (ocean floor or beach or rocks). The dynamics of each wave are segregated or there would be no retreat of the toppled wave before the toppling of the ext wave. But of course all the water is "connected". wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, December 18, 2010 12:51:07 PM Subject: How transitory is a mental image? I'm working on a very chancy play in which a main character is a working philosopher. At one stage I have him deliver a quick riff on something I've posted on this forum: He asserts that all notion - all "consciousness" - is IIMT: Picture an ocean-wave. How many notional drops in that notional wave? It's Indeterminate. How long is it? It's indefinite. It's multiplex - never a single "unit" - the "wave". And, I have the character say, it's transitory; all notion morphs like a writhing cloud. An hour from now you cannot reconjure in all its details that identical wave. At that moment, it occurred to me that maybe I was making a mistake that has marked philosophers through the ages: Because MY notions - in particular my imagined visual images - are unstable, constantly changing, I was assuming that EVERYONE's notions are that way. I can believe that whole philosophies have been created by philosophers who mistakenly believed the nature of notion is the same for everyone else as it is for them. The members of this forum are very predominantly visual artists. I'm not a notoriously modest guy, but I assume almost every one of you is far better than I at imagining visual images. So it then came to me you were the perfect talented people to put the question to. Note: I'm not talking about the visual image of something you're seeing right in front of you as you paint. I'm talking, in effect, about two other kinds of images: Memory images, and imagined images. My question is, how stable, how precisely-in-every-detail, reconjurable are those images? Is it, say, as though someone asked you to pull out a given photograph, and you can do it, utterly unchanged? Picture Abraham Lincoln - i.e. a photo of him you've seen. Does your conjured image reproduce every detail in the original image? Don't answer too fast. Are you picturing the exact tufts of hair on his head, beard and eyebrows? When I say "New York City", does the exact same image come to mind each time? And when it is the same, is it precisely the same? Now picture again that ocean wave. Would you say your current image is in every detail exactly as it was when you pictured it a few minutes ago? When/if you are painting a vasty scene a la Breughel, Bosch, Dadd et al, and you quit for the night and come back the next day, and there are still large unfinished patches, will you be able to fill in - in your mind's eye - the exact details you originally had for those patches? Or is it the case you never "see" in detail until, brush in hand, you're putting the specific strokes on canvas? In sum, is there any validity to my claim that all notion is transitory?
