augmented illusions

My dreaming is already different and it turns out that memories are not “pictures” but instead are other-sensory visions. Obviously, now that the modality in which they were generated and the modality in which they are remembered are different. A flickr contact’s comment about the Olaffur Eliasson show in the NY MoMA brought this to light. There was an Eliasson show in Rotterdam, two years ago, and I remember the sensory totality of it. It was also a momentous occasion because, after a series of photos, the Leica D2 broke (probably because of the moisture in the air) and had to be repaired. Now that S. writes about the experience of the MoMA show, I remember what I experienced in Rotterdam, but the visual has given way to the other-sensory: the creak of the wooden floors that let you manipulate water, what the rippling water sounded like. Also how the temperature dropped from one room to the next, the air laden with moisture, wet against my face. These memories are now flooding me. The visual memory I retain is the general idea of what it looked like, while the other-sensory memories are vibrant, almost too much to bear. And so it is with remembering people’s faces, or familiar surroundings. As my brain adapts to the reception of other-sensory input, how I think and what I remember are changing. I wouldn’t say there is no vision there, because there is. But it is the vision that was meant before the term was restricted in its meaning to “ocular perception”. What is there is very much like the vision of the deity in visualisation practice. There too, the shift is there. In my imagination is the rush of silk, or the scent of flowers decorating the deity’s implements; likewise, the sound of the bone ornaments she wears and the sound of blood dripping from her garland of freshly severed heads. Yes, blindness is a cognitive condition. So much in the practice speaks of vision, but actually means: to forego seeing, because we have the habit of thinking that what we see is real because it is instantaneous. Once the focus is on the temporal senses, we’re in the shimmering world of impermanence that is forever creating itself in every moment.