Genius.
“It’s hard to feel important in the presence of so many people. Dead, and alive. Trading images across oceans and even from the grave, increases our perceived size of the human community. I am real. My mom is real. Now this kid on youtube is real. This film star from Bollywood who’s apparently the most famous person on earth even though I have have never heard of her, she is real. Rudolph, the film star, he is real. I cannot deny him as I have the surfs. We are each a lonely numerator in a fraction whose denominator is always increasing. Spinning ever upward like one of those tickers that calculate dead. In the prospect of having a very small role in the world , is at all odds with the intuition of our own importance. Even the design of our bodies reinforces the idea that we are crucial players. By the literal report of our senses, nothing actually happens without us. You have no experience when you’re not around. The world is quiet when you sleep. It parts around you as you maneuver through it, leaving your intelligence to presume that it zips itself together after you have passed. Our vision, the perceived seat of consciousness seems to powerfully manipulate the world. Objects of interest obligingly grow larger as we approach, lending themselves to our inspection. When we are through, they collapse into the distance to be stowed beneath the horizon. Then a camera man arrives. He unveils an un ending catalogue of realistic pictures from other lives and it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that we occupy a central position. Daguerre, when he took the first portrait of a Parisian passing by, became the Copernicus of the personal sphere.”- Dessa
