On Presence

New ways of seeing are constantly being laid out in front of us. An avalanche of information, but we can only hold so much. The challenge is to filter them, to know ourselves enough, to be rooted enough that we are not so easily swayed. ⁠

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Willow Defebaugh, Editor-In-Chief of Atmos put it perfectly, "I suppose that’s what it means to see the world through a prismatic lens. It requires us to embrace contradiction and multiplicity, to never be afraid of letting new perspectives repattern our own. It’s about accepting that life is a kaleidoscope of every hue imaginable, in shades both light and dark, at once disarmingly fragmented and breathtakingly whole. And in those dazzling shards, we find our humanity reflected back at us—jagged, brilliant, and gleaming with possibility." ⁠

The eyes are hungry. They eat brain energy. When you close your eyes your brain opens to your ears. When you open your eyes, now the brain is crowded.

The internet, as a mediator of human interactions, is not a place, it is a time. It is the past. I mean this in a literal sense. The layers of artifice that mediate our online interactions mean that everything that comes to us online comes to us from the past—sometimes the very recent past, but the past nonetheless.

There are in this world certain lonely places: The mountaintop when a storm begins, a long drive under the obscurity of night, the unfinished attic of an old house as a child, the empty alley of an otherwise busy city. In the prolonged absence of others, our senses both sharpen and diffuse. We might begin to hear the subtle sounds that are forgotten in normal life. We might lose track of time. We become almost at risk of noticing things that are not really there. Solitude conspires with our surroundings to push the seen world and the unseen world closer together. It is no wonder that these settings are where we find ghosts.

Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.

- Werner Heisenberg

Historical writing often makes the mistake of focusing solely on presence, of what is here and why. But goaded by Zweig, I am looking for traces of absence, the unnamed things that once were, and are silently no longer. I want to see the ghosts.