'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'
Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen
Al-Azhar mosque, Cairo
Photo credit: AP via Guardian
Human beings have long been trying to explain the unknown. We have constructed grand theories, separated doctrines and invented names all in a bid to create systematic order out of the unknown. In the process, we have been so enthusiastic in our examination of the mysterious and so hopeful to tame our reality within our notions of proof, that even when our logic no longer fits, we still believe it is present. After all, building edifices upon that lack of proof, just like proving stories never happened, can be even more powerful than finding evidence for those that actually did.
In this image, perhaps the child’s innocent play shows in a single gesture the impossibility of stepping outside our essential humanity.
This girl and the balloon are so completely embedded in life itself that it is difficult not to recognise in the image this human urge to investigate. Yet, in the human search for knowledge, the tendency to build walls has never outreached that clarity this girl and the balloon hand back to us.
When does something become intelligible?
Is there some kind of archaic intuition that determines when a relation becomes timeless within a spatial dimension? Could the girl and the balloon have been pictured like this in front of a row of policemen, or a church, in the desert - or even in Cairo's busy traffic? Instead, the balloon seems to descend like another world that the girl is waiting to receive.
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Thank you, Thomas. Well, y'know, I kinda shy away from images like this, precisely because children relate to the world on a more direct level - but Tessa felt as you say too that it contained many messages worth exploring. I felt ultimately that this picture works because the messages are so subtle.
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We did try to track down the photographer for a proper credit but so far haven't been able to, by the way.
It's a lovely picture, which does make one wonder due to its multiple dimensions - the action, the light and shadow, the achitecture. No wonder it causes various thoughts. To know is part of humanity; a simple proof of this is that, although men are biological, at every moment, there are much more people reading news paper than having sex.
ReplyDeleteI wish our educational systems would focus more on the potency of images. Images can bring dialogue that alone with words is not possible to evolve in the same way and move perception to other levels of consciousness.
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