I may have mentioned–some few blog entries ago–that the visual world is full of stories for me. It’s not just me, though. You’ve heard it plenty yourself: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” There’s no end of people inspired to find tales, ideas, inspirations of every kind in things seen, in the real world and in all sorts of visual images, and what we like to imagine they mean, or could mean. So have at it. I give you now a digital collage and know that no one else will see precisely the same collection of Stuff or relationships between the things collected here exactly the way I see them. You might guess why I put some of this together in a single image, maybe even could see some of my motivation more clearly than I do myself (you shrink you), but the fun of the whole thing is the same as what I love experiencing when I have an art exhibition: seeing my own work through others’ lenses and knowing that they always bring something different to it than I did either in looking at the finished piece or in revisiting any part of its birthing.

All these things together . . .

Every sighted person “reads” the world through his or her own filters, and for the most part, that’s good. It’s not only what helps us to be ourselves fully in the world but what gives us a large measure of pleasure in existence: we can create the world in which we find ourselves as well. Imagination and interpretation are colorful ways of coping with reality and reshaping it as we go. We can be horribly misled by our crazy or wrongheaded or under-informed explication and conceptualization, and that usually leads to trouble of one sort or another (not least of all making one be a chump, a dimbulb or even a full-fledged jerk). But really, isn’t there a lot of fun in just giving ourselves a moment of fiction to stretch our boundaries and enlarge our existence in some small measure?