Magical Index
"shards of glass are one thing - but a marble, there's something to feed your dragons on."
Friday
The Supremacist’s Greed
A photographer and a scientist stood on top of a mountain marveling at the tiny, radiant world sprawling below.
“It’s incredible.” sighed the photographer. “I bet nothing in your little world of laws and certainties and controls helps you to enjoy this any better.”
“On the contrary,” replied the scientist sharply, “my understanding of the geological processes that pushed this mountain to such distorted height, refraction of sunlight – which is eight minutes old as we see it in the valley here – to create these exact varieties of what we call color, and the functions of perspective which make things far away seem smaller to our eyes thereby allowing us even to see such a view at all make this experience far more full of wonder than if I’d been an ignorant child.”
This statement threw the photographer into an unaccountably sudden fury:
“Science is greed! You only look at things so closely and carefully and with such devotion to your rigid definitions of meaning so that, by understanding everything about the world you can somehow possess it. It’s the last frontier left to the supremacist cravings of the Western explorer. In art we let things loose into the world instead of caging them up behind suppositional bars.”
The scientist raised an eyebrow and turned to his companion coolly.
“Each time you take a photograph, my friend, aren’t you capturing for yourself a little slice of the universe, spinning it just so to suit your mood or the mandates of your ‘inner demons’, and then proudly vaunting to the world your reality, the world as you have made it – the piece of time you have caught in your butterfly net and pinned to a bit of paper? That is supremacist greed.”
The photographer grimaced at the other and unfolded his arms angrily but said nothing. So they both turned back to the beautiful shrunken world laid out at their feet – that was beautiful just because it was so small – because it could be lapped up into their eyes like a warm soup. And when they were far from that mountain, and it, in its turn had withered into a little snow-capped triangle on the horizon, they looked back and slipped it with delight into the drawers of their memories.
A photographer and a scientist stood on top of a mountain marveling at the tiny, radiant world sprawling below.
“It’s incredible.” sighed the photographer. “I bet nothing in your little world of laws and certainties and controls helps you to enjoy this any better.”
“On the contrary,” replied the scientist sharply, “my understanding of the geological processes that pushed this mountain to such distorted height, refraction of sunlight – which is eight minutes old as we see it in the valley here – to create these exact varieties of what we call color, and the functions of perspective which make things far away seem smaller to our eyes thereby allowing us even to see such a view at all make this experience far more full of wonder than if I’d been an ignorant child.”
This statement threw the photographer into an unaccountably sudden fury:
“Science is greed! You only look at things so closely and carefully and with such devotion to your rigid definitions of meaning so that, by understanding everything about the world you can somehow possess it. It’s the last frontier left to the supremacist cravings of the Western explorer. In art we let things loose into the world instead of caging them up behind suppositional bars.”
The scientist raised an eyebrow and turned to his companion coolly.
“Each time you take a photograph, my friend, aren’t you capturing for yourself a little slice of the universe, spinning it just so to suit your mood or the mandates of your ‘inner demons’, and then proudly vaunting to the world your reality, the world as you have made it – the piece of time you have caught in your butterfly net and pinned to a bit of paper? That is supremacist greed.”
The photographer grimaced at the other and unfolded his arms angrily but said nothing. So they both turned back to the beautiful shrunken world laid out at their feet – that was beautiful just because it was so small – because it could be lapped up into their eyes like a warm soup. And when they were far from that mountain, and it, in its turn had withered into a little snow-capped triangle on the horizon, they looked back and slipped it with delight into the drawers of their memories.
