A collideorscape! (FW65, No. 11 - I.6, 126-152)

Question 9 in I.6, presented like a radio show interview where a figure like Shem asks Shaun a series of questions, each focusing on a different persona or space within FW, stopped me in my tracks. I read it and was overwhelmed. I had to put the book down, being almost confused why a paragraph made so much sense to me and spoke to me on such a deep level (I've given it, as printed in my copy of the book, below). It seems to me to include an entire aesthetic, a way to bundle up the artistic and linguistic achievement of FW and offer it as a way of understanding the world, compressed into the image of the kaleidoscope. What can I do with it?

The collideorscape (FW 143.3-28) [source]

There is so much happening in this passage but at the same time such a single vision and thought process that I would like to do a detailed commentary, but larger thoughts about what this means and what it can mean for me are more urgent and are desperate to come out now, so I will save that for another post.

First I have to express my understanding and work it out through writing about it. I think it is important to clarify at the outset how it is different from a normal kaleidoscope. That is what strikes me first. A kaleidoscope is a lens to view the world through which gathers its light, splits it into different shapes, and sets them in motion. In a real kaleidoscope, what you see is in the viewer itself, and what you see it do is caused by your hand turning the barrel. The only external presence in the viewer is the light taken in from the external world. 

A view through a kaleidoscope. By Albarubescens - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 [link]

The kaleidoscope of FW, which JJ calls a "collideorscape," is, on the contrary, true to what enters through its aperture, a prism that gathers everything that it sees and brings it together in its diversity. Like a real kaleidoscope, everything appears saturated with all colors of the rainbow, with the fundamental components of the natural light we see with our own eyes. But instead of resolving what it sees into a single crystal vision foreign to what enters the viewer, it shows the truth of everything and presents them next to each other. It is like a particle collider, but everything is held together, the simple substance of what you see and the component parts, arranged next to each other in a landscape: a collideor-scape. The cyclical motion around the unmoving center as the barrel turns could be present in the thing itself as well.

For this to work, there has to be a fundamental sympathy, even ultimate identity, between the instrument of viewing and the object being viewed. I think this just has to be an article of faith. The author or artist has to finetune this, has to search for deeper meanings in reality, history, and the human heart, and has to learn to exert more control over the means of expression. I wonder if this belief can be espoused apart from the actual practice. Is the purpose of the theory not observational accuracy (adaequatio intellectus ad rem) and lucid reporting, but the production of radiant objects? What am I doing in delineating it, in recognizing it?

It can be, at least, an aspiration: to strive to see everything in this way, to unfocus your eyes and transcend time and space, but at the same time preserve it. It is also a belief that the art can be adequate to the world in all its diversity. 

In simple terms, developing this "collideorscape" device is what JJ did in writing FW and devising the language and style that is both able to be simply expressive of the basic substance of English words and sentences, and at the same time radiating outwards into larger meanings. Though printed with a standard letter press, anchored on the English language, using the Latin alphabet and the conventions of the left-to-write book of lines, pages, paragraphs, chapters, the words in their truth, if they are read aloud, read repeatedly, and held next to each other in the mind, they are prismated. Like the simple meaning of the sentences of FW in sequence, which is (in one analysis, an oversimplifying one, but a valid one nevertheless) one story and one series of speeches of different kinds about certain topics, it is also many stories, possibly every story, and discourses about fundamental natures and the depths of the heart. 

Or, better yet, and to be more precise, is a claim to be such, and a claim that such a thing is possible.