the unknowable you

Life is the greatest tragedy. But let's get back to this in a moment.

I spend many days looking into my head, as if I had eyes in the back of my eyeballs. Beyond the blue-red lace that connects the visual to the cerebral, I see more than stars. If I look hard enough, reach deep enough into the mush and tumble of my bumbling brain, I find everything ever.

This should hardly be a surprise. Everything I have ever heard, said, or thought is bouncing around in there somewhere, but these facts and memories are tangled up with the sharpest (and physically weakest) recording I have - that of my eyes. And with this jumbled, transmuted data I build expansive places I cannot begin to express to anyone. But maybe I should start.

The finest point of human civilization has to be communication - the ability to agree on a common meaning for visual and aural expression. But this understanding is rooted in each individual experience, and as such cannot begin to arrive at a precise meeting point. Somewhere at the intersection of communication and observation is where my imagination begins and ends. And a crucial part of my imagination is my understanding of place, specifically the place I am and the place I dream about.

In communicating this very dynamic, fluid place that exists in my head, I help create hundreds of new, unknowable places in the imaginations of others. For example, I take my physical experience of Petrin Park in Prague, and I blend in my love for and intense knowledge of Kansas City, along with my appreciation for complicated, impossible Lebbeus Woods type constructions and Terry Gilliam fantasy dystopias, and populate it with people I have known, pretended to know, or generated to fill in some dream narrative gap that I still don't understand. And this place is very real to me - at least, it is to that bumbling brain behind my eyes. But each description I offer of it will only draw on someone else's understanding and observations of such things as Kansas City, Terry Gilliam, industrial decay, and civic majesty. I find this fascinating - that a place so tangible to me becomes something else each time I describe it.

So how do I communicate it? Do I write stories about the inhabitants? Do I draw rough sketches of it? Do I create maps and a history and a development pattern for it?

I want to do all of these things. But that is part of the tragic nature of life - the undefinable, unknowable, and ultimately beautiful nature of each mind - of each person's observations and understanding of the world around them. Even if I share everything, down to the last imagined detail, I will never know how others experience this place. And I don't think I want to, either. The electric point where individuals communicate, understand, yet cannot inhabit each other - that is the beautiful, tragic moment.