Snapshot

Maybe the reader will forgive me for temporarily lapsing into a drawn-out, possibly mixed metaphor. (As an aside, why is the literary establishment is so anti-mixed-metaphor? I mean, I think it encapsulates our modern, attention-challenged, stuff-morphing-into-other-stuff, anything-goes (but it's all pretty much equivalent attitude). The kind of attitide that leaves each to their own pleasures, desires, beauties, sexualities, beliefs (or lack thereof), styles and other practices, whereas more "traditional" metaphors comparing two and only two ideas reflect the slightly more confident, more stable and more normative attitude of an age long since passed. So, our metaphors are metaphors for our current historical moment. This has the smell of an infinite regress lurking a couple of sentences down this track of thought. So I won't pursue it. But before I drop this aside, I posit that mixed metaphors are not signs of mush-minded thinking.) Anyway, as I was walking down the street, I chanced upon a particularly thrillingly beautiful tree covered with a particularly thrillingly beautiful mixture of ice and snow. You may infer, from my rather ludicrous overmodification, that I was profoundly moved by it. But it was not the trees that moved me; the city is full of trees and snow today. No, it was the contrast between the snow/ice draping its branches fully and thickly and the light brown of the building which framed it. And from that I drew my extended metaphor. You see, if that tree is backgrounded (there must be a better word) by the sky, the snow/ice does not stand out at all. The tree is just a tree with no condiments, as it were. But when it is placed in the context of our (otherwise ugly) human edifice, it shines with a light of its own. And then I drew unwaranted lessons about humanity's place in observing the universe. Without us (or "intelligent" observers), there is nothing to bring the beauty into contrast, into relief, as it were. So, for all our problems--us as a cancer on this world--aesthetics would not exist, and with that, art, that which I feel must save the world. Molecules of frozen water would move around and deposit on trees without us, to be sure, but there would be no observer to take that in and amplify it past just photons hitting the retina; to amplify it into some crazy pattern of neural activation that somehow manages to represent "being moved", and that furthermore moves into "the abstract", and then begins to mix and match the two ideas generatively, and that communicates it by bouncing some electrons off other electrons, and maybe causes another pattern of neural activation somewhere else entirely (by this "other pattern of neural activation", I mean youm gentle reader). Photons to proteins to neurotransmiotter vesicles to sodium/potassium (a whole bunch of times) to myosin and actin to electrons to photons, starting the cycle again. How wildly improbable!

Quote from my logic professor: "I'm not here to clarify anything."