(The Golden Ages page where this week's Question began is a bit unwieldy—long and sprawling, the way ideas get if you let them run for a few days. What follows is a continuation)
The Question began with 'Ages' but 5 days later I find myself considering the micro bits of Golden Moments. This morning's waking thoughts were of sun on bits of sand and mica on the beach, flowing in water in and out of coherence as decoded patterns, the sort of exercise in intertidal randomness that I've been attending to during the last month or so. And I found myself considering bits of memory of 58 years with my spouse, not so much as Episodes as a warm sense of rightness. This gallery is a proxy for those 58 years of memory fragments.
Those are both cascades of energies, and trying to apprehend them in a 1/500th-second exposure robs the cascade of its dynamic, flowing nature... which leaves me wondering of there's an analog in the curation of memories to the transformation that converts sun and water and sand into lissome dancers and a portly Easter Bunny:
The mirroring REVEALS something nascent but unrealized in the original image. Here's how that one unfolded:
the original image:
(in which I dimly saw that there might be Something)
...and as processed:
(I saw a robed dancer, arms upraised)
...and then mirrored:
(the Easter Bunny appears in the center, holding the upraised arms of the two dancers, who lean into his rotundity)
So is there some other dimension in which fragments of memory can be nudged into a new coherence? I'm working on what that might be, spurred by son John's comments at the end of a recent blog post:
...why dismiss the grindings of imagination? When you tear things apart with symmetry or other challenging art, all kinds of interpretive possibilities suddenly spring up in the observer's strained mind as it grasps for meaning ... You've become expert at tearing apart an image just so that it creates the most potential of interpretation, and another degree or so it would again collapse into baffling noise that is torment to the mind that seeks to grasp at meaning everywhere. And if we're in a simulation, the possibility that that meaning created might indicate something greater or hidden significance being revealed seems all the more tempting, no? Rather than just flecks of mica rearranged by water.