thinking through neuroscience

I just got back* from a trip with Erik. He doesn't have a blog I can link to, which is probably healthy for him, interacting as he does with real people in the real world most of the time, while I spend my time in the online world, not interacting with anyone.

I say this because I want somebody to braid my hair, whose fingernails I can paint, at whose house I can show up uninvited. I'm missing my childhood friends but bad these days, lost in the diaspora as we are. The internet makes it so easy to get in touch (to touch?) with almost anybody, but I stall in actually doing it.

Is this an essential difference between music and photography? The making of a picture can be a shared experience, the subject and the photographer have to be there together after all, but the image within its singular frame is only perceivable at one point. The preservation of that moment, the sequence of transfers resulting in a pretended-permanent version, is analogous to the recording of that "live" experience. What I'm doing is playing songs to an empty room, to myself or no one. All of this reproduction and re-vision isn't worthless, but it is after the fact.

Seeing and making noise are two different, almost opposite things anyway. Hearing, not singing, is the auditory equivalent of seeing. Photography is a very inwardly-directed art, perception long before creation. Rearranging images on paper and screens isn't the equivalent of singing either, it's a back-and-forth across the sense barrier. We only create visual images without those intermediary steps when we pose. But then, we listen while we sing and feel while we move.

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