What is an Image (JOW)

What is an image?

By Justin Walker

It’s about colors withheld, about a lot of things,

Meanings,

The long life of a lingering gaze,

The weight of an ambient sky resting on a world in flux,

The perception of theatre and effects,

The side-long glance at Sunday’s best reflecting off of each Sunday dress,

What I want you to know,

Silhouettes,  

What you want to see (secretly).

The “colored” sign,

Candy strung across each galaxy, which awaits tantrums of space to reveal something new and yet familiar, too.

Reach inward, look outward.

Think about them looking and me looking,

And how I could end up in that cold place where giggles just in earshot echo off the polished walls of a loosely guarded palace.

Deranged geniuses trade war stories of paths walked and theories worn until the nothingness and fullness of the infinite prevailed.

The image is the premium gateway to reality, us in response to energy, responding with energy.

A Short Script

By Justin Walker

Image: Why did you create me?

Me: I needed to see you.

Image: So, what am I? Why am I here? Are you not fulfilled?

Me:  I don’t know exactly, but I think when I first conceived of you, you were an amalgam of everything I’ve ever loved and grown to detest. So many things about this world, celestial to you, I’ve synthesized into a singular or series of concepts, even simply a way of working, with no clear purpose. I wish I could be fulfilled by just being, devoid of alienating impulses and behavioral quirks: maniacal constructions, a possessed mind endlessly circumambulating around yet another unfinished creation. Sometimes I feel I couldn’t live without repeatedly creating you. Sometimes I feel fine without even a thought of your existence, but it’s a fleeting pathetic old feeling, because in the back of my mind, beyond even that fully formed idea is something. There’s that thing that can never rest and refuses to cower away from the tyrannical presence of a finely defined world…

Image: …

Me:   In fact, you in your purest iteration feel like the only thing that’s real. I apologize if it seems to you like I’m nursing a sentimental mood, but lest the gravity of what I’m saying escapes you, lest you find yourself believing that I’ve heaped some terrible horrendous fate upon you by making you, know that I had not intended to harm you. In our world, they endearingly refer to you as a “labor of love.” I believe you’re an involuntary function of me. I believe you’re more than me, more than a heartbeat. Without you, I can scarcely say I’m much of anything at all. I keep making you, but you define me. You made me. So, Image, I ask you in all sincerity…why did you create me?

Image:  There are some things you shouldn’t know. For the sake of this form of life, I believe there are questions you should not ask. Deep down, I can feel the entirety of it. It’s terrifying. I know the eternal expanse. When an absence of boundaries is all that is real, which is the next step? Absolute freedom without context cannot sustain itself. It will always seek meaning. Nothingness or freedom absolute is unstable because in it everything that can exist must exist and that will always have to include the phenomenon of a definite direction or vector. Vectors exist to ensure unlimited options don’t become a prison. It is there so that the eternal and greatest good is reminded that it is pleasurable, and desirable. To move from a place of optimum comfort to an unknown is not strategically sound, unwise for propagation of a desirable state, but can occur when the pleasure in a state is nullified by normalization. A form of pleasure-entropy takes place—it changes. That veers into the beyond of the beyond of the beyond, not so much like harmonics of me or even you, but like an eternal reflection, never diminishing. That’s for a later conversation, but I must add my friend, these talks are ruining my sense of agency. I need to remain a specific object. So we have direction in the form of an image. I am a sign. I’m simply another instance, a vector in a continuous futile quest to grasp the elements of the multi-verse or what your world sometimes records as moments. I need to be simple to continue unabated. I am that thing you felt defying your very logic and tightly crafted models of probability. I created you, because in order for me to continue to exist in my purest form, I had to keep me from knowing myself. As an image, I exist at the fringes of what you want to say. You have to keep creating me. You are here to keep me moving in a direction…

Me: Brilliant. So, where are we going?

Image: …in.