.
I remember once sitting in a fast-food restaurant at a motorway service station. There was a sudden rush and, in a matter of seconds, hungry customers were queuing from the the counter to the door. For some reason – perhaps an effect of the caffeinated soft drink I was drinking – I was feeling particularly receptive. Sometimes things which you know already can strike you, out of the blue, in such a way that you see them afresh, as if they were new to you. In this case, when I looked up from the tray in front of me, I was intensely aware of the fact that the people in the queue were not just a ‘queue’, they were thirty-five people. They came in all sorts of shapes, sizes and colours. I was acutely aware, unlike most of us are most of the time, that each of them had, in their heads, a whole world, like the one in my head, only different. Each of them had a past and a future. And there they all were, in the present, stood in the queue. Whether they were reflecting on their pasts, contemplating their futures, mulling over ideas, taking in their surroundings or simply wondering how long it would be before they’d be served and trying to exercise patience, it was impossible to tell. And this was the commonplace idea that struck me: not only do we all have our own pasts, presents and futures, but we each act them out in a world that is entirely in our own heads, worlds we construct from the material reality that surrounds us, based on the sensory data, enhanced by subconscious hunches. We use words to describe what we find, think and do in our worlds and, in many ways, our worlds are very similar – although we may, for example, see colours slightly differently – as all our worlds are based on the same material reality.
However, in other ways they can be very different: memory, past experience, ideology, neurodivergence and our capacities to vividly imagine and for critical thinking, all these things colour how we experience and reflect on our worlds. And, alarmingly, our brains are very good at sustaining the illusion that what is actually happening in our heads is happening ‘out there’. Look around you. The illusion is so complete that we think of the words for things as being embedded inside them. Lamp. Wall. Picture. Laptop. Of course, what happens in our worlds does mimic what happens out there, but what we think of as reality is no more than a virtual reality, limited, moreover, by the very real limitations of our senses, our preconceptions and our ways of thinking.
To see just how complete the illusion is, one merely has to scratch the top of one’s head. Since the world as we perceive it is a creation of the mind, in our heads, it would be reasonable to assume the sound would come from beyond the ceiling in the rooms we’re sat in (or from above the sky, if you’re reading this outside)? No: we perceive it as coming from the top of our heads. Our bodies as we perceive them are an integral part of the illusion, an illusion so complete that we can go our whole lives thinking the world in our heads and material reality are one and the same.
You might, at this point, be wondering where all this subjectivity is getting us. Surely we should be concerned less with the nature of consciousness and perception and more with the ways we interact and the society we interact in. To which I’d say that we can’t begin to understand our interactions until we understand the worlds we inhabit. We don’t interact with each other as individuals in ‘the world’. Our individual worlds interact in the theatre of material reality. We build relationships – positive ones with those whose worlds are more-or-less synchronised with our own, who help us to build and develop our worlds, hostile ones with those who undermine our efforts.
We reserve some of our deepest hostility, though, to those who undermine the illusion itself. Anyone, for a start, who speaks a different language, writes with a different alphabet, lives by a different belief-system. Visionaries and activists who tell us the world could be different. Scientists who base their work on the understanding that what surrounds us is far more complex than we can possibly imagine. Anyone or anything that undermines the illusion that the world in our heads and the material reality that surrounds us are one and the same. We take the illusion very seriously, often more so than reality: we’ll shrug our shoulders at the social injustice, the very real poverty or the environmental damage created by the capitalist system that defines so much of our illusory worlds, yet die for a pattern painted on a flag, in defence of our version of the illusion.
It’s hardly surprising. Shatter the illusion and we become disorientated. We find ourselves in the state Sartre describes in his novel, Nausea (the title being the word Sartre uses for the state we’re talking about). The main character, Roquentin, experiences a vision in the park:
All at once the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen…. The roots of the chestnut tree sank into the ground just beneath my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root anymore. Words had vanished and with them the meaning of things, the ways things are to be used, the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping over, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty lump, entirely raw, frightening me. Then I had this vision. It took my breath away. Never, up until these last few days, had I suspected the meaning of “existence.” … And then all at once, there it was, clear as day: Existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It … was the dough out of which things were made, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the patches of grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous lumps, in disorder — naked, with a frightful and obscene nakedness.
One of the most important jobs of the artist, poet, writer, musician, etc., is to expose the illusion in such a way that we are enthralled – rather than, like Roquentin, appalled. Artists, by making shapes (and musicians, by making shapes in sound) that cause us to look at reality in new ways; writers, by using words – as somebody once put it – to say things that cannot be said in words. To put it another way, it is the job of the artist – in the general sense – to reveal, to present us with revelation. It is possible to use the arts to do the exact opposite, to reinforce the illusion, to celebrate the way things are (someone once said sentimentality was a failure of emotion: it is, but it’s also a failure of perception). However, it’s for the artist to be aware of such pitfalls and avoid them, in order to make work that opens our minds to unfiltered reality. Such work flies in the face of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, jingoism, and so on – all the things that divide us and which have their roots in the illusion. In other words, it is the job of the artist to open what William Blake called the doors of perception. Blake summed the whole thing up: ‘if the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.’ Most politicians would prefer the doors to stay closed, but some – the Trumps, the Farages and those like them – go further: they try to barricade them, to make them unopenable by stirring up hatred of the other, undermining the freedom to think and speak, promoting conformity, fundamentalist religion, nationalism and irrationality; in other words, to keep us trapped in our own little worlds. Faced with such politicians, the artist has to double down, get on with the job and not let themselves be intimidated into silence.
.
Dominic Rivron
.
This is excellent. Catching yourself thinking is an art in itself.
Comment by Irene Bailey on 17 August, 2025 at 11:52 amDONALD TRUMP’S CALIGULA {recut from salvaged material
Which brings us back circuitously
to Keir Starmer’s absence. He has no
favourite book. Or film. He has no
favourite poem. No painting appears
to move him. There is no moment
which might have made him
halfway human
where ecstasy overwhelmed him
No Scream or dark convulsion
Keir has no favourite drug. No
antidote to emptiness. No type
of porn to recommend. Nothing
lurid to bestir him. No transgressions
No collections, hidden
No lyric verse (or rumoured videos
owned by Putin)
Just Israel and the Gunners
Up the Arsenal
He likes a bit of German, Beethoven
Three Lions, Baddiel and Skinner
Comment by Steven Taylor on 22 August, 2025 at 8:53 am