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February 23, 2005
Throw a pond onto a stone and...
Imagine that you pick up a book from your book shelf and you begin to read the book and then there is an awareness of somebody else in this world having just picked up the same book. And you are able to see what they see, the exactly same words, word after word after word. For several days perhaps. The location is different... how about the time. Is the time different? What if you could open a book and there would be the awareness of all instances of this book ever being opened on the same page. And in all translations? It would be a cloud of words streaming through a group glued together by page after page after page. Somewhere in the back of the gigantic vertigo of perceptions would be the author, writing the words, one by one, by one, not really in a linear fashion at all. Some words being older than others. Some words really being something else, not actually even written by the author. Or were any ever?
On a much smaller scale, imagine being able to see all of the readers who moved their eyes over this and this and this word today.
All of them who stopped for a brief moment to try to somehow pronounce the word: Standpunkt. And some of the readers could just include the word in their perception of the text, while others would feel locked out to some extend, that missing word, that missing word, a last locket that made them stumble. And what makes them then think that there are no other words hidden in the text that are equally stumbling blocks, or maybe just rough round stones of words that should have made them stumble but did not? And what about the words not actually written?
Several hundred eyes will glide over these lines, one by one by one, assembling words to very quick, seemingly instant translations into a voice in them, and maybe more readers began to read the entry than will end reading it. Maybe many of the readers will be disappointed that certain elements here are missing. Certain readers will be incredibly disappointed that this entry does not include images, compressed, quickly downloadable images of things or other images...
And the entry does contain so many of them, except that they are invisible to the quickly scanning eye, they open up to the one who is able to somehow align their point of view with something compatible with the combination of words here. And then this entry can open hundreds of images, more, many more. There are images here, put in deliberately, and then there are all the images that are only visible to one person at a time.
There are the peripheral images that happen outside of this window even, outside of this screen even, the images that are stored out of sight to others even. This page looks the same and yet completely different to every single user. Not only because there are so many versions of the page rendered for everyone individually, but because this page is just a spark that falls onto completely different grounds.
So imagine that you pick up a book from a shelf and there they are, the words, written one by one by one onto the page and each one of the words has been looked at, has been blessed with attention by hundreds, by thousands, by millions perhaps. And if you imagine the variety of contexts possible and the locations possible and the voices possible in which the words were read and then multiply all this by the ability of the voices to actually comprehend the words and the words between words... Well, then this image in itself is impossible to comprehend. The potential density in each and every stroke we see, and be it just a tiny particle of a letter inside of a simple word, contains the secret to the entire universe, with its centers always present at the given moment everywhere, now. If looked at the right way perhaps?.
And now throw a stone and see what happens to the pond.