To tell apart through absences and other similar exercises allows for a placid abandonment of contention. Still, the means remain – materials we deem to recognise and stubbornly classify. Abraham’s psychoanalysis refers to this as anasemic tools: an allusion to the unknowable by means of the unknown[1]. I'd rather ascribe them the function of purview. During a visual approach, we collide with an image, rebatting its scale and distance and the successive variations thereof. The magical act also happens in that strain. The black cloth serves as absorbent and causes absences and rabbit ears and bare hands appear, before shape itself does.
To wait for a natural, lagging and erratic event, may be another method for purview. In this state of tedious prostration we fail to be precise, neglecting our tasks, and unintentionally evoke the anti-metaphor, sleep and laziness. One could say, perhaps, we all suffer from the same malaise…
Footnotes
^ Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel. Chicago: The University Press of Chicago, 1994, p. 23.
