Illusion

Places that have been hastily abandoned, not to be entered or even inhabited for who knows how long, often tell me more than the lively ones. That may be morbid. Or it may be due to the traces that will not change for the time being. The scene of an event that is at best a matter of conjecture, based on objects that have been left behind and phenomena that have arisen in flight, which stand still for my subjective interpretation. Pure speculation, nothing more. But the allure of invention, whether reconstruction or construction, is a brother of fiction that transports me as a viewer to the starting point of a long-lost drama. Which will never have existed there in the same way. An eyewitness who was really there at the time of the disappearance could stand by my side, even if he might interpret the past differently in his memory than it might have actually happened.

Meanwhile, it is not only Buddhists and other transcendental or metaphysical thinkers who assume that everything we perceive with our senses and are capable of interpreting as reality is illusion. Illusion as a technical term is defined primarily in psychology as (pathological) deception, as a misinterpretation of the sensually perceptible that does not correspond to the shared reality. In this context, it is claimed that there is a misrecognition of the real in the course of pathological perception and thought processes, i.e. a “false reality” of the person concerned, who must consequently be insane from the position within the “true reality”.

In quantum physics as a branch of astrophysics, scientists such as Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking even assume that this is the only reasonable explanation for the inexplicable. In other words, beyond the sensually comprehensible and also beyond all our corresponding conceptual thought and interpretation processes. For them, the starting point is the material materialization of spiritual universality, which can no longer be explained scientifically, i.e. cannot be proven or justified, and which must underlie everything that takes place in the cosmos. And this without temporal sequence, but somehow simultaneously, not dynamically as long assumed, but statically.

I find this variant of the critique of pure reason somehow comforting. Because every word I write down would be part of our shared illusionary perception. And at the same time or parallel to this, a kind of materialization of the spiritual, of which I myself am a part. Like the much-invoked drop in the ocean. An image or a metaphor that ultimately only conveys an idea of what illusion or reality could mean. And precisely because these are only concepts which, in their sensory limitation, cannot grasp the incomprehensible.

So even if narrative is a material manifestation of the intangible spiritual, it must remain one thing as perceptible and conceivable within the conceptual system of language: illusory. Accordingly, all expressions, interpretations, memories, hypotheses and so on would merely be forms of expression or variations of the illusion that we, as sensual-spiritual beings, can at best share with one another. The significance of the artistically invented and however expressed would thus have the same significance as that inherent in the supposedly real events. For there is no difference in the illusory. One cannot say: This is more illusory than that illusion. Or: You were more deluded than I was. You can only claim that someone does not want to or cannot share your own construction or interpretation of a reality. In other words, they must be crazy in the above sense.

Sounds crazy?

Author: Titus David Hamdorf, Berlin, Germany

Translated with: DeepL.com