On Seeing

Seeing is believing, if you’re easy to convince. Like Thomas, I begin to think touch more reliable. Some people see things that are not there; many see things that are placed there. Wars, invasions, propaganda may depend on seeing things, present or absent. Ask a migraine subject about the flashing lights. Don’t begin to contemplate the actions of certain drugs, legal or not.

            Photography is a language:  like English, Chinese or any tongue it can be used for truth or fiction. If the devil is the father of lies, photography must be the mother, or at least the sister of lies. Why the sister? Because like Wisdom, she sees deeper than others, but any deceit plays on thoughtless unsupported concepts of veracity: seeing is believing. Many believe wordy falsehoods: even more false pictures.

            ‘I saw you,’ said Jesus, of a man in whom there was no deceit. The quality of the eye is also important. What everyone hopes to see is the truth. Deep, deep in the understanding is a precondition for identifying what the truth might be. Is it a ruthless, punishing God? No God? A merciful, availing God? May you see grace to understand the last.

On Magnitude

I read about the super-rich constantly building new yachts: massive, bigger than the Normandie. You need a new one, because your neighbour has a new one: bigger swimming pools, in-house submarines, helipads onboard. You need a new one with better features.

            Biggerness and betterness are often conflated. How big? How good? Is magnitude always relative? Do we know when things begin to be large?

            Big trouble is usually easy to find. But if one of the, say, top 100 wealthy feels suddenly poor as the neighbours increase, what does it say about the order of magnitude? Is smaller than the Normandie still big?

            Anselm says God is that which nothing greater can be imagined. We’ll have to define ‘God’, ‘great’, and ‘thought’. Mathematics isn’t my world, but it seems to me the numbers involved must be either very large or very small. So small they become great?

            Aquinas doesn’t buy this argument, because God is a mystery. What, then does magnitude say about the human condition? Comparison with those above (richer, smarter, happier) rather than those below (poorer, and so on) is natural, but unenlightening.

            John the Baptist understood magnitude. “He must increase; I must decrease,” he said.