"This memory of Erika pouring lead by candlelight was triggered for me by a chance reading, over the holidays, of some lines from Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, regarding the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in random shapes: water stains on old walls, clouds, inkblots, and so on. “What we read into these accidental shapes,” Gombrich writes, “depends on our capacity to recognize in them things or images we find stored in our minds.” To see a butterfly in an inkblot, for example, requires “some act of perceptual classification—in the filing system of my mind I pigeonhole it with butterflies I have seen or dreamed"-Christopher Benfey of.”nybooks/blogs/nyrblog/2011/jan/07/lost-rituals-found-poems/
Posted on: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:57:13 +0000
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