One of my favorite paintings is René Magritte’s’ The Treachery of Images.  I once saw a bright sun yellow station wagon covered in psychedelic flowers with “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” painted on the hatch. I hope this magnificent wagon is still on the road in all its sunny glory.  

The phrase stuck in my head. After a little Googling, and I found the painting. And felt like I was in on an joke. Logic is the butt of the joke, along with all that took things too seriously.

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I’d have been lying!— René Magritte

Torczyner, Harry. Magritte: Ideas and Images. p. 71. ISBN 9780810913004.

<p class="has-drop-cap" value="<amp-fit-text layout="fixed-height" min-font-size="6" max-font-size="72" height="80">I like how the painting plays with sensible conclusions, joyfully undecided like an optical illusion. This is key, the painting <em>does</em> something. Other works are in on the joke, search for them, you will find them. I like how the painting plays with sensible conclusions, joyfully undecided like an optical illusion. This is key, the painting does something. Other works are in on the joke, search for them, you will find them.

And I want to play too.

So I argue, this is not a post.

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This year I resolve to write better, clearer. So this means writing more often, which means having something of value to say. Where shall I find these valuable sources?

The internet is the source because it is so beautiful, I argue. At times its beauty feels infinite, an endless ocean of everblooming imagination. The flowing reflection of unlimited evolving expressed personas in digits, from everywhere, all at once, on the subject of everything.

When it comes to the web, the depth and convergence of ideas, impressions, memories, history, psychologies, and philosophies mediated on the cusp of the imagination require a precise nuanced language to describe it, to do it justice.

And that is the issue, the issue I see in writing on the net. There is beautiful wordcraft online, for all tastes, which rescues us from the feeling of being a drop in the ocean or being stuck alone on a rock in outer space. The communing with another in the mixed networked digital medium brings fresh ways of evoking meaning in an artificial sea.