A quick note about my essay 'On Vision and Being Human', discussing the lack of bibliographies in each post, the upcoming book of the essay and a couple of other points...
At this point in the serialization of my essay ‘On Vision and Being Human’ I’d just like to say a few brief things. First I’d like to apologize for the lack of bibliography for each individual chapter. In the short stand-alone essays on various subjects, I’m always careful to make sure there’s a full bibliography so people can check the original sources for what I’m saying about, for example, the Mayan concept of itz as cosmic sap. With ‘On Vision and Being Human’ however, I’ve written the whole thing – 25 chapters in total – all together and as such, the bibliography runs to some 20-odd pages. The task of dividing this up into individual chapter reference lists would be too long, and so I spare myself this task. The full Bibliography will be published as part of the book I am planning for this essay.
'The First' - Bruce Rimell, 2015
(Sketch for forthcoming painting for 'On Vision...' book cover)
(Sketch for forthcoming painting for 'On Vision...' book cover)
Which reminds me! A fully illustrated book of the essay, entitled ‘On Vision and Being Human: Exploring the Menstrual, Neurological and Symbolic Origins of Culture’ is planned for publication in October or November 2015. The book will contain fully annotated and edited chapters – here on this blog you are seeing the first draft – with references and the complete bibliography, as well as a selection of endnotes (short essays in themselves) on pertinent points briefly remarked upon in the main essay. The book cover will be graced by a delightful forthcoming painting for which the above image is a sketch – the symbolism of this strange female-to-male transgendered, therianthropic and otherworldly shamanic figure will soon become clear!
The serialization of the essay will continue well into 2016, I imagine, but if you’re enjoying what you’ve seen so far, then I heartily recommend the book for the full story! You can contact me directly through my website if you’d like to be updated as to the book’s publication progress.
To conclude this brief note, I’d like to say that what we’ve covered so far with ‘On Vision and Being Human’ is really to only outline the ‘problems’ of human visionary experience – its ‘otherness’, its perceptual ambiguity and its reporting of hidden realities which cannot generally be held to exist. In the ensuing chapters, we do not reject visionary experience because of these points as some have done, but rather we explore a diverse range of human phenomena and behaviours in order to seek solutions to these problems, convinced of the intrinsic value, if not necessarily the empirical reality, of vision. As I say in the Introduction, the journey and solutions may well be challenging and often strange, but I believe they can lead us to a completely new image of ourselves…
The serialization of the essay will continue well into 2016, I imagine, but if you’re enjoying what you’ve seen so far, then I heartily recommend the book for the full story! You can contact me directly through my website if you’d like to be updated as to the book’s publication progress.
To conclude this brief note, I’d like to say that what we’ve covered so far with ‘On Vision and Being Human’ is really to only outline the ‘problems’ of human visionary experience – its ‘otherness’, its perceptual ambiguity and its reporting of hidden realities which cannot generally be held to exist. In the ensuing chapters, we do not reject visionary experience because of these points as some have done, but rather we explore a diverse range of human phenomena and behaviours in order to seek solutions to these problems, convinced of the intrinsic value, if not necessarily the empirical reality, of vision. As I say in the Introduction, the journey and solutions may well be challenging and often strange, but I believe they can lead us to a completely new image of ourselves…
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