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THE
POSSIBLITY
OF
THE
THING
AND
ITSELF
IMAGES AND TEXTS

BY IAN GONSHER
Special thanks to Richard, who, over the many

years, has brought much light into the world.

This book was made possible through the support of

Brown University and the Creative Arts Council.


PART ONE:
ECHO AND NARCISSUS
 HINENI:
HERE I AM
Here I am... I am Echo... but I am not here...

neither who nor where. I, and by I, I mean you.

You and the echo of me within the mind of you the

reader... us as meaning upon a page. I, the reflected

first person, am a copy of indeterminate origin,

neither who nor where. I am an echo. Echoes have

no inherent qualities. They take on the shapes of

empty spaces. Echoes are effects of plurality and

8
 difference... even here, I am neither who nor where.

The last time I saw Narcissus, he was sitting

beside the still surface of a pond. The two of us,

alone together. The land was uninhabited for as

far as a voice can carry. We were both very young,

unexpired by age, unencumbered by fate, and it was,

quite simply, love. It was love in that first moment

you recognize it as love. It was love the first time

again. In some versions of the story the place was

called Eden, and we had different names. But that is

neither who nor where. Narcissus was so beautiful,

new to me there.

Often, it has been reported it was vanity that

blinded him to me. It has often been repeated that

it was blank empathy that imprisoned us both.

This was not the case. I knew of his ontologies.

I knew the depth of his soul. He was not motivated

by vanity. Vanity was abhorrent to Narcissus.

9
Vanity violated the profundity of his beauty. And of

beauty and echoes, what can be said that is not

already spoken as a question, “Who are you?”

“Who am I?” This was the question in his gaze.

I saw Narcissus there (who and where) searching

for the source of the reflection. He gazed into the

stillness of the pond, a mirror in the landscape.

Upon that synesthetic surface, sight became sound,

echoes within reflections emerged. He heard a

transcendent sound that permeated everything

and reflected everyone... beyond the surface of

the water. Beyond the echo of the ego and the id

entity. Beyond the blank self. Beyond the self that is

concealed when you look at it. It was an echo. It was

the most beautiful Echo! I saw Narcissus sitting by

the side of the pond, exchanging meaning for being.

10
 NARCISSUS
AND THE
REFLECTION
Sunlight rebounded off the surface of the pond,

beyond the sky, and into the void which borders the

earth. The water remained still, occasioning unflawed

reflections and speculations. Narcissus paused, and

gazed into the water for an indeterminate amount of

time. Then it all changed.

It arrived as a raindrop in front of my eyes. I saw it

before I felt it. The projectile pierced the plane of the

water, but water is liquid, more fluid than rigid, so the

surface slipped away. A simple pattern propagated

outward from the center where the drop had fallen.

It had shape and frequency, simultaneously. That

raindrop and the others that followed inscribed

themselves upon the surface of the pond. It was

11
peculiar that I had not noticed the surface before, now

delimited by the light rain. And even more, that I had

not noticed the difference between myself and the

reflection. A fundamental distinction ignored! But from

distinctions… the initiation of meaning, differences

perpetually deferring, and the invention of absence.

Absence is nothing if not the relative and imagined

distance between entities. This is the manner in

which the noumenon fractured. Surfaces appearing

every place I looked. They separated one thing from

another. Sometimes the surfaces were beautiful

to look at, but most of the reflections had failed.

12
 FAILED
REFLECTIONS
It arrived like a raindrop on the back of my head.

I felt it before I saw it. My focus arrested, aware of

the obvious for the first time, of the surface and my

reflection across it. I whispered to myself, “I am

here... a distinct subject, incongruent objects, and

the illusion that separates them.” In another version

of the story, Echo asked, “Where are you?” – It may

have been Eden.

Then all of a sudden, and for no apparent reason,

it changed once again. I found myself just above

the south pole, just below the infinite bend of the

earth’s surface. Water and ice, sometimes light...

the landscape lacked scale and lay abruptly flat. It

reminded me of the surface of a page or a screen.

Anxiously, I tried to imagine Greenwich. Then

13
thinking of the surface below my feet, I remembered

something about the transitions and translations of

surface tensions – You can walk on the surface of

water if you wait for the water to freeze.

THE
FRACTURED
NOUMENON
At the south pole there were rumors of the

penultimate antithesis of the infinite stretch of the

globe. And I forgot my name, or at least misplaced

my position. Who and where? Lost at the bottom

of the world I wondered if it was a fool’s errand

to search for the culminating surface of a sphere.

But then it occurred to me that all positions on the

earth’s circumference were equally removed from

the spinning center of the planet. And I imagined

the inaccessible core as a Thing-in-Itself. It can be

14
 recognized (albeit amid the debris of the imagination)

by a circular movement that is neither fully present,

nor completely absent. I imagined the internal orbit

as such, obscured by the rotating surface upon

which all humanity plays out. And I stood there, feet

positioned against the surface of the ground.

And surfaces were everywhere apparent.

Surfaces coincided with the ordinary sensations

and separations of things. Upon the periphery of

common things, installed amongst the disregarded

obvious and the manifestly supererogatory, the

echo reemerged as a hint, a reminder of the

premise of repetition. Surfaces and their doubles,

echoes everywhere apparent. Surfaces as a ceiling

concealing. As a wall or a floor. As a gesture to

the ground against the sky. Surfaces in space

and in time, and in practice and in discourse.

Surfaces as apriori distinctions, positions, and

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16
From Noumenon to Phenomena
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transitions. Surfaces signifying the appearance of

common things.

The surfaces of common things articulate the

useful distinctions of accrued experience. They

fasten us all to the spectacle of ubiquity. And

when we speak, we make mention with souvenirs

of conspicuous divisions, by which we know one

thing from another, and from which the universal

meaning of knowledge, and the local meaning of

identity are both derived and sustained. But these

common things are not things in themselves. They

are contingent upon an awareness of the relations

positioned in their design.

Then all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, it

repeated once again. I found myself just above the

south pole, just below the infinite bend of the earth’s

surface. Water and ice, mostly light... the landscape

was flush enormous against an inconclusive

18
 sky. Suspended between a map and a globe, the

south pole appears as both an edge and a point,

superpositioned between two dimensional and three

dimensional models of the ground. It reminded me

of the original premise of repetition.

And these common things everywhere apparent

as transitions and positions – a point – attenuated

into an edge, folded in by a surface, that when

disregarded coalesces into a simple noumenal

volume. Eternal even then, in the beginning which

was before the end.

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 “The concept of a noumenon – that
is, of a thing which is not to be thought
as object of the senses, but as a
thing in itself, solely through a pure
understanding… is thus merely a limiting
concept, the function of which is to curb
the pretensions of sensibility”

Immanuel Kant

from the Critique of Pure Reason

20
 AN
UNKNOWN
SOMETHING
Kant places a significant epistemological

limit on what can be disclosed about the world

independent of the mind which perceives it. A

particularly conspicuous feature of the Kantian

project is an apparently insuperable gap between

phenomena in the world as they are experienced,

and the world as it is independent of the mind...

as a thing-in-itself, which Kant vaguely describes as

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Scissors
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23
“an unknown something”.

The mind imposes order onto the world, making

it legible by translating what is into what appears

to be, from noumenon to phenomena. Phenomena

are filtered through the senses, and it would seem

that a necessary precondition of all experienced

phenomena is the faculty to discern differences

between distinct entities in the world, between

qualities and quantities within space and time.

These qualities and quantities are bundled together,

experienced, signified and given meaning. But the

consequence of this is that our eyes, indeed all of

our senses, hide the noumenal world from view.

Consider your experience of space for example.

Can we assume that space is a property of the world

independent of the mind? It would seem that spatial

distinctions depend on the cognition of absence,

absence disclosed to the mind as a difference

24
 between things. One might say that this is the way in

which the mind creates a place for the world to exist.

Absence may be both a condition of awareness, in

that it initiates space between distinct entities, and

absence may be an object of awareness when we

assign it value as a lack of value. So, to what degree,

if at all, does space exist independent of the mind?

The same question might be asked of your

experience of time. We find ourselves always

already within a continuum of time. It seems that a

temporal awareness depends on the aggregation of

memories, the relationship between moments bound

together by the mind, within a continuity of past,

present, and future. The same question is applicable.

To what degree are these relational differences and

similarities imposed onto the world by the mind? To

what degree are they independent of the mind, if at all?

Consider an object – a pair of scissors for

25
example. But before you do, consider the mind

that considers those scissors. Consider the mind

which experiences itself as distinct from everything

and everyone else… a distinct subject, oriented

towards discrete objects, objects such as those

scissors…those scissors which cut, separate, and

divide. Can it possibly be that the mind is both the

consequence of the conspicuous difference between

itself and everything and everyone else, and that

the mind is also a precondition of all apparent

differences? Do the contours of the mind give shape

to the world, or do the contours of the world give

shape to the mind? Are both options possible?

And as I become aware of those scissors,

when they are signified as scissors, they detach and

differ from everything and everyone else, taking on

their own local identity and specific meaning. As I

experience them, they disentangle themselves

26
 from other objects, making them distinct, placing

them in time, setting them in space, and allowing

an understanding of their qualities and quantities

to emerge. They are useful too. They multiply the

content of the world by dividing things into discrete

and distinct forms, thus initiating a mellifluous plurality.

Consider a map… but before you do, consider the

earth to which it refers. A map demarcates territories

and signifies distinct entities, but these borders

and boundaries are not a necessary feature of the

world as it is independent of the representations

which the cartographer applies to it. The world does

not require these distinctions as a condition for

its existence, and a world without distinctions and

differences must necessarily be considered singular.

When the scissors are not framed by awareness,

where do they go? Perhaps to the same forest where

soundless trees fall? When those scissors shake

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28
 Separation
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loose of all differences from, and relation to, other

things; when they are unframed and ignored, does it

make any sense to speak of the inherent distinctions

between one thing and another? If differences and

distinctions are relational and mind-dependent, but

also a precondition of all phenomena, then it does

not seem unreasonable to speculate that the world

undisclosed is singular; an ineffable Thing-in-Itself.

30
32
Nothing is Greater
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 Nothing is greater than infinity.
Therefore infinity is singular
with presence priviledged over absence.

34
35
PART TWO:
ADAM AND EVE
 EPISTEMOLOGY
PRIOR TO
THE TASTE
OF THE FRUIT
In the beginning, which was before the beginning

and outside of time, everything that ever was, or

would ever be, was singular and undifferentiated.

There was no distinction between the mind and

attended objects. There were no comparisons of

the one to the many. Before moments began, there

were no separations at all.

38
 But after the beginning, we perceived the decay.

Our eyes and our mind hid the noumenal universe

from view. Everything de-transcended into the

common things of the quotidian world, and as they

did, a space opened up, within which we acquired

identity and agency.

Light was the first to become distinct against the

darkness. Then the sky above could be distinguished

from the waters below – and the waters separated to

form the land. By the fourth day, light and time had

divided once more. Water, land, and sky, but mostly

light. Eventually we found ourselves in a garden

and delighted in the questions, “who and where?” It

was the first time we were reminded of the original

premise of repetition.

Positioned in time amongst a polyphony of

events and phenomena, everything as we know

it emerged – transcendence intimately wound up

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40
 Bereshit
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42
43
within immanence – translations and transitions,

histories and traditions, one thing becoming

another becoming another becoming another… a

constellation of rhythms and patterns which are the

only means we have ever had of recovering that

which the aggregated moments of history withhold

from us at all times.

THE FIRST
TIME AGAIN
“Who and where?” And we realized we were in

Eden, but with paradise we had nothing to compare.

This is why beauty and love had different meanings

there. And we asked ourselves and each other with

wonder, “Why was this all created?”

There are different versions of the story. In one

version, God created us; male and female, and

we were naked and not ashamed. We were one

44
 being, the same, male and female whole. Then

love became possible, as we became aware of the

differences between us, and intimacy played out as

non-zero sum love games... It was love in that first

moment that love is recognized as love. It was love

for the first time. It was love the first time again.

It was love then, and later, it was love too.

It was love born out of a wish to disobey customary

chronologies, defiant against time. Perhaps we even

secretly wished to visit ourselves as children, or

aspired to return to that place which preceded the

beginning.

In Eden, we were promised the end; the

acquisition of death deferred. We are always already

approaching that unknown something. We realized

that with every breath, in every moment we lived, we

were expiring. But we also noticed that our perpetual

mortality was contingent upon the separation of

45
moments, one from one another. And we asked

each other, “Why was this all created, if only to be

destroyed?”

In the innumerable generations since, which our

original love made possible, love and this question

have repeated themselves too many times to count.

And although the answer has never been completely

clear to us, that we are here to consider the question

must be an important hint… Love like death plays out

as a constructed concept in the minds of the living.

And we were reminded of the original premise of

repetition. Eternal even then, in the beginning, which

was before the end.

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47
 “God planted a garden in Eden, to
the east, and placed there the man
whom He had formed. And God caused
to sprout from the ground every tree
that was pleasing to the sight and
good for food; also the Tree of Life
in the midst of the garden, and the
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad.”

Genesis 1:8

48
 THE ABSENCE
OF LIGHT
AND HEAT
Together we ate of the fruit, and it was good. It

was good because it contained both the possibility

of the good, and the possibility of that which was

not good, each giving meaning to the other. The fruit

initiated that separation, which was a fundamental

distinction we had not considered before.

God called out like an echo, “Where are you?”

(who and where) And Eden changed… How

could we have known it was not good to disobey

God before we ate from the Tree of Knowledge?

The fruit produced that distinction! Before we tasted

it, we were like children, not knowing good from bad.

So, how could we have known it was bad to disobey

the commands of God, even if we were warned of

the consequences?
49
 Did we already know? Did the fruit merely

occasion the contrast? It is difficult to recall what we

knew prior to knowing the difference. Regardless of

those fugitive memories, it was only after we tasted

the fruit that we acquired the ability to perceive these

distinctions clearly – to separate the meaning of one

action from another – to know the difference between

good and bad.

50
”Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but
of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, you
must not eat thereof; for on the day you eat of it,
you shall surely die.”

Genesis 2:16

51
 DIALECTICAL
MONISM
The Hebrew word for sacredness is kedushah,

which connotes separation. The sacred, in this sense,

takes the form of the good in opposition to that which

is not sacred. Sacredness, as a concept understood

in this manner, requires no pretense to metaphysics

or a transcendental signified (it does not necessarily

preclude them either). Sacredness can be a useful

concept for framing the ways in which we privilege

one thing over another by giving meaning and value

to our perceptions of the world. As soon as we orient

our attention towards one object or person, at the

expense of all others, a hierarchy has emerged.

Those hierarchies give structure to our perceptions,

while also obscuring the integrated whole.

But what are the consequences of separating one

52
 thing from another in order to give them meaning?

Is this always a necessary move in the disclosure

of experienced phenomena? Is the sacred always

predicated upon the contrast between opposing

concepts, concepts which emerge out of one

another, concepts which separate and exclude one

another? To give value and meaning to the world,

must we always disrupt its unity by placing one thing

in a privileged relationship to another? Or is the

sacred always already everywhere, whole, waiting

to be discovered as such? If so, in the absence of

comparison, how does one become aware of it?

53
 “The serpent said, “You will not
surely die; for God knows that on
the day you eat of it your eyes will
be opened and you will be like God,
knowing good from bad.”

Genesis 3:4

54
THE INTENSIVE
PROPERTIES
OF THE SUN
Then all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, we

found ourselves upon the great circle of the earth’s

equator. There was some water, some land, but

mostly light within a boundless sky. We compared it

to the frequently dark, perpetually cold landscape at

the bottom of the earth. We were closer to the sun

than we had ever been before, so we spent the entire

night staring directly into it, feeling its warmth, and

discovering that the roots of the Tree of Knowledge

were just as heliotropic as the branches.

And we discovered a stark distinction between

burning and freezing; hot and cold were each

discrete, yet mind and body dependent. We gave

meaning to the conditions as we experienced

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56
Dialectical Monism
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them, conditions which occurred independent

of the mind, but to which the mind engendered a

graspable shape.

Hot and cold, light and dark, presence and

absence… We thought about the good. We thought

about the absence of good too. We were Narcissus

and Echo. We were Adam and Eve. Who and where!

And we closed our eyes and imagined that all of

the differences and distinctions had collapsed into

each other, that Logos and langue had become

coterminous, as if all was one.

GIVING MEANING
TO THE MOTION
And there was the duality of hot and cold – the

meaning of these concepts is always already

constrained, both within the sensations produced,

and in the way these terms operate in opposition to

58
 one another. Temperature is the measurement of

the relative motion (or kinetic energy) of molecules

within a substance. These molecules sometimes

move at faster speeds, sometimes at slower speeds,

but their meaning and value are always constrained

within limiting concepts, limiting concepts such as

the mind dependent binary of hot and cold – hot is

hot because it is “not cold”, and cold is cold because

it is “not hot”. These perceived differences produce

the respective meanings of these terms. “Hot” and

“cold” delimit one another as two distinct, mutually

interdependent categories upon a single spectrum;

they are disclosed as a conceptual construct,

intertwined within a framework of other concepts that

are external to that spectrum. This is how sensation

and meaning are given to the motion of molecules;

motion which occurs independent of the mind.

Hot and cold produce meaning in relation

59
to each other, as differentiated concepts. The

meanings of these terms are dependent on, and

contained within, consciousness and discourse.

Their meaning is necessarily contingent on the way

in which the mind gives shape to them. And yet,

that meaning is still necessarily contingent on the

conditions of the world, as they are as a Thing in

Itself, which is to say, as they are independent of the

mind or any sense experience of them.

Beyond the conceptual constraints of hot

and cold, what value and meaning can temperature

have? Outside of the constructed framework in which

experience is contained, external to those spectra

in which meaning is constrained, beyond meaning

itself, which is disclosed as concepts in opposition to

one another… what remains?

How do the apriori preconditions for experience

give shape to experienced conditions? If meaning is

60
 produced out of the differences between conceptual

categories, if that meaning is a product of terms

defined by what they are not, and if those differences

emerge as a mind dependent system of related

concepts, and not as a Thing in Itself, then what can

be said of the difference between who and what?

THE
OBJECT/OTHER
SPECTRUM
Who and where? But who is the who that is

there? Who am I? And who, and/or what, is this “I”

that is both the subject and object of my question,

both the inquisitor and the inquiry?

Who and what? As I consider these questions, as

I think about it, and I think about myself considering it,

I identify myself, I recognize myself, both exterior to

myself, yet immersed within myself, superpositioned,

61
both as subject and object.

“Who am I?” This was the question in Narcissus’s

gaze. In another version of the story, he gazed in

opposing directions simultaneously, each away from

the other towards separate and distinct vanishing

points. In one direction – it was inward attention toward

the Self. In the other – outward attention towards the

phenomenal world. As he gazed, Narcissus thought

of hot and cold. He thought of good and bad and the

story of Adam and Eve. But most of all, he thought

of desire, a desire to know… to know himself and to

know that which was not himself. It reminded him of

how much he longed for Echo. And he imagined that

she was just beyond the threshold of those vanishing

points, which weren’t points at all.

Narcissus asked himself, what lies beyond the

veil of that perpetual horizon? What if he was to go

there? There were rumors that at a certain scale, all

62
 straight lines are actually curved, eventually coming

back around to themselves. Might love be that way

too? Could it be that this was how the differences

dissolve, tensions resolve, and all distinctions lose

their meaning? Perhaps an echo would reemerge.

As time passed, Narcissus’s outward gaze

disclosed echoes in objects and Others. In the

opposing direction, interior, oriented towards himself,

that echo eventually appeared as a reflection, and in

the reflection was a question – “Who am I?”

LET THERE
BE LIGHT
Then all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, it

repeated once again, but this version of the story was

different than the others. Adam and Eve lay together

looking up above at the night sky, gazing outward,

backs flat against a round earth. They speculated

63
about what lay beyond that which they could see,

beyond the clouds, beyond the trees, beyond inside

of you and me.

Looking upward and out, Adam and Eve imagined

the most ancient light in the universe – light from the

beginning – even now, you can hear it in a detuned

radio. There’s an echo, a pattern whispered in the

static, wavelengths of redshifted heat arriving from

the furthest edge of the visible universe – the Cosmic

Background Radiation, like a fossil of Genesis in the

heavens. It’s there, right now, in every direction in the

sky. Together, they witnessed the edge of the visible

universe, and they both agreed it was sublime.

Then Eve held Adam’s hand. He whispered

something in her ear. They closed their eyes and

looked inwardly at each other. And when they finally

opened them again, they stood together, and went

on to explore that unknown something, which lies

64
 beyond the veil of the horizon. This was how they

discovered the infinite bend of the earth’s surface.

And the surfaces no longer reminded them of the

surface of a page or a screen. They realized that

all paths on a sphere are great circles, which have

no edge and no end. This is how it was possible

to peer beyond the flat horizon, which was not flat

at all… Gazing upward towards the sky, looking

outward across the horizon, looking inward towards

themselves, they beheld the same nameless thing,

superpositioned, as if somewhere between a map

and a globe. Eternal even then, in the beginning

which was before the end.

65
Let There Be Light
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Map of the Cosmic Background Radiation courtesy of NASA

67
68
 WORKS
CITED
Tanach: The Stone Edition. Brooklyn, NY:
Mesorah Publications, 1996.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason.
New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1965.

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70