I’ll take up now the question of the conjurer. Does the conjurer see or know or neither? Does the conjurer take something you know and change it into something you WANT to believe in, devolving it in a way? How much invention goes along with belief? How much playing-along? Will ideas strike us like lightning or must we always be searching and seeking them out? Frank O’Toole’s Physiognomization demonstrates the mind’s ability to see unexpectedly and its willingness to play the part of the conjurer. It asks to what end do we seek out likenesses? Do images attest to the persistence of the mind to keep thinking, to know more, to stay alive? Nietzsche asks a similar question as he walks through the logic of dreams in Human, All Too Human, “How is it that the mind of the dreamer always errs so greatly, while the same mind awake tends to be so sober, careful, and skeptical about hypotheses?†Nietzsche then decides: Dream-thought is so easy for us now because, during mankind’s immense periods of development, we have been so well drilled in just this form of fantastic and cheap explanation from the first, best idea. Dreaming is recuperation for a brain which must satisfy by day the stricter demands made on thought by higher culture.
