“Aesthetic of Impossibles” ArtBook Series
Exploring and celebrating being human is an abiding passion. I especially honor as a distinctive human gift our capacity to hold together without resolution things declaring them to be the same, even identical, while knowing they are not the same at all. A metaphor is to understand one thing by equating it with another that we know it is not. Art, ritual, language, maps, play, and masks all equate things we know are not the same. Impossibles! More than an interesting quirk, I find these impossibles a distinctively human and quite common source of power and value. Relying on its Greek root “aesthetic” is not limited to concerns with beauty but rather suggests something more like “I feel, I sense, I perceive, I know.” A bodied feeling kind of knowing. Linking aesthetic with the notion of impossibles opens for consideration, exploration, and sheer wonder this human capability to feel, sense, perceive, and know in ways that defy the banal terms of reason alone. Each volume in the series explores in words and images an arena of this aesthetic of impossibles.
- On Photography, 2021
- On Moving: A Biological and Philosophical Account of Human Distinctiveness, 2022
