1.

I cannot remember its name, but when I was very young, I watched an anime in which, if you closed your eyes and then, with your eyes already closed, closed them once more, you could see another world. Honestly, I thought the anime was boring and never watched the rest, but that single line has remained vivid in my memory.

2.

I once heard in a documentary that the organ we call the “eye” first appeared on Earth roughly 540 million years ago. Before then, living creatures supposedly did little more than drift through the water with their mouths open. If something floated into their mouths, they swallowed it and stayed alive. If they floated into the mouth of something else, they died.

3.

I also remember an episode from a comic book about four-character idioms that I read as a child. In it, someone stared at a block of tofu at the bottom of a well with absolute concentration for half a day and managed to lift it out without touching it. It must have been the kind of story meant to make Jeongsin ildo hasa bulseong (精神一到 何事不成) stick in a child’s head: something like, “When the mind is wholly concentrated, there is nothing it cannot accomplish.” Thanks to that story, I took some tofu out of the refrigerator, placed it on a plate, carried it into my room, stared at it, and poured my whole mind into it. In the end, several perfectly good blocks of tofu had to be thrown away. (The tofu did not levitate.)

4.

The best game I played with my older brother as a child was the “telekinesis battle.” Beginning with Children of the Rune, my brother and I climbed from one fantasy novel to the next until, at some point, we fell headlong into wuxia fiction. We fired palm blasts at one another, levitated, and roamed the Misong High Zone apartment complex in Pyeonghwa-dong, Jeonju with bamboo sticks we had picked up in the countryside, as though the complex were the Peach Blossom Spring itself.

5.

To imagine the unseen as visible, and to believe the visible unseen: both are, in the end, acts of forming an image.

What light entering the eye forms upon the retina is an image, 像 (상, sang). The character 像 combines the person radical 亻 with the elephant 象 (상, sang). Going by the structure alone, 亻 carries the meaning while 象 supplies the sound. Yet 象 did not lend 像 its sound alone. Long before 像 came into existence, 象 already meant not only an elephant but also a shape, a likeness, a figure that stands in for something and shows it forth. 像 is therefore less a wholly new character than one that inherited a single branch of 象’s ancient meanings and broke away. It is not that an elephant happened to wander into the image. There was a time when the image was still an elephant.

象 really is a pictograph depicting an elephant seen from the side. The Han Feizi (韓非子) tells a story in which people, rarely having the opportunity to see a living elephant, examined the bones of dead elephants and imagined what the creatures must have looked like when alive. Eventually, even this act of forming a mental picture of an unseen original came to be called 象. This can hardly be accepted as the character’s actual etymology, but the story fits remarkably well. People made an image of the elephant precisely because they could not see it. At the beginning of the image stands not the elephant that was seen, but the elephant that was never seen.

6.

But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”

(1 Corinthians 2:9, ESV)

7.

狀 is another character pronounced ‘sang’, also meaning form, shape. In 形狀, however, 狀 refers less to an image copied in the likeness of something than to the actual shape a thing is in right now. It is closer, in other words, to a state or condition. If 像 is a resemblance that imitates an original, 狀 tells us how the thing itself is situated. 狀 combines the dog 犬 with 爿, which carries the sound jang. 爿 is sometimes said to depict one half of a log split lengthwise, and sometimes an upright bedstead. Opinions appear to differ as to precisely what it represents. The Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字) defines 狀 as “the form of a dog.” If we follow this old gloss as it stands, there is an elephant inside 像 and a dog inside 狀. To speak of shape and condition, human beings first had to borrow the bodies of animals.

8.

As Lyotard put it, images are not things we make. They leak out. Desire breaks into reality in real time. (Hmm … it is basically a long-winded way of saying, “You all just have ADHD..”)

9.

相 (상, sang) is composed of the tree 木 and the eye 目. From looking closely at a tree with one’s eyes came the meanings “to see” and “to observe.” The character subsequently came to signify the appearance and distinguishing features that reveal themselves to the eye. In Buddhism, to cling to 相 (marks, appearances) is to seize upon the shapes and features that appear before us, along with the distinctions we attach to them, as though they were independent, fixed realities. 相 can also mean “mutual,” “one another,” or “each other,” although this is not because the eye and the tree are facing one another. Still, whenever I stare at the character, I cannot help feeling that the eye and the tree are looking back at each other.

Place the heart 心 beneath 相 and it becomes 想 (상, sang), to think. Strictly speaking, 相 supplies the sound while 心 carries the meaning. Yet I find myself reading the character as though the 相 had sunk down into the heart and become thought. If we take apart the two characters of imagination, 想像, we find inside them a tree 木, an eye 目, a heart 心, a person 亻, and an elephant 象.

10.

He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. Putting spittle on his eyes he laid his hands on him and asked, “Do you see anything?” Looking up he replied, “I see people looking like trees and walking.” (Et apprehendens manum caeci eduxit eum extra vicum; et exspuens in oculos eius, impositis manibus ei, interrogabat eum: “Vides aliquid?” Et aspiciens dicebat: “Video homines, quia velut arbores video ambulantes.”)

(Mark 8:23–24, NAB, Vulgate)

11.

Where did I read this … was it John Berger… seeing(voir), having(avoir), and knowing(savoir) are bound up with one another.

12.

At university, in a course called “Understanding Hinduism,” I studied non-dualist (Advaita) Vedanta. I still remember the analogy of the rope and the snake I heard then. It is the story of someone who sees a rope lying in the dusk and mistakes it for a snake. The rope remains exactly as it was, yet at a certain moment it appears as a snake. The rope does not grow scales or flick out a tongue. What has changed is not the object, but only the perception briefly superimposed upon it.

13.

In the lyrics of Fly to the Sky’s “Ga Sm A Pa Do,” what goes and returns, what longs, is the heart; what is happy is the eye.

More than a dozen times again today,
my heart makes its way to you.
Even if you are dangerous to me,
I can no longer make it stop.
Though I picture you all day,
the longing that will return each day
remains again, just as it did yesterday.

Though my heart aches, I smile like this,
because it is the first time my eyes have been happy.
Even if the tears I swallow leave my heart raw,
as long as it is you, I will be all right.

…

If I could never see you again,
I would no longer be able to see anything.
Even with my eyes open, as though they were closed,
I would walk through the darkness.

I want to hold you. I want to love you
until my embrace is worn away to nothing.
I could cast away every wish I have left.
For me, just one person—
only this single wish.

14.

If image, according to Someone, “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” light comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

15.

“All forms are illusory; if you see that all forms are not forms, then you see the Tathāgata.”

凡所有相，皆是虛妄。若見諸相非相，即見如來。

(Diamond Sutra, sec. 5, “Seeing Reality as It Is” 如理實見分, Chinese translation by Kumārajīva)