Amanda Dulcinea Cuéllar
I never believed that anything could be defined by one factor. A person cannot be completely defined by their nationality, their place of residence or family name. We are infinitely more complicated. So too is everything we create, see and experience. Thus words, as descriptive and intense as they may be, cannot span the emotions of this moment. Those feelings, which make my being tremble, cannot even begin to be defined by a few syllables a person indifferent to my emotions once coined. To make you understand what I feel when I hear that one song, see that one face and hear that voice, so sweet and comforting, you must inhabit my skin in that moment. As that is not possible, the closest we can come is for you to hear and see what affects me so. The description of the interactive collage in “The New Reading and Writing: “Left vs. Right Side of the Brain: Hypermedia and the New Puritanism” which presents the “reader” with sounds and images of the time period and events that marked that point in time in the author’s life is the only way to get close to understanding who the author is. As was pointed out in “The World is Your Body” everything must be put in context and described in relation to its environment in order to be truly defined. Nevertheless, the context is infinite and thus the object can never be completely defined. Humans seem to need to define and shape everything in order to believe they have control over the indomitable forces of nature. In the poem “o sweet spontaneous” ee cummings expresses this need:
“o sweet spontaneous earth how often have the doting fingers of prurient philosophies pinched and poked thee has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty how often have religions taken thee upon their scraggy knees squeezing and buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive gods but true to the incomparable couch of death thy rhythmic lover thou answerest them only with spring”
The innate splendor of nature is dismantled when humans try to mold it to meet their needs. We try to enclose our experiences, feelings and even nature in powerful, decorous words when the events contain so much beauty on their own. It is this beauty, much like spring, that shines through and that no one except the one who experienced it can begin to understand.
Even when venturing out of the realm of personal experiences, the complete majesty of scientific phenomenona can only be appreciated when it is experienced with all senses. The assertion that "electronic thinking does not abandon, exclude, or replace analytical thinking; it puts it in its place in a larger system of reasoning” (Bump, par. 3) is true. In my experience the illustrations of chemical reactions and videos of atoms floating about are what I remember more than the text. It is through this “hypermedia” that I attain a more complete understanding of the material.
In spite of my views expressed previously, I still enjoy books without illustrations. When reading the illustrated Zuleika Dobson, I felt denied of my right as a reader to visualize the characters on my own. Ever since I was a child my father would read out loud to us and tell us to imagine what the story looked like. Being able to exercise my creativity and analytical abilities always made my reading more entertaining. On the other hand, I was able to view the book as Max Beerbohm saw it. Having never been to
Like the Yin and the Yan, both aspects of ourselves coexist and even complement each other. By failing “to recognize the dependency of each pole on the other or the possibilities of the simultaneous presence of both and of a larger whole which contains both opposites” (Bump, 862) we negate half of ourselves or of any other whole. Between black and white exists the grey area which is a bit of both and balances the differences.