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There are moments in life when understanding arrives too late to claim priority. Something in us has already halted, already turned, already registered the weight of what is happening before the mind can explain why. The body stops first. Attention narrows first. Recognition enters before interpretation has caught up. This image turns toward that strange interval between apprehension and explanation. The stairwell is narrow, ordinary, architecturally plain. No dramatic event appears within it. No visible figure causes alarm. No overt symbol announces revelation. And yet the man is caught mid-step, suspended in a moment of interior interruption. His movement has been arrested by something that has not yet become language. What matters here is not what he knows conceptually, but that he already knows in another register.
That structure belongs deeply to the lived-world of Confessions to the Empty Chair. The book repeatedly shows that some of the most important truths in a life do not arrive first as theories, arguments, or neatly articulated conclusions. They arrive as felt recognitions. One senses the moral gravity of a situation before one can fully describe it. One perceives the significance of a person, a place, a danger, a desire, or a judgment before the intellect has organized its explanation. The soul is often touched before it is articulate. This does not make the experience irrational. It reveals that rational narration is not the first mode by which human beings encounter reality. There are forms of knowing older than commentary.
Phenomenologically, this image concerns pre-predicative awareness: the kind of knowing that belongs to lived experience before it is converted into explicit propositions. Human beings do not first meet the world as detached analysts. They meet it as embodied beings already involved, already oriented, already exposed. The stairwell intensifies this truth because it is a space of transition. One enters such a place in motion, with purpose, with implied destination. To be stopped there is significant. The interruption is not externalized into spectacle; it is carried in posture. The lifted foot, the arrested momentum, the contained expression all testify to a recognition that precedes speech. The self has encountered something real enough to reorganize its body before it has successfully explained the encounter to itself.
In the world of the book, this kind of interruption matters because it reveals how much of life is first grasped beneath the level of declared certainty. Confessions to the Empty Chair does not portray the human person as a cleanly self-transparent being who always knows why he feels what he feels. It presents consciousness as layered, with intuition, desire, conscience, fear, memory, and spiritual sensitivity often moving before explicit understanding. The result is not chaos, but seriousness. One must learn to listen to recognitions that appear before one has words, while also refusing to sentimentalize every impulse as truth. The difficulty lies in discernment. Not every inner halt is revelation. But neither is every pre-verbal recognition reducible to confusion. Some of the deepest truths in a life first appear exactly this way: as interruption without immediate explanation.
Psychologically, the image addresses the intelligence of the body. Contemporary people often trust only what they can state clearly, but lived experience shows that the self frequently reacts meaningfully before it can justify its reaction. A body stiffens. A voice catches. A hand hesitates. A step pauses. Such responses can emerge from trauma, desire, intuition, conscience, attraction, dread, memory, or long-formed pattern. They may mislead in some cases, but they may also reveal that the organism has already registered significance. The body is not a mute machine dragged behind the mind. It is part of how meaning first becomes manifest. In this image, the man’s halted motion says what his language has not yet had time to say: something here has reached him.
This is also spiritually serious. In Confessions to the Empty Chair, moral and spiritual awareness often arrives not with immediate conceptual clarity but with inward pressure. One senses before one systematizes. One knows one is standing before something that matters before one has named its category. Theological traditions have long recognized this dimension of conscience and discernment. The heart can be struck before the argument is formed. The soul can feel summoned, warned, exposed, or drawn before it has arranged the event into doctrine or explanation. That does not abolish the need for thought. It establishes thought as a response to a more originary contact. The deepest recognitions are not always manufactured by analysis. Sometimes analysis is the delayed obedience owed to what the soul already encountered.
The stairwell as setting intensifies the image’s philosophical force because it is a liminal place, neither one room nor another, neither full arrival nor full departure. That is exactly where many recognitions happen. They emerge in passage. They interrupt self-momentum. A person thinks he is simply moving through life, and then suddenly he is no longer moving innocently. Something has entered the field. The world has shifted, not necessarily outwardly, but in the inward relation between the self and what stands before it. The transition space becomes a site of revelation because revelation often appears where one expected only transit.
In the broader world of the book, this kind of moment matters because delayed understanding does not negate initial recognition. In fact, the delay often proves how real the first apprehension was. The mind struggles afterward because the soul has already been addressed. One spends hours, days, or years trying to explain what one had already, in some deeper sense, known. This is one reason certain memories remain charged long after the visible details have faded. The event did more than happen. It registered. It laid claim before it made sense.
“I Recognized It Before I Understood It” names that priority with precision. It refuses the flattering fiction that understanding must always lead the way. Instead, it honors the humbling structure of human awareness: first the halt, first the pressure, first the obscure but unmistakable sense that something is there. Explanation comes later. Language comes later. Even judgment may come later. But recognition, in such moments, is already a form of encounter. The soul has been reached before the sentence has been formed. And in the lived world of Confessions to the Empty Chair, some of the most decisive truths begin exactly there, in that suspended instant when the self knows enough to stop but not yet enough to say why.
May Photography. Final 20 in gd 12 portfolio 2014.
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THEME 4: The Beauty of the Beginning and the End. Cycle of beginning and the end, create and destroy. Existentialism.
STATEMENT: Feel the beauty.
Feel being alive.
Feel being apart of this world.
All things are created to balance each other.
I feel sinful being alive, but the reasons are not resaons.
I see the destruction in human beings, but I cannot admit it is not one part of us.
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today this series of lids became the topic of a delving into existentialism by learning the reasons as to why a friend ended up with a certain lid. a rather intriguing discussion.
canon 7d with sigma 30.
we are so insignificant to the world and its everlasting cycle.
it is so simple to recognize.
we make our own decisions. there is no fate, no path previously chosen.
Comics Exhibition: "From TELEOS to the Beyond”
Dithers Humor with the Existential and the Mundane
SILVER SPRING, MD— DWIGHTMESS Cartooning & Comic Arts, a new gallery devoted to experimental and cutting-edge independent comics and illustration, is proud to announce its next exhibition, From Telos to the Beyond, a conceptual group show exploring material spirituality and existentialism through comics, featuring the original comics art of Sam Sharpe, Everett Bass, Bob Kubbers and Peach S. Goodrich.
Combining the uncanny and the profane, the arcane and the contemporary, From Telos to Beyond represents a cartoonists' inclination for testing out possible habitable cosmic systems through the particularized and unshared realities of their art. Humanity's inclination to obsessively name its purpose through art is a feature of popular Western cosmogony, and is put into illuminatingly weird action by these artists through the language of sequential storytelling.
Sam Sharpe and Peach S. Goodrich are collaborators on Viewotron, an anthology of recurring stories that match comedic riffs with philosophical narrative rhymes that could only happen in comics. Populated with talking animal college students, goal-less explorers, space monsters, debunked deities, and unexamined consciences, the publication's weird humor reminds us that no one is safe from the stresses in our lives that can embolden one to self-sabotage.
Combined with Sharpe and Goodrich, the perfect draftsmanship and storytelling of comics artist Bob Lubbers (1922-2017) reveals a mastery of and seamless relationship to the comics medium that would seem, to contemporary eyes, eerie to maintain and distinctive in its compositions. His bold creativity, on display in comic strips such as 'Lil Abner, Tarzan, The Saint, and Secret Agent X9 should have afforded him more recognition. According to comics journalist Paul Gravett, Lubbers is 'not the celebrated cartoonist he should be.' Additionally, in these strange & obscure, possibly unpublished comic strips titled Buck Danes, Everett Bass, an artist surmised to have worked in the 1940's, engages a singular, running commentary about making ends meet through its characters that mirrors the political realism of Harold Gray's renowned and long-running comic strip, Little Orphan Annie. That the comic may well represent a failed attempt to capitalize on Gray's success by featuring familiar working-class themes and a relatable drawing style, it ultimately still succeeds at replicating Gray's comic universe, but for purposes too fascinatingly odd to be understood.
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Every object leaves a shadow, but the shadow is not merely absence of light; it is the trace through which the hidden truth of the object becomes visible.
This guy was interviewing the seal about existentialisms. Rozie, Shayne, and I had an unspoken bond where we all decided to leave with out talking to each other.
The French-Algerian philosopher who wrote a pile of books, papers, essays, articles dedicated specifically on the notion that there is something fundamentally absurd about the human condition, since we are condemned to search for objective meaning, purpose, and value in an indifferent universe devoid of all these things, that is Albert Camus.
Camus died at the age of 46 in a car accident with a train ticket to Paris in his pocket.
//watercolor, ink on paper
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this is a sieways comment on the emptiness of existentialism as a medium for conveying somethingorother
or not
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International visitors as well as locals & Americans leave small cairns in memory of the man who loved a walk in the woods. His last words were : moose & Indian. cf WIKI.com Henry Thoreau
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