People can achieve constellations to each other like stars, expressing the social forces like stars arrange to patterns of gravity. Even strangers succumb subconsciously to forming patterns. At the same time, their sheer position in the scenery put them into a relationship to each other. Can this happen: that we are in no relationship to someone, but we’re in a relationship to someone out of instances of a higher order that we cannot control?
It happens around us, and we can’t really control it, because we are the reason the way we are. A storm of stars is around earth, and man has ordered the chaos by putting them into constellations. Those stars in the constellations are not connected to anything but man’s observation. They are thousands of light years apart, and the only thing that connects them is the observer, man, standing on the surface of earth, looking up. And putting the stars with similar brightness into a relationship to each other where there is no other relationship.
We can’t look at anything without attaching sense to it. Kant called this a priori, the basic functionality of the human mind, the way it works as it approaches the world to unravel its mystery through thinking. The same goes with the thinking based on what the eyes see. The mystery of the people in the image is in the eye of the beholder, creating a pattern out of a chance meeting.
The people in this image form a circle even though they don’t know each other and may never run into each other. But for the purpose of this image they are locked into a fleeting, if not imaginative relationship. As if the people had a common story. Maybe they are the last survivors of the town lost in the red fog which once was Los Angeles. Something has happened here. And it is to the observer to decide what it is. Nothing can be proven, like most things about humans. It’s all what our imagination takes for natural and reasonable.
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