Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

Matteo Terzaghi

A CONVERSATION AT THE AIRPORT

“You keep confusing mental images like visual memories, dreams, etc. with actual, real images from the outside, images backed up by a tangible substrate like photographic paper or film. You’re fooled by words that can have multiple meanings, which is precisely the case with the word image . . .” M. says to me. He’s a former classmate who’s since become a philosophy professor in one of Europe’s colder backwaters. We’d run into one another at the airport, after several years, and began discussing what each of us were writing. “You’re right, you’re right . . . but even mental images are a chemical precipitate of sorts, just like photography— at least before the advent of digital . . . Maybe that similarity helps us understand a bit more of their nature, which is otherwise so elusive.” He winced at my use of the word “nature,” and seemed horrified by what I was saying—so much so that I began to relish it, and taunted him: “The thing that interests me the most is precisely that continuity between the real, the image of the real, the mental image of the real, and the mental image of the image of the real. You

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