Some kind of ventilator

I made a couple mistakes when I asked readers of Long Sunday to help me make a list of phenomena that, though not directly observable, make themselves known by the distortions they cause in some mediating element—think of, say, the Invisible Man. One was not requesting some justification for adding an item to the list—the “Explain.” part of the assignment that teachers perfunctorily require and that students neglect with impunity—for suggestions like capitalism, history, and thoughts are fatuous without further elaboration; these answers themselves are in need of some woolen cloak of narrative or image to make their contours visible. Of the responses I received, I was most impressed by wind and Henry James, though I think that the latter probably doesn’t belong under the given category; while I suspect that Henry James may have believed that Henry James was not available to direct observation, I'm not sure he would have considered language—what other medium could be intended here?—an element in which some more primary thing appears, distortedly.

More fundamentally, I failed to adequately frame the phenomena that really interested me, something more like things that are there and available, but more knowable through some modified representation that contains less information than the original. Think of Neil Young, who found that his autistic son was more responsive to his voice when he spoke through a Vocoder—an electronic device that splits your voice into what sounds like multiple parallel channels of robot frequency, a staggered, receding chorus of electric fan vocalizations— or the close-mic’ed horns on the Beatles’ “Got to Get You into My Life” or “Good Morning Good Morning,” where the distortion and compression recast the melodies in chompable pop-forms before they meet the ear, which is delivered a flow of acoustical fact so selective that the mind's eye doesn’t immediately reconstruct the shape of a saxophone and is instead allowed to synaesthetize freely. My question is this: what is the right amount of information to give the brain in order for the aesthetic imagination to do its work best? What filters and reductions—what forms of omission—what shapes of gap in the thing remove it from real-world reference and place it in the nightspace of stereo audition, the starfield of self-illuminating, self-composing image-objects, the fountain world of nameless, friendly shapes, of unspeakable but immediate micro-stories, of ancient architectures drawn in thought?