Chapter X — Raconteur Road
The Self — Adaptive decoder under finite throughput.
You are a vortex. Not metaphorically. Structurally. Substrate flows through you. Pattern persists. Entropy is produced. When throughput stops, pattern stops. The book is the long argument for that sentence. The road is the argument lived. The photographs are the argument made visible.
The observer
Stand at the edge of something vast at dawn and you feel how small the looking thing is against the looked-at thing. But the canyon does not know it is a canyon. You are the only part of this view that is aware there is a view. That is the whole strange job of being a self: to be the place where the world finds out it is here.
The universe went to all this trouble and then needed someone to notice. That part is you.
The maker, in the frame
For years I kept myself out of the pictures, and then I noticed I was always in them anyway — stretched across the foreground at sunrise, the long blue shadow of the one holding the camera. You cannot photograph the world without standing somewhere in it. The shadow is the honest part.
There is no view from nowhere. Somebody is always casting the shadow.