Shimmering images in Didion’s mind
I’m reading Joan Didion’s essay “Why I Write” in her book Let Me Tell You What I Mean. She describes how certain images get stuck in her head and how she weaves stories around them. She describes these as images that “shimmer around the edges,” where the figure and background seems to dissolve into each other.
I’ve already come accross this in Meg Miller’s Are.na channel where she explored writing as image making.
When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. [...] People on hallucinogens describe the same perception of objects. I’m not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens, but certain images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet.
I believe it’s not a coincidence that Didion mentions halucinogens when talking about these shimmering images. Didion’s shimmering, Robert Pirsig’s pre-intellectual reality, Vladimir Nabokov’s butterflies, Virginia Woolf’s vanishing souls, and Antonia Showering’s paintings all seem to come from the edge of perception: somewhere that cannot be directly perceived but is still present and that resembles what people explain to have experienced when on hallucinogens.
