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	hen Jeanie had washed the peach juice off of her face and hands, and cleaned the dishes, she turned on the computer. Every summer, since Jeanie was five years old, she had been coming to great aunt Lily’s house where she practiced making art. They had started with crayons and paper cutouts. At her request, Lily had added writing to their “program” last year. Jeanie had kept a story journal all through the school year.       This year, Jeanie was using a digital camera to take pictures that she then manipulated with a graphics editing program on the computer. She had been given the software for Christmas (after persistent begging). She hoped to be able to make illustrations for the story that she and her great aunt would dream up.       Great aunt Lily looked over her shoulder as she scrolled through the thumbnails of her newest images. “More flowers. They are very nice, but I’d really like to see you digging a little harder for subject matter. The pictures are beautiful, but there are many other things out there. Finding the harder subjects will make you stretch your awareness. Your eyes are perfectly comfortable just looking at what you’ve been accustomed to thinking of as pretty. If you work at it, you can see interesting things that your mind is not expecting to see as pretty. The catch is, you can’t see it if you’re not expecting to see it. So, you have to kind of lie to yourself and convince your mind that it’s going to see something beautiful, even before you know if anything is really there.”       “But look, great aunt Lily; I can take the picture and fix it so it shows what I feel about it. Like this big yellow flower. I made it so you could see how I felt like there were flames coming up out of its heart. See there?”       “Oh, yes! That’s nice. What a lovely job. I’d still like to see you working more around the edge of the image, like we talked about yesterday. You see how the whole thing is right in the middle of the frame, and the edges are just sort of left over? Try and feel how the 'weight’ of the stuff inside the rectangle of the picture pulls and pushes. If it just sits there, solidly, maybe you could do a little better by composing your pictures with more than one big thing, and by putting stuff off center.”       “Yeah, I see what you mean. I thought about that today. Do you think these new ones are any better?”       “Let me see…. Yes. They are. They’re a little untidy, but you’ve got much more going on in these than you did in the earlier ones. I think you’ve made a good start.”       “Thanks! I love the flower garden, but I guess I can try to find something else tomorrow.”       Jeanie picked one of her flower pictures to work on, while her great aunt sat outside on the porch and did her afternoon watercolors. The computer had been installed especially for Jeanie. Lily preferred to work with the materials she was used to. They sometimes chatted through the open screen door as they worked, but it was more likely to be a quiet time for them both. For Jeanie, the difficulty lay not in finding inspiration; her mind was filled with a flux of possible shapes and colors that she would have liked to use. The hard part was picking out one selection from the exploding variety of choices she envisioned, and then figuring out a way to get the computer to do what she wanted.       Lily, who had been painting for more than sixty five years (since she was Jeanie’s age), was very fluent with her materials, but now, in her old age, often could not engage her imagination in the job of exploring her subject matter. More and more, she found herself wanting to rest, to let her mind drift backwards over familiar territory.       Nevertheless, she would always sit at her easel until two thirty. Jeanie would stay with her own work for as long as her great aunt appeared to be busy, and Lily wanted the girl to learn the value of a disciplined approach to her creativity.

	At the single ‘ding’ with which her mantle clock sounded the half hour, Lily put away her materials, and went to the kitchen to get a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses. She set these on the coffee table in the living room, and walked to the computer, which was in the dimmer light of her adjoining small study/library.       “Whoa! What happened, here?”       “I don’t know. I got kind of stuck, and I was just staring at it when I got interested in the curvy part down there. See that funny shape that the leaf edges makes? I started making the colors more interesting there, and then other stuff seemed to need to be changed so the whole thing has sort of exploded. It’s really frustrating. I had this great idea in my head, but it doesn’t come out right.”       “Look at the shape right here. That’s excellent. But this thing over here. What is that?”       “I hate that thing. It was part of the picture. Can I take it out? Is that okay?”       “Absolutely. I made the rule about not changing things in your photos because I want you to respond to what you see, not force it to be what you expect. I’d like to see you find the identity of new things, not turn them into things that you already know. But taking stuff out of a picture is just fine. In fact, that is a lot of what photography is all about.”       “Cool! Gimme a second, and I’ll put this away.”       As Lily watched, still a little astonished at the way computers changed the work process, her great niece made four clicks with the mouse, and the offending shape disappeared under copied fragments of the matching background.       They took the tea tray out onto the porch and sat together on two splintery old rockers. There was sugar and mint in the tea, and cookies for Jeanie.       “I was thinking about my imagination game idea, the belief game, while I was painting,” Lily said. “I think this could be really interesting. Do you like it?”       “Yeah! I love games and making up stories.”       “Okay. I get to go first since it’s my game and I already have an idea for the beginning. Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a universe; our universe. It had bits of stuff floating in its space, but with no moving stuff; there were no living things. Life hadn’t been cooked up yet. It just so happens that another universe intersects our universe. It exists in dimensions totally unrelated to ours with the exception of the dimensions where it intersects. One of the intersecting dimensions is time, and the other is … I’m not sure what. Have you studied anything about the universe, yet?”       “No. I don’t know what you’re talking about. What are dimensions? I thought that meant how big something was.”       “Our four dimensions are width which is side to side length, height which is up and down length, depth which is here to there length, and time which is how long something lasts. Since you haven’t studied anything related to physics, and I can’t remember any of what I studied, we are happily free of any trivial restraints. Let’s just say the two universes intersected at two dimensions. Here’s the important part; at the line of intersection, a new force is created, sort of a sparkle, and this force, this sparkle, is the life force.       “The intersection of the two universes runs through the very center of the consciousness of all living things. In the very center of your mind, that place that you think of as ‘I’ or ‘me’, that’s where the two universes intersect and that’s the reason that you are alive. That’s the only place that the two universes intersect.       “From those sparkles, the energy of life takes the form of what I’ll call Homers. The Homers, at the beginning of … whenever the beginning was, had no means of perceiving the world. They were aware of each other, and aware of where things were more or less solid, but they wanted to have a better look. So, they energized some of the solid matter and made it live. Little by little, by tinkering with the way the matter developed, the Homers made life forms that could perceive more and more things. The Homers would go into these life forms, or ‘vehicles,’ and were able to do more and more things.       “Is this making sense?”       “So far, so good. Should I ask questions, now?”       “No, wait a minute, I have to tell you a little bit more.” Continue on next page
Unreal Nature	Copyright © 2002 by Jay Arraich. All rights reserved. All photographs copyright © 2002 by Jay Arraich jay@arraich.com	next page Animal Rights arraich.com