Reason Took a Holiday (and then came back)

As I reached the halfway point of a library book, a note slipped out from between the pages. On one side, a photograph of a koala bear. Cute, yes, I was thinking the same thing. I turned it over. On the other side, in scratchy pencilled handwriting, were these words: insulation from reason.

This phrase had no direct relation to the book itself (it was a potato-chip thriller novel, a.k.a. an easy summertime read) and yet, I wondered. What provides insulation from reason? Or, how is reason insulated? Why was this scrawled out here?

I had also been spending time tackling something that has sent me crawling under my desk for a few years now: organizing research files. I did not spend the entire summer doing this, in fact, I stayed away from my laptop as much as possible in an effort to rest my mind.

The task of sorting research may not seem like such a big deal. People might comment at the water-cooler, “oh, gotta organize my research today!” and they actually mean merging a few files or running a spellcheck.

My files, in a nutshell, existed in this manner: dating from 2017-2023, across three different cloud-based storage services, appearing in slide decks and text docs and spreadsheets, and tucked into the corners of various note-taking apps. Oh, and there were also a few voice notes that never quite made it to the speech-to-text phase.

From this disarray, however, emerged a focus that I hadn’t anticipated. If anything, perhaps the disorder of documents was a sort of insulation from reason, allowing my insights to emerge… differently.

Around the same time as the koala photo apparition, we went to our local indie movie theater for a screening of four Man Ray films from the 1920s — a full 70 minutes of experimental fragments, textures, and studies of form. These works, which felt nonsensical yet were thoughtfully composed, conveyed the curiosity that comes with discovering a new medium. My familiarity with Man Ray, up to this point, consisted of works such as Le Violon d'Ingres from an undergrad art history course. His motion explorations are new to me. Coincidentally, Man Ray’s films have been re-released under the title Return to Reason.

There it was again. Reason.

At some point, my notes and odds-and-ends left the realm of reason. They kept accumulating (timestamps show the most activity happening over winter break…) and then took a back seat. But, like playing with a new medium, the bits and pieces could not have come together in any meaningful way, until now.

I left the koala photo in the book, and returned it to the library. Some messages are worth paying forward.