The picket fence There was a fence with spaces you could look through if you wanted to. An architect who saw this thing stood there one summer evening. Took out the spaces with great care and built a castle in the air. The fence was utterly dumbfounded, each post stood there with nothing round it. Christian Morgenstern, The Art of Looking Sideways www.andrew.cmu.edu spacearchitectureabsurdity
Focal awareness The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes what she experienced as "being as a thing." The philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it "focal awareness" and recurs to the act of hammering a nail: When we bring down the hammer we do not feel that its handle has struck our palm but that its head has struck the nail. We have become the things on which we are working. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman The inventive process was often a nonverbal oneHe feels the end of the cane identity