It is tempting to say that Helene provided us an unplanned hiatus from the “flood of information” that addles the contemporary mind, the torrents of data and noise that overtake the trickles and rivulets of our senses. But this is backward. The problem with our direct sensory experience of the world is that it contains too much information: too much data, too many interpretations, too much meaning. The philosopher Eugene Gendlin once described it as a “myriad richness” that presents us with far more “than our conceptual structures can encompass” — “we feel more than we can think,” he wrote, “and we live more than we can feel.” It is experience that is the flood, the borderless amnion we have always lived within and cannot escape.
Cover photo by Erin Brethhauer.
