Phenomena are complex: partly real, partly imaginary, partly immediate, partly of the past. My eyes look at that cup of tea that I made in the morning, the brown film that covers the surface of the liquid. But what my mind encompasses is not only the cup but also the comfy interior of the train coupe that we took to get to the capital, as well as the gasoline stains in a puddle near my home. The current experience is brought to life by the breath of past memories; the real can be taken into the mind only in relation to a cascade of images. The reverse happens with the things that are seemingly just fantasy: reality is weaved into them. The images we create in that semi-isolated mindspace are formed under the enormous pressure of the real. The pressure may get so high some of the waters slip into the fantasy, like in a sinking ship. Again, the same analogy can be applied to the reverse: the imaginary pushes so hard it bursts out into the real (that’s how madness may be born).

The complexity of the phenomena keeps nothing unrealized: if something is striving to be not real, it becomes more imaginary and the other way around. It creates a circle on the complex plane around nothing, thus keeping it unreachable.

The relation between the real and the imaginary in a phenomenon is a kind of reflection. The two independently see and point at each other, which makes them touch right at the thin mirroring surface that separates them, uniting the two as a single phenomenon. For some mysterious reason, some object of the real finds itself in the image(s) existing in our heads and the other way around. The touch enables understanding of any kind; without the interaction between the two, phenomena become dead data. The compound between the real and the imaginary takes the infinity of the real plane and gives it the infinite depth into the imaginary dimension, thus making it possible to explore every single chunk of the real infinitely in depth. There is no distinction between the real and the imaginary in a phenomenon after all; one is the other, and one is nothing without the other; one has no substance without the other, like a line in geometry has no area. Phenomena are sui generis. Yet, we have to break it down into the imaginary and the real in our analysis because that is the distinction with which we think of the world. I know it makes things contradictory, but in the words of one or two cute Germans, meet me halfway.

Finally, how does the touch come to be? For a newborn, there are no images, no past that can make the current experience meaningful; there is no air to breathe into the lifeless data they see at the moment. There is the infinite real and nothing. There is just a surface with no depth, just a bottom with no water on top. That is the only time, it seems, when nothing responds, pushes back (out of generosity or mercy, haha). It repeats the real, records it, filling the first layer of the imaginary.