Images of Thought

Mark Krueger

(1970) I take six boys from the treatment center where I work camping in the Door Peninsula about 140 miles north of Milwaukee. It’s near midnight. we’re sleeping in the tent. I’m half awake. Daniel, one of the boys, gets up, pulls on his swim shorts, and leaves the tent. I put on my swim shorts and follow out of sight. A year ago I would have tried to stop him. He would have run away. Now he is starting to change. It’s a warm August evening. Once he reaches the bluffs, he stands a moment and looks out across the water.

(2008) I stop writing and reread what Gilles Deleuze, who produced works of philosophy, literature, film, and fine art, said about “image of thought.” According to the interpreter Deleuze, “exposed pictures” amidst the repetition, difference, plateaus, and multiplicity in the connections he saw in his ways of doing philosophy The Deleuze Connections by John Rajchman, 2000, p. 33).

I duck behind a tall clump of grass and watch as he races back and forth across the sand, stopping now and then to charge up and down a dune then gliding again along the shore until he collapses at the waters edge.

“I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his divine spirit," I think of Daniel, then my father dancing in the moonlight, and remember a quote I cannot find from Nietzsche and use it in the adolescent development class I teach to describe the importance of presence, history, culture, and rhythm in interactions with youth.

Caught up in the mood, I race down the dune hollering at the top of my lungs. He stands and faces me. At the last moment I veer off and dive face first into the water. We play and splash each other for a while. “Let’s see how far we can swim,” he says, and we swim out a ways, heads turned up toward the sky and down into the water the light and dark connected to the movement of our head and arms and legs, then return and sit on the beach with our chins on our knees and the moon running across the water to our feet.

“Do you think I'll be fucked up like my ol' man?” Daniel asks with his voice shivering.

I hesitate and with my voice also shivering, say, “No.”

In his analysis of Camus' The Stranger, Sartre said the choice the great novelists like Camus make is to rely on images rather than arguments because of their belief in the futility of all explanatory principles. Instead they rely on the power of words that appeal to the senses. Of his own work Sartre said, “The only way to learn is to question.”