the pain of knowing shrouds the phenomenal world into an eccentric invisibility—the pall of its recoil—within the vacuousness of which may emerge the icon.

the icon, in all its emptiness, is the volatile conjunction of myth and reality¹ within (i.e., encompassed by) the stark immediacy of the image—it electrifies the moment of logical perception with the poignancy of a purely emoted (i.e., "sensed" ) meaning; thus, the moment is deterritorialized, divested of its tautological symbolism: it remains, at this juncture, thoroughly "beyond good and evil" (cf. Nietzsche) with respect to truth value, hence, beyond "true" and "false," removed of its logical signifiers in the same manner that morality is "unqualified" (for man) in Nietzsche; and it is at this extremity that the moment may be taken up, once more, by the volatile immediacy of the image and becomes susceptible to reterritorialization by the icon's own insistence, by the driving force that is its exclusive, sentient meaning...

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note: such a thing arguably happens with respect to each and every one of us, on some level—a most arguable claim which allows for valid comparisons between Mr. Moore, Jeanne d'Arc, and even (however pejoratively) Slavoj Žižek with hardly the most complete and utter absurdity, if much at all. one must never the less be careful about this pervading phenomenon...

¹in no way here am I proposing or even suggesting the nonexistence of something known as "the myth of reality;" I am simply arguing in a more orthodox manner regarding the specific elements of dichotomy which do lie between the concepts of "myth" and "reality," however inevitable these elements and/or what they constitute may be.