Vision only needs a pinhole, we only need a pinhole to see a Universe. My day opens into my work.  I ask into the Cloud of Unknowing, and am referred to the Cloud of Knowing Even Less.

I look in my mind and I can see there won’t be the careful precise recording of every little move, the way Newton so generously did for me… it’s called, “The PROOF by Experiments.”  And continues, (from the Dover 1952 edition)  “In a very dark Chamber, at a round Hole, about one third Part of an Inch Broad, made in the Shut of a Window, I placed a Glass Prism, whereby the Beam of the Sun’s Light, which came in at that Hole, might be refracted upwards towards the opposite Wall of the Chamber, and there form a colour’d Image of the Sun.  The Axis of the Prism (that is, the Line passing through the middle of the Prism from one end of it to the other end parallel to the edge of the Refracting Angle) was in this and the following Experiments perpendicular to the incident Rays. About this Axis I turned the Prism slowly, and saw the refracted light on the Wall, or colour’d Image of the Sun, first to descend, and then to ascend. Between the Descent and Ascent, when the Image seemed Stationary, I stopp’d the Prism, and fix’d it in that posture, that it should be moved no more.”

fix’d it with what! I call to him, but I’m far away as a sack of fan mail.

I should never have uttered the name Newton before I began reading Newton.

Let’s talk a little more about Newton and the bodkin. Let me spell out that this inquirer, Sir Isaac Newton, this explorer drove a large coat-sewing needle between the bone of his eye socket and the orb of his eyeball, and squashed the orb of his own eye with the flat side of the needle, more and less and in different ways, and wrote down what the maneuvers did to his vision, and again in varying kinds of lights.   I have recently encountered my very own bodkins –  which is unusual, and then twice in the same week.  When I saw the first one, I wondered, why is there only this thick sewing needle when I have to tack the front of this fancy top? I used it anyway.  Then I read about Newton’s bodkin. Today I found a second even larger bodkin mysteriously on my own bookshelves, like a relic reminder of my own devotion to my work.

here’s what he wrote, in the shape it appeared on his notebook page, double spaced so you can see the undersides of the words:

I tooke a bodkin gh

& put it betwixt my

eye & the bone as

neare to the

backside of my eye

as I could: & pressing

my eye with the end of

it (soe as to make the

curvature a, bcdef in my

eye) there appeared severall

white darke & coloured circles

r, s, t, etc. Which circles were

plainest when I continued to rub my eye with the

point of the bodkin, but if I held my eye & the

bodkin still, though I continued to presse my eye

with it yet the circles would grow faint

& often disappeare untill I renewed them by moving

my eye or the bodkin.

-Sir Isaac Newton

So, about whether primary experience has anything to do with the basic building blocks of Science, better ask Big Data, or The Hive, or how about the self?  The primary experience?      Where is my bodkin?