Promiscuous Pedagogies - on Creativity

It’s April 21, and after 6 long months of winter, a blanket of snow remains.

The maple trees are still producing sap, but we are closing down operations. Maple sap begins to run when the temperatures toggle between -10 and +10 in the spring, usually around mid-March in Ste-Anne-du-Lac, a village three hours north of Montreal on the border of the Quebec north. We have 850 tapped trees, the sap of which is funnelled into a large forty-gallon vat that feeds our wood-powered evaporator. For weeks each spring, we burn wood to boil the sap, watching it transform into syrup. It’s an intense process, both extremely slow and dizzyingly quick. For hours, as we boil down the sap and feed the fire, we are tending a relatively stable system. We have to be attuned but we can rely on some predictability: the temperature begins to go down when the fire is low, which we perceive in the pan closest to where the sap comes in, bringing with it the cool temperature of the outdoor vat. So we watch that corner for the slowing boil, and when we note that the evaporation has slowed, we open the large furnace and, hurriedly, stack wood. This is always a tense operation: the open fire box cools down the front pans: we have to be careful not to lose the heat we’ve been working so hard to gain. Once the sap is diluted about 40 times, we will be working very hard to raise the temperature 4 degrees celsius above boiling. Those four degrees can take us several hours.

We’ve come to recognize the moment when the sap begins to turn to syrup from both the size of the bubbles and the amber colour of the sap. As the bubbles grow, the sap is getting more dense. We test this density with a large wooden spoon. When the syrup sticks to the spoon, forming a “curtain,” we begin to “pull” it. Everything is moving fast now.

While the syrup is being drawn from the front pan into the stainless container, more sap is coming in the back from the outdoor vat. This means cool sap is mixing in, which will dilute the syrup by cooling it down. At this point the fire has to be extremely hot. But it can’t be so hot that the syrup becomes taffy. This is a stressful moment: if the syrup heats up too much, the front pans will burn because the sap won’t be liquid enough to continue being drawn. This is disastrous: it means throwing out all the boiled sap, cleaning the pans, and starting all over again, fingers crossed that the pans are still usable. But if it’s too cool, we will lose the batch. I continue dipping the spoon into the sap, watching for the curtain, as someone tends the back pans, and another monitors the rate at which the syrup is entering into the container, slowing down the flow when the curtaining is less defined.

The process is absolutely singular each time: there is no predicting whether this particular fire will take it over the edge, or what exactly the taste of this batch will be. But it is also reliable in some ways: the fire will evaporate the sap, the degree of sweetness of the sap coming out of the tree (from 1 to 3.5 brix) will affect the time it takes (sap becomes syrup at 56-58 brix); low clouds will make it harder to achieve the hot fire we need; it will take at least 5 fires to get to the first batch.

The tension between what is minimally reliable and the accidents of process feeds a practice’s improvisatory share. It’s what keeps attention acute and curiosity alive. For the mapleing, we are in the sugar shack 10-12 hours each day for 4-6 weeks, depending on when we are simply too exhausted to continue, or when the weather makes the decision for us: when the forest warms up and begins to bud, the sap will turn milky and will no longer be usable. It’s a long time to be engaged in a repetitive practice of splitting wood, making fires, tending a vat, watching the bubbles, curtaining, bottling, labeling, cleaning. But it always also feels surprising, the new batch an exciting deviation from the last. We get a break when the weather decides - some days there is no sap because the nights are not cool enough or the days not warm enough. Often the season takes us to the end of April, the nights still cool enough for the movement of the sap to continue up and down the large maple trees. When the sap turns, the buds now out, it does so with a suddenness that is jarring: cooking it, there is no maple smell. This last sap can still be boiled and used for cooking. It will be very dark and deep. But the next day, it will be over: the sap will stink. Many years we drop from exhaustion before that turning point.

A local farmer who has been making maple syrup for over 50 years entered the sugar shack on the last day of operations and suggested, after only a few minutes, that we were making a mistake allowing the sap from the back of the front pan into the area from which we draw the finished syrup. A typical observer would not have been able to notice any difference between the back corner and the front of that pan. But when he pointed it out to me, I noticed it: the smaller bubbles were making their way forward and mixing with the larger bubbles. To keep that back part of the front pan from overflowing, you have to keep the boil just a bit lower. It’s a question of a tenth of a degree. But with this observation, we were able to keep the syrup at the front hotter, and pull a longer batch.

Experience grows from theoretical premise, but does so incorporating ecological emergence. It becomes sensitive to how a process is interlaced with the complexity that makes it singular in all its different ways. It’s not just a question of knowing what to look for - it’s about having been attuned to the quality of a practice over a long duration such that its minute shifts are discernible in the feel. It’s about being in the care of its many durations.

The metastable rhythm of all process not only requires attunement, it produces it.

With the sugar shack closed down for the season, it was time to tend the seeds, which we had started growing indoors weeks before, on March 1. We garden in zone 3B, which reliably has 90 days of growing season. Last year, the tomatoes starting turning in September, which is dangerously late, given fall frosts. My pantry is full of green tomato pickles. So this year my goal was to have them go into the ground in June once the danger of frost had passed, the plants as mature as possible. This meant planting them inside a month earlier than usual.

Climate change confuses things. The typical June and September frosts have not occurred over the five years we have been working at the 3Ecologies Project. Historically, the planting date in Ste-Anne-du-Lac, the village 7km away from our land, was June 11, with one of my close collaborators remembering that in his childhood, fifty years ago, it was done the June 24 weekend (a national holiday). But since we’ve been here, there has been no hard June frost, and despite the snow still being on the ground in early May, we often have some very warm days in mid to late May.

This year I decided to try to direct plant early. The cold weather plants - spinach, peas, lettuce, coriander, carrots, were planted in batches the first, second, third and fourth weeks of May.

Nothing.

I planted again in early June.

Nothing.

No frost, but no growing - the earth simply not yet receptive to the conditions of germination.

Peas began to come up around June 5, to the delight of the groundhogs. And then lettuce, and slowly carrots. But nothing grew on my timeline. Things began growing when their growing conditions were met.

On June 2, I planted out the first set of the 61 kinds of tomatoes that populate my garden this year. These were planted in the greenhouse. On June 10, I planted the rest outside. The nights were still cool, sometimes going as low as 1-2 degrees. But no frost. I tried to keep the soil damp to mitigate damage. The plants, already coddled for over 3 months by then, survived.

From the mapleing into the gardening, new qualities of process emerge, but there are overlaps. Like the mapleing, the gardening is a collaboration with a complex interplay of conditions over which I have little control. To improvise is to learn to attune to the ways in which the ecology expresses itself.

This is creativity.

Creativity is a teacher.

A process is a complex interweaving of tendency. These tendencies might be thought of as bundles of contrast. Each bundle is a lively ecological field. The practice that emerges from process taps into the relational web of these fields.

A practice - mapleing, gardening - is always an attunement to the agencement of an emergent ecology. Agencement refers to the way tendencies grow together to direct expressivity. Unlike agency, which relies on a dominant feature of an environment to direct the action, agencement motors complexity from the heart of the process itself.

Over time, practices become more precisely attuned to the ecologies they call forth. Contrasts become more perceptible, more felt. Bubbles of different sizes close to where the syrup is being drawn teach about density. But it’s never just the bubbles - it’s how the bubbles mingle, what the curtaining looks like, what the back pans are doing, how high the fire is, whether there are clouds in the sky, what time of day it is. The bubbles are agencements of a much more complex expressivity than the form they take at the surface of the sap.

In Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, creativity is the activator of difference in a metastable system. It is not what the agent does. It is how a process exceeds the conditions of its reliable continuance, birthing a practice. It is the accident of surprise that promiscuously reconditions the expectations that have come, reliably, to frame it.

Whitehead writes: “[Creativity] is that ulti­mate principle by which the many, which are the universe dis­junctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity” (1978: 21).

An actual occasion is the momentary shape of a gathering-in of tendency become it-self. It is a just-now event, a way the world reveals its importance in the moment. Millions of occasions are actualising at any one time. And then perishing. An actualisation is the activation of a node of process, a force-of-form generating a distinctiveness, under singular conditions, in a particular interplay.

The actual occasion is key to process philosophy. It reminds us that the world is made of activity, and that this activity is not reducible to a simple account of form-taking, where subject and object are kept in binary superposition. There is no subject that pre-exists an occasion: an occasion is a dynamic operation through which the world (or the universe, in Whitehead’s terms), peaks into the this-ness of its singular ecology. Once peaked, having reached “subjective form,” it is not the actualized form itself that is retained. It is the force of form, the potential.

Potential relies on the actualization of a singularity. It surges in the crevices of that singularity, relying on constraint to give it the verve it needs to contribute to the dynamism. Without the fire, the steady boil, the flowing sap, there will be no bubbles to observe. But even after fifty years of practice, it will not be possible to say with any certainty how - in all its emergent detail - that singular dynamism will find its final expression, how it will reveal the creativity of its potential: will it be earthy? have an undertow of vanilla? make your teeth hurt with its sweetness?

The many, the universe disjunctively, are the open tendencies of the world’s flux. How they come together matters. This will give them the angle of their specificity. This angle, the actual occasion they will become, will, however, still carry that disjunction, despite it now revealing a conjunction. It will carry the disjunction both as the potential it excludes (what Whitehead calls negative prehension), and as the creativity it emboldens. This is what Whitehead means when he says “the many become one and are increased by one” (xx).

If creativity is “the principle of novelty,” as Whiteheads suggests, it is because of the dynamism between the many and the one. One is a unity, the way things came together. “Creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively” (21). Difference without separability (XX).

I chose the 61 kinds of tomatoes based on local conditions: they had to be on the lower end of fruiting-time, ripening under 85 days (ideally between 60-75 days). More of them are cherry tomatoes than beefsteak or roma, because from experience I know they ripen earlier. I also chose them out of curiosity - either in terms of colour or shape, or in terms of the promise of an unusual taste. I wanted as much diversity as possible.

Joseph Lofthouse gardens in a a significantly different ecosystem - a desert valley at 5000 feet in Utah - but in the same climate zone. His way of practicing “adaptive gardening,” or “landrace,” has captured my imagination.

Before monoculture growing practices, each garden - each field - was local: it responded to local conditions, generated local exceptions and surprises, and benefited from local collective knowledge. Permaculture has learned from these tendencies, largely Indigenous, and taught many of us “to let nature do the sorting for you” (XX).

In a culture of human-centered agency, this is not an easy task. It takes time to feel into the ecologies of practice such that they take us with them, and to develop a collaborative curiosity over a willful one. Too often, we are trained to believe it is we who make a difference, a perspective of disattunement to complexity. This has fostered the ongoing commitment to difference with separability that upholds the normopathic (racist) standards too often taken as given. It has made us singularly unattuned to the accidents of creativity.

In adaptation agriculture, curiosity is seeded. There is of course a desire for production - no one plants something without hoping the seed will germinate - but what is foregrounded is less the monoculture of that one seed’s growth than what its occasioning has activated for contrast.

I planted spinach in early May this year, supposedly an easy crop, especially for my climate. It didn’t grow. Not this year, or last year or the year before. I amended the soil, adding compost and manure. I replanted with different seeds. I got down on my hands and knees to encourage that tiniest of purple germ to grow. It never did. I replanted. Waited another few weeks. Nothing. Tried again. And finally: two plants. A disaster for the prolific gardener of a monoculture. But an interesting experiment for the adaptive one. This garden, now in its second year, was the floor of a forest I cleaned out manually, cutting trees and pulling out enormous rocks. The spinach corner is the most recent part of the garden, cleared this spring. Fir trees grew where I was planting, as well as alder, their long roots still mingling with the earth’s understory.

Joseph Lofthouse teaches us to pay attention to what doesn’t grow (or what else grows) as much as to what does grow. In that bed, nothing grew. No weeds. No grass. But after six weeks, at that one far corner where the light reaches in a slightly less dappled way, those two seeds did grow, and they are now becoming spinach.

These two spinach plants, if they do mature to seed, will become the seed for next year’s patch. But before I plant them next spring, I will add some wood ash. My forest floor is simply too acidic for spinach, and the nitrogen on its own wasn’t enough to remedy it. I should have planted blueberries there instead.

With the seeds from those two surviving plants, I will also plant more spinach seeds. If I am lucky, the soil amendments will foster more growth, and allow for some spinach diversity. I will, again, save the seeds from the best plants, this time hoping that some cross-pollinating has occurred. According to Lofthouse, the magic happens in the third year: now something local is growing.

As seeds adapt to the ecosystem, we too adapt to it. I admit to having sometimes been jealous of thriving monoculture rows in the village. But I just can’t seem to plant that way - my inclination is toward diversity. Some carrots here, more there, beans interspersed with spinach and lettuce. Bush beans and pole beans in close proximity. A broccoli here or there, a tomatillo, brussel sprouts, some marigolds, borage plants with their gorgeous blue flowers. Swiss chard, asparagus, strawberry. Tomatoes. Sunflowers. Nasturtium. Wild flowers. Gladioli and lilies. Part of it is about the animals and the bugs: a row of a single kind of plant can easily get attacked and decimated, whereas a bit all over the place intermingled with other things is both less likely to get completely invaded, and will teach you something about how and where it likes to grow. When I am in the garden in the early morning, this is what I look for: what has been eaten? what is thriving? what is persistently resisting growing? what else grows there?

Often gardens are disarming. Their ecologies take time to encounter, and change with time. I grew up part-time on a farm with a very large and thriving vegetable garden. Only a few warmer climate zones from where I am now, I expected to be gardening in a similar way at 3E. But those climate zones make a big difference, as does the difference between field farming and forest farming. Even here, in the village, a remarkable difference of temperature can be felt from Ste-Anne-du-Lac to where we are, seven kilometers away - often as much as 5 degrees celsius. Everything makes a difference.

Microclimates are little zones of differential relations. Ours has cooler nights and in the winter, more snow. The vegetation is more lush - more moss, more ferns. The forest goes on from where we are for thousands of kilometers with very sparse human inhabitation. There are many animals, and in past years they have left me alone. But this year a baby deer has decided to make my garden his restaurant, fighting over the remnants with the local groundhog (and perhaps some rabbits). I’ve often waited too long to protect things, thinking that it wouldn’t continue because it hasn’t in the past. Happy to share some, but not all. There is no need to eat my garden - the surrounding forest is rich with vegetation - but this year it’s what the deer wants to do. So much so, in fact, that it pulled out the deer-resistant flowers I planted to protect my sunflowers in order to better be able to chop off their heads!

This is creativity too. Both to attune to an environment in constant digestive transformation to protect the almost-blooming sunflowers, and to use your front foot to dig up plants that are in the way of your meal.

Creativity is always at work, agitating the field. With minor insistence, it tweaks conditions toward the difference they also are. As mentioned above, conditions in the garden, as in the sugar shack, bring with them a certain degree of reliability: seeds germinate at certain temperatures with a certain degree of light or darkness, and thrive in certain weather and soil and environmental conditions. But these conditions are not neutral, which is to say, they are not a-receptive to the difference they also carry as potential. Their creativity is not the opposite of their instinctive, genetic natures. It accompanies them, tuning to what Brian Massumi, speaking about instinct in animals, calls their supernormal tendency (Massumi 2014). The world is made of difference. If all you ever do is plant monocultures, the differential at the heart of process will be muted, and with it, its creative tendency. But if promiscuity of cross-pollination is encouraged, if difference is activated (as is its wont), not only will the seed surprise itself, you will also find yourself enmeshed in the unusual accident of what Whitehead calls “the creative advance” (1978).

The world as activity is always in creative advance. Interlopers generate diversity in the ecology, exposing it as bundle of contrast. But much is done to dampen that creativity. With each generation of clear-cut forests, monocultures re-seeded, the potential for difference is abated. And when gardeners follow suit, assuming that it is through monoculture that crops best thrive, they feed this dampening of existence.

Nonetheless, world is activity: potential is never extinguished completely in the pedagogy of creativity. Even in the worst man-made disasters, creativity remains. Appetite for difference is insatiable in ecological interplay. From contrast to contrast, difference is the directive vector, emergent in the interstices of the constraints that enable it. Whitehead calls this the “anarchic share” of process - its insatiable curiosity for how the many become one and are increased by one.

That the many become one and are increased by one involves selection. Appetite, for all its promiscuous proliferation, must also involve the appetite to suppress. Occasions of experience, after all, are subtractions of the welter. Lofthouse is adamant about this: any plant that tastes bad, any plant that struggles in his ecological conditions, any plant that refuses to fruit or fruits too late, becomes compost. To be in adapative proliferation, not everything can be included. The challenge here is to not reduce the appetition’s agencement to the agency of the one who throws the plants to the hogs. Appetite is a collective engagement with the bundle of contrast. Any decision it seeds is collective, generated by a complex fusion of conditions.

Appetition emboldens the force of collective desire. It touches the nerve of an environments most voluble expressivity, and extends it. It feeds on the verve of activity, decisioning it into act. Decision here cannot be reduced to an individual, volitional act. The event breaks into decisional verve, inflecting it toward the cut. Decisional cut unsettles. How a process knew itself is shifted by each decisional cut.

The third year’s spinach - should I get there - will not be reducible to the first year’s. The seeds from this year will hopefully have shown themselves to be more resilient when I plant them - a bit later - next spring. Rather than planting when I want to (it’s hard to be patient after a very long, cold winter), I will have learned to wait until the earth is ready, digging my fingers in instead of judging it from the surface. But if the seeds from this year’s spinach grow, and if next year’s different species are interspersed with them and germinate, they will inevitably do some cross-pollinating which will produce the difference of the third year’s local tendency. That third year tendency will prolong some of the first year’s production - it will still be spinach, and it will likely look and taste a lot like what I first planted - but it will also be different: it will grow with less of a struggle, will mature faster, will make stronger seeds, will perhaps have a distinct taste that will further develop over the ensuing years of spinach-experimentation, and might well affect the beans I grow next to it, or the carrots. The environment will be altered, if only in the most minor of ways, and I too will have been changed by it. Not only that: I will finally get to eat spinach!

The promiscuously pollinated spinach will taste like the month it grows. From then on, I will remember that that year I ate something from the garden in June. This year the first harvest was July 23. Last year it was August 18. The year before it was September 5.

Creativity is in the midst, impossible to segregate. It is not spinach. It is not me. It is not earth or sun or seed. It is how they come into differential activity.

Lofthouse defines landrace as a “genetically-diverse, promiscuously-pollinating, and locally-adapted crop” (12). Landrace, he writes, are “loved for producing stable yields under changing growing conditions” (12-13).

There is much discussion, in landrace agriculture, about the emergent seeds being especially “fit.” The “survival of the fittest” is how the process is described. While on the one hand this is certainly true - the spinach that survived is the most fit under the local conditions - to speak of mere survival is to underestimate the verve of the process and the appetitions of the practices it seeds.

In landrace, “the plants most likely to thrive are the offspring of plants that previously thrived” (15). This is because the plants are working on adapting themselves to the local conditions not only of the earth, but of the pollinating populations and wildlife. Lofthouse speaks of a species of landrace corn he has developed that grows cobs above where raccoons can best get at them, this due to the fact that Lofthouse privileged corn that grew at a height where he could most comfortably pick it. Genetic shifts are sought out, but they too surprise us. When these preferential genetics meet the local ecology, we re-encounter it with new perspectives.

What is lost in the vocabulary of “survival of the fittest” is the play, and desire. I like to move - I like to learn how a garden dances my body. I would likely never select for the height of picking. I like to bend. Nor would I select for plants that grow well with weeds, as Lofthouse does, decrying weeding, as many farmers do. I love to weed - it’s my morning meditation. I grow a garden that has few weeds because of how I mulch, so it’s not an onerous task, and it gives me pleasure to be eye to eye with the plants each morning. It’s how I get to know them.

Creativity is generated from within the conditions of a process. How an ecology crafts joy matters. My 61 kinds of tomatoes (75 plants) please me no end. One or two of them are quite weak. It’s unlikely I will continue with those, although if the tomatoes ripen and are remarkable, I may well baby the plants in the future, keeping those seeds. Lofthouse wouldn’t. But I am not selling my food, and I like taking the time.

The pedagogy of creativity cannot be a moral one. It’s not about the better way. It’s about how the interstices attune to the agencements of potential, and what kinds of pathways that opens up. I have called this parapedagogy to separate it from institutional forms - learning happens everywhere, all the time. It’s not about method. It’s about process and the practices process generates.

Joseph Lofthouse has an ebullient presence. He clearly loves his work, saving seeds not only for his and his community’s gardens, but also to share more widely. That he doesn’t keep records made me love him all the more.

I want to be good at keeping records. And I try really hard. This year I carefully followed each tomato, making sure its species and tendencies were noted. Six have nonetheless escaped me. I thought I knew what they were, but somehow they have come unmoored from my system. The garden carries me away. Before I know it, I’ve moved something or I’ve planted more seeds in some corner, sure I will remember what they were. I don’t. I suspect I prefer the suspense. And so I wait, excited to see what will grow, visiting them each morning to gauge their progress. In another place, where nothing has come up, I impatiently seed again and midsummer I suddenly have two interwoven crops.

Lofthouse calls it “plant breeding as an artist” (31). For him it doesn’t matter what the seeds were. It matters what they are becoming, in the local ecology of experimentation. After all, the plants are growing in a very particular local ecology, and we learn more from that than we do from the seed packets they came from. What matters is how they grow, and how they taste. The plants are the ones that teach us. Lofthouse trusts in their capacity to decision the process: everything gets tasted before seeds are saved. In his case, because he loves carotene, he notices a tendency to breed for it, his squash bright orange. Decisioning happens all the way down, in the bundle of contrast of the garden ecologies more-than human aesthesis.

That some people are good record-keepers is surely important, but the institutionalization of the value of documentation can be a danger to process. Being in the midst, agitated by the practice as it is teaching itself how to be as capacious as possible under local circumstances is more vital than knowing it from the outside of its experiential force.

Lofthouse: “I don’t stress about keeping varieties pure, or contaminating them. With landrace gardening, getting things mixed up is a virtue. The first thing I do when getting a new variety, is to forget the current name and most recent story. That eliminates the stress of keeping track of the names and stories. It is joyful to let each plant tell its current story in each generation. The story of each variety stretches back tens of thousands of years, through thousands of seedkeepers. It slights them to only tell the tiny fraction of the story associated with a variety name on a seed packet” (32).

Too often pedagogy is reduced to taxonomy. Knowledge is given to us in stages, according to prerequisites. We are organized into method, trained to separate ways of knowing according to a studied segregation of theory and practice. We are expected to adhere to format, and even when our work is considered “experimental,” to clearly state how a process is delimited. Legibility is assumed to function as a value, little attention given to the question of for whom. Neurotypical benchmarks are policed and maintained. Whiteness is assumed as a starting point and as the ultimate encapsulation of how value values itself. Even work that calls itself “decolonial” too often continues to carry all the hallmarks of colonial forms of knowing: a presupposing subject, an established and agreed-upon meter of value, an object of some consequence, a linear movement that is said (usually argued) to do justice to the arc.

Neither gardens nor sugarshacks offer such linearity. There is no method. The seeds get mixed up. Sometimes the air pressure drops and the fire just won’t get up to the temperature needed. Or the groundhog eats the brassica and the deer finds a way to get to the sunflowers despite the creative landscaping.

In the promiscuity of process, it gets ahead of us. “We” disappear into its folds, soon veered from the presupposition that we are in charge. This can cause anguish - it’s hard to let go. But if we let ourselves be drawn in, self becomes background and we soon we find we are participants of processes we don’t fully control, lured by the improvisation, attuned to constraints. Now we are alive in the pedagogy of creativity. Here, the learning is infinite - the garden often wakes me up at night with an idea for how to better create conditions for growing, or how to protect a plant, or an idea for next year’s landscaping. Every day I also find new plants that have seeded themselves - usually edible. I note where they grow and laugh at their ingenuity: chickweed grows in one of my gardens where I’ve tried spinach. Last year I kept pulling it out and re-seeding spinach until I finally checked what it was and saw it is considered to be a form of wild spinach-like plant. It doesn’t taste quite like spinach, but it grows in the same conditions, and has a remarkable zest for life (except in that garden where nothing wants to grow, which should have been a sign…).

Promiscuous pedagogies are parapedagogies of creativity. They are active anywhere process take over. “I find new crosses each year,” writes Lofthouse, “because of the close spacing and because I’m looking for them” (39, my emphasis). Play occurs in the attunement to shifting conditions, in the unsettling of the presupposed. Here, perspective germinates that is not single-authored - it is what Whitehead calls “the perspective of the universe,” how the universe resonates through any given actual occasion.

Each occasion is scintillating with potential. This creativity inflects, catching the angle of a ray of difference. Knee deep in weeds, the ray might land in such a way that suddenly what hadn’t been perceptible appears. The wonder of it!