Seeing through Stone: Image Montage

Abstract

Throughout the development of this volume, there has been mention, many times, especially by people stumbling on Peter Whitehead's work for the first time, about the variety it embodies-the extreme changes that seem to have occurred, in so many different disciplines But Whitehead has always insisted that he sees his life to be the pursuit of a single idea rather than many. In a November 2010 e-mail conversation, the editors suggested he might write something to explain this central recurring idea, which is not immediately obvious. He replied that he had tried hard to explain this entangled singularity in words but kept falling into a black hole while trying. He often pointed out that running around cities, the man filming with his movie camera was using the camera as an all-seeing eye . This just happens to be the occult meaning behind the Horus name and mythology in Ancient Egypt: the Udjat magic eye, the opening of the third eye, and so on. After only a few years of filming, he spent more than twenty years with his beloved falcons. I merely swapped one allseeing eye for another! ... An outsightlooking camera to an insight-seeing camera . Any suggestion to him of writing an autobiography gets the instant reply: It would have to be a graphic novel! Finally, he came up with this ...