An optical illusion can give itself in multiple possible ways to a beholder, who, in any given moment, perceives it spontaneously in one of multiple possible forms.

In such give-and-take moments, we tend to focus more on the given object beheld rather than on the receptivity of the subject doing the beholding. Workaday language is optimized for comprehensible objects, not for the comprehending subjects, and even when we attempt to focus on subjects we distort them — evert them — into objects. When seeking the mysterious origin of our field of vision and the nature of sight, we find only eyeballs and eyeball parts, and we explain seeing by what we see, while sight as sight slips away.

Gestalt psychology speaks of perceived figures embedded in visual fields. Our language itself is a field, and it cannot speak about wherefore it speaks. Only a language of fields can do justice to subjects. Physics tells us that no two objects can occupy the same point in space at the same time. Metaphysics should tell us that two subjects cannot avoid overlapping in time and space. This overlapping of being is essential to subjectivity.

Let us call any given object a gestalt (“form”), and the subjective taking of the gestalt, which receives it in one of its multiple possible gestalts, a gestell (“enframing”). There is no gestalt without a corresponding gestell. Figure and field are a unity. Object and subject are a unity.

We can alter this unity — these unities — at various strata of being, at various scales of self.

At the lowest stratum, we play with optical illusions. We undergo a “click” and experience a duck becoming a rabbit, a stairway flipping, a ballerina’s spin reversing. Or we are punched by a punchline or shocked by a plot twist.

A bit higher we have paradigm shifts of science and other systematic methodologies.

Higher still, we have life-changing insights. We see that we were right to a degree, but not right enough. Distracted by the truth of our own truth, we were oblivious to the possibility of truer truths, and what was at stake in pursuing them. Lower truths eclipse higher ones.

There are yet higher strata, and higher clicks. These extend into fields of being so omnipresent and lacking any otherwise that when they shift, the initial shock is the revelation of their being, seen now only in the even more shocking reality of difference. Such being irrupts ex nihilo.

An optical illusion is one of myriad kinds of multistable phenomena.

An infinite optical illusion would show itself in myriad ways to myriad beholders, each of whom, in any given moment, takes what is given in some particular way.

Reality is an infinite optical illusion.

The multistable object is not arbitrarily imagined. But! …every given object is from stubborn noumena who shows their being in the gestalt taken by the gestell-receptive subject. It is instaurated. It is configured. It is material dialogue. It is craftwork.

Reality is infinitely multistable gestell-gestalt, against a ground beyond subject-object.

Here I am now — finite, delicate, suspended in space, time and self — draped in velvet of nihilitude, gently and fleetingly delaying my reabsorption into infinity.