TOWARD READING SHADOW TRANSIT: on shadow from the blue and brown notebooks of Wittgenstein.

[Mark Kohut]

"tThis is how the question arises": . "How can we expect something that is
not the case?"  "How can we expect a fact which does not exist"?
        MK: TRP quotes Witt's famous line "The world is all that is the
case", we remember

"The way out of this difficulty seems to be what we expect is not the fact,
but a shadow of the fact; as it were the next thing to the fact; we have
said that this is only pushing the question one step further back. There
are several origins to this idea of a shadow. One of them is this we say
“surely two sentences of different languages can have the same sense”; and
we argue therefore that "the sense is not the same as the sentence“ and ask
the question what is the sense“ and we make of it a shadow, we being one of
the many which we create when we wish to give meaning to substances, to
which no material objects correspond.

Another source of the idea of a shadow being the object of our thought is
this:  we imagine the shadow to be a picture the intention of which cannot
be questioned, that is a picture which we don’t interpret in order to
understand it, *but which we understand without interpreting it [MK].* Now
there are pictures of which we should say that we interpret them,  that is
translate them into a different kind of picture in order to understand
them; and pictures of which we should say that we understand them
immediately, without any further interpretation. If you see a telegram
written in cipher, and you know the key to the cipher you will in general
not say that you understand the telegram before you have translated it into
ordinary language. Of course you have only replaced one kind of symbols by
another; yet, if now you read the telegram in your language, no further
process of interpretation will take place. Long dash or rather you may now,
in certain cases, again translate this telegram say into a picture; but
then too, you have only replaced one set of symbols by another.

The shadow, as we think of it is some sort of a picture; in fact, something
very much like an image which comes before our minds eye; and this again is
something not unlike a painted representation in the ordinary sense. A
source of the idea of the shadow certainly is the fact that in some cases
saying, hearing or reading a sentence brings images before our mind's eye,
images which more or less strictly correspond to the sentence, in which are
therefore in a sentence translations of this sentence into a pictorial
language. – But is absolutely essential for the picture which we imagine
the shadow to be that it is what I shall call a "picture by similarity" I
don’t mean by this that iit is a picture similar to what it is intended to
represent, but that it is a picture which is correct only when it is
similar to what it represents.  One might use for this kind of picture of
the word “copy". Roughly speaking,  copies are good pictures when they can
easily be mistaken for what they represent.

MK: Certain themes from beggining to end?...the copies in Crying of Lot 49?