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Liz and I are @ a conference for the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts in Atlanta this weekend, where we presented a roundtable w/ Ava Blitz, a colleague who is a visual artist. In tracing the process from "encoding through decoding to transformation"--whether one is making art, doing science, or criticizing literature--I think we added yet another layer to your suggestion that we "embrace mystery." Disrupting the expectation that decoding will lead to clarity, we tried to highlight the production of mystery that inevitably occurs in this process; all our attempts to make the world clearer result inevitably in the production of further mystery....