19-Rack

2 Replies

Solitude

Comfortable?

“Leaden paralysis” is a psychiatric term.

If your thought patterns & attitudes, your very sense of self, could be altered by medication, there seems little room in the equation for the soul.

The Christian existentialist conclusion is that the soul is that which chooses.

Malfunctioning receptors may sap or boost your energy. Chemical fluctuations may create a racket in your head. But you can choose your words & actions.

Choose to reject the Voice of Doom.

MY THOUGHTS ARE NOT MY THOUGHTS ~Kathleen Founds, The Sun Magazine, February 2022

14-Ties

9 Replies

Wonderland

The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo.

She succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing.

And when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away.

Besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to.

Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (1865)

for a clever animation -> Alice and the Flamingo

09-Bord

3 Replies

Tombstone

The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist.

Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm.

Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows.

A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm.

Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.

The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit.

Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville

07-Beon

4 Replies

Hymenoptera Apocrita

On our fence, near the trash cans, every year.

As you eliminate your body on the web, you recuperate it in your physical location.

Sometimes you have a body, sometimes you don’t.

If you don’t have a body, you’re not there.

If you have a body, you are so there that your relationship with the world is what I call proprioceptive. It’s tactile. It’s not visual as it was during the Renaissance.

In the Renaissance, what was your identity? It was the outer limit of skin, a head that processed information, a dumb universe shown as a spectacle.

Identity became a point of view.

Today, identity is a point of being. We add the new possibilities of mixed identities, collective identities, just-in-time identities, fabricated identities.

There’s great flexibility, but the core business of self remains, just extended all over the planet by electronic extensions.

Derrick de Kerckhove – Wired October 1996

pro·pri·o·cep·tive – relating to stimuli that are produced and perceived within an organism, especially those connected with the position and movement of the body.

05-Heat

2 Replies

Transformation

Found this black & white treasure hanging on the fence in K’s driveway after our hike through the suburbs of San Jose to Dawson Loop. Click on the image to see M’s colorization.

Click for Color (thank you M!)

Here’s a black & white line drawing for contrast:

Splash! – Designed and Printed with PostScript Code (1992)