I’m trying something new for me with the image above, and with not rattling on about it here. However, if you’d care to share your thoughts in a comment I’d be very glad to receive them. I’m very curious to know what you make of it.
When I completed the Faun image presented in my previous post, I found myself at a loss regarding what to do next. It crossed my mind that it might be fun to try to represent a time before all human-crafted physical and mythic structures, and perhaps even suggest beauty entirely outside of time. The image above arose in my imagination and realizing it in pixels has been a joy.
As details of the composition formed in my thoughts, I wondered, “What’s the story here?” Perhaps that a beautiful, unselfconscious creature seeks communion with her world? But that’s just where the image takes me. I hope if you fall into it you’ll go some lovely place.
As I understand it, way back in the day the Roman’s thought that special places…stately groves, shimmering pools, intensely lovely country lanes…had personalities. Each had a spirit. A genius loci. My guess is that the cluster of mental material that accumulated in the minds of frequent visitors to such places caused place-specific personalities to form in their thoughts. That’s the sort of thing I’m playing at with the image above, which I think of as sort of a capriccio. A fantasy of a bygone place and time.
The façade pictured in the image at right belongs to the second and third floor of a building on Grant Avenue in San Francisco which I photographed in February 2003. That façade is NOT an element of the lovely Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, at which I had the pleasure of helping to stage a conference in the 1980s.
A fun attraction of the Peabody continues to be the twice-daily march of the Peabody Ducks to and from a fountain in the center of the hotel’s main lobby. Another fun but lesser-known uniqueness of the hotel is the “Lead Duck” pin. If you are wondering what a pin made of lead and shaped like a duck could be about you are already leaning in the direction I hope this post will take you.
The pin is given to key folks who are participating in the staging of an event at the hotel. It lets the hotel staff know that the wearer is to be accorded special assistance if requested because they are an event lead…er. Pleasantly aware that “lead” has at least two meanings, and potential humor can arise from a meaning switch, when the hotel’s delightful convention manager presented me with my pin she declared me a “Lead Duck” – pronounced “led” as in the heavy, bluish-gray, soft, ductile metal. I remain very amused.
I love words that can mean more than one thing. From words soulful like tear, to words colorful (another word that also has a couple of meanings) like booty. Which brings me to façade and reflection and the image above.
I think of my own experience of my own experience as a layer-like zone vacillating in a conical space between unconsciousness and consciousness. Imagine on the left side of the screen an immense globe of swirling unconscious material, each mote of which is related to every other mote by a gazillion associative connections. On the right side of that globe imagine a conical space…a transition area the base of which projects from and interacts with the swirling unconscious stuff. And emerging to the right from the apex of the cone is a line of thoughts, formed when the unconscious stuff moves and is processed through the cone into a linguistic-like conscious thread that allows me to purchase a jar of pickles, open it, and tell you about it.
Regarding that conical space, I think of myself as sort of a band or layer that moves back and forth between the unconscious base and the conscious apex. Often hovering nearer the base than the apex. Especially lately since I’ve been willfully courting a state that, with increasing frequency, allows what I see there to linger as images that can be recalled. Images from a depth within the cone that precedes the point where one or another related meaning gets designated as the next bead in the linier conscious thread – from a depth at which differentiation between things has not yet occurred.
I often sing while cooking and doing the dishes. For three consecutive evenings in early April 2024 while preparing for and cleaning up after dinner I serenaded myself over and over with a song called “Stewball”. It’s about a race horse and not a particular edifying ditty, but it seemed to have taken hold of me,
I generally sing several songs during each dinner prep and dish-washing session, so by evening three, having sung nothing but “Stewball” I had to ask myself, “Why? Why? When there are so many songs you could be singing, why Stewball?” As I lay in bed that night waiting for sleep the question was still in my thoughts, and it seemed as if the melody was playing softly somewhere nearby.
The next day I rode the J Church MUNI line inbound to Downtown San Francsico. As we entered the underground segment of the journey, I noticed that a pleasant looking fellow with curly gray hair and wearing a well-worn flaxen coat was sitting near the rear door of the car softly playing sort of jazzy flamenco on a venerable guitar. I got up and sat near him explaining that I wanted to hear better. He smiled and played a little louder, meandering through several melodies and then…you guessed it…he began to sing “Stewball”. By the time he got to the last verse I was sufficiently recovered from my muddled thoughts to sing along.
The minstrel does not appear to be a phantom. I have bumped into him twice subsequent to the Stewball encounter, both times above ground and in broad daylight. His name is Jerry. He tells me that he often plays from 1 to 2 PM on weekends at Bird and Becket Books and Records in SF’s Glen Park neighborhood.
If you found what you just read more interesting and/or amusing than annoying I encourage you to check out my 2012 post The Rabbit of Synchronicity.
And for your listening pleasure, The Hollies give you Stewball.
The location is a drab, dimly lit, open office interior. Everything wears a layer of rusty grime. I can’t see them, but I know others are within earshot. My boss, a sandy-haired man in his forties, wrinkled long-sleeve white shirt and khaki pants, is standing turned away from me, speaking calmly but loud enough to be heard by anyone on the floor that might choose to listen. He is berating me. Stating in well-chosen words that I am not capable of being on the same page with him because I am not smart enough to understand his ideas and what he is trying to do.
I’m sitting on the floor in a dark narrow hallway. My assistant is sitting across from me saying he thinks my boss is fond of me and the harsh rebuke was for show to make people believe that I am not aligned with him…that he is trying to protect me because he knows his activities have gotten him into trouble and he does not want to drag me down with him.
My assistant reminds me that I was hired because I am a poor subject for hypnosis. Because when hypnotized the eye of my awareness turns inward and I ignore the instructions the hypnotist gives.
I sense that I have a mental impairment. Something that inclines me to prefer not to speak.
My assistant and I exit the building leaving tracks in newly fallen snow. My assistant turns to the left and walks away leaving a trail of footprints behind him.
I see myself, viewed from above and behind my boss who is watching me from a window on the second floor. I turn to my right and walk away leaving a trail of footprints, but there are no footprints in the snow in the direction my assistant departed.
Imagine you and I are having a conversation and it occurs to you that what I’m saying does not seem entirely genuine. Perhaps you find yourself wondering, “What does he really think?” And if you asked, I’d probably try to come clean, but I think that even if I threw myself into the task with abandon and total sincerity whatever I said would be as vapor rising from a vast ocean swarming with life below the surface of consciousness. Strictly speaking, I think I’d only be able to say what I think I think. In other words, I think that much of what I’m thinking at any given time is a feeble work in progress emerging in response to immediate conscious circumstances profoundly influenced by a tumultuous underlying universe of unconscious material.
In the movies we often see a whiteboard to which photos of bad folks have been taped, and lines drawn on the board between the photos indicate who is related to who. And sometimes in the movies we also see a basement or attic or garage where a loner has covered the walls, and perhaps even the floor and ceiling, with photos, news clippings and scribbled notes, connected by a dense web of threads that tie together pieces of an improbable conspiracy. I think both the detective’s careful plotting and the loner’s largely incomprehensible web are different flavors of metaphor for the way the human mind connects mental material, only the web of interconnecting threads within any individual’s mind is millions of times denser, with literally every scrap of mental material connected through millions of hops to every other scrap.
I think a detective’s whiteboard is especially metaphoric of the mental activity of someone who has developed the ability to willfully ignore connections that don’t seem pertinent to whatever conscious task is at hand…especially tasks that involve teamwork and require agreement among the participants regarding the basic details of their shared perceived world and what’s to be accomplished and how.
And then there is the poor devil, often characterized as “a conspiracy nut”, whose ability to ignore mental connections is somewhat limited. For such folks, I think, no matter what is being considered, connections are included to various clusters of mental material that have acquired a sort of gravitational pull. And that pull grows stronger each time it is indulged, which is often. In extreme cases I think even when “a conspiracy nut” is discussing the price of tomatoes their words and actions are leavened with ideas about pyramidal structures on the surface of Mars or the suppression of reports of Big Foot sightings.
I will cop to a certain amount of conspiracy nuttiness since it seems to me my understanding of myself and my relations with everything I’m consciously aware of drifts on a sea of unconscious material, every iota of which is connected to every other iota. Most of the time, like a detective earnestly working a case with like-minded colleagues, I willfully ignore all but a relatively few connections. And those most frequently favored connections find expression in habits of behavior that others perceive as my personality. But at other times, like while working on the image above, I think webs of connections usually ignored find overt expression, in this case through arrangements of pixels that I was moved to set in place to a significant degree under the influence of lots of unconscious stuff.
The 2022 Winter Solstice image at right is my final collaboration with the extraordinary woman I had the marvelous good fortune to share a life with since our high school days in the 1960s. Throughout the six-months during which the solstice image evolved, she guided the effort with insights and inspirations around color choices, perspective, figure proportion and posture… All the fine stuff. And she poked me, mercilessly, when necessary, to eliminate contradictions – anything her sensation instincts told her was not true to the overall unity of the composition. But dearest in my recollection is her delight when something we’d noodled over together began to manifest on the screen. That’s what I will miss the most. Her delight.
The image background is adapted from Basil Valentine’s 1671 “Table of Chemical & Philosophical Characters.” We thought it would be fun to suggest a point along the arc of evolving human consciousness from which the foreground image might have spontaneously emerged. The context. And we tinkered with the parchment tone a lot, looking for a hue that seemed to push the bluish beasty upward.
The foreground image…the Sky Lizard…is a subject that has been writhing around pleasantly in my thoughts pretty much throughout my life. I wrote about some of my previous engagement with the creature in a 2012 blog post. I wonder as time passes whether I will be able to feel that with the rendering presented here I have fulfilled my responsibility to bring the unlikely being fully into the world.
I know a wonderful woman, M, who manages a machine shop. One of her employees, D, who M has known long enough to think of as a friend, frequently expressed extreme annoyance at M’s insistence that all employees must wear masks while at work. D contracted Covid and got very sick. She survived, but for many weeks after the primary symptoms subsided, she was super weak and unable to concentrate. M asked D why she had not gotten vaccinated and had not worn a mask while out and about in the world. D said she had done her research and was convinced that the Covid “scare” was a hoax, so there was no way that she was gonna catch it.
When I heard this, what especially amazed me was D’s report that she “had done her research.” What “research” could possibly satisfy someone that Covid is a hoax? It turns out the authority D had consulted was Facebook. M is a super smart person, and I’m sure anyone that works in her shop…and especially anyone she regards as a friend…could not be a complete idiot. But Facebook as the authority for how to respond to a pandemic that had already at that time killed more than a million Americans!!!!! I had to wonder, is D out of her f—ing mind? So I also “did my research” and some thoughts that occurred to me follow here.
On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It’s tempting to speculate about the motives of the justices who pushed that ruling through. But I focus here upon what I believe to be an overt circumvention of the fundamental function of law in America.
As reported by NPR:
Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the 1973 Roe ruling and repeated subsequent high court decisions reaffirming Roe “must be overruled” because they were “egregiously wrong,” the arguments “exceptionally weak” and so “damaging” that they amounted to “an abuse of judicial authority.”
For Justice Alito to speak of “an abuse of judicial authority” is ironic at best because his participation in the overturning of Roe v. Wade places him radically at odds with the core function of the Constitution, which is, I believe, to guard against tyranny.
I think the American Revolution was necessary to bring to an end the lording of one group over another. And I think the Constitution is a remarkably lucid attempt to establish a foundation upon which a society can evolve that’s primary virtue is that it guards against one group bullying and otherwise tormenting another. (Racial injustice in America remains a monumental societal failing in this regard.)
Above all other considerations, I think the initial gating factor when determining whether something is constitutional must be does it open the door for one group to impose their will upon another, which overturning Roe v. Wade absolutely does. The license to commit acts of aggression against women which that overturning has set in motion is, to my way of thinking, a horrifying example of the general drift in all aspects of human interaction toward self-indulgent sadism.