[Images: “Non-Geometric Geometry #1 (color) and #2 (black-and-white,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) These two images were the starting and ending points of a series, in which I gradually drained color from the original (top). As the color palette shrank, I realized where I’d seen this kind of geometry before: photographs taken in wind tunnels. Later, examining actual wind-tunnel photos, I discovered that it wasn’t those after all… but I know I’ve seen it somewhere! First person to answer the riddle for me (runningaftermyhat AT johnesimpson DOT com) gets a free professional print of either of these two shots. Seriously — it’s driving me crazy!]
From whiskey river:
In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events and conversations, or with the identities, motivations and interrelationships of family members and historical passages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.
[…]In a weird way, it’s a memoir of not my life, but my imaginative life, like a history of my imagination.
(Michael Chabon [source])
…and (italicized lines):
Shaving in the Dark
How old is the sun today
Where are the shoes of yesteryear
What an evil potato goes through
we can never know, but
I’m beginning to resemble oneAh, a little light now
It is the hour
the moment
when it becomes possible
to distinguish a white
thread from a black,
so prayer beginsI see a shadowy reflection now our fingers touch
There’s nothing like what is
fragile and momentary
as the pale yellow light along the windowsill
in winter north
of nowhere yet
if not for winter, nothing
would get donewould finally get done
I’ve been all around this world
and not to die in hell
not to die in the flames of hell homeless with a cell phone
pleaseThere’s nothing like today
And contributing one’s atoms to the green universe
how strange is thatand some have managed to live in a constant awareness
that all things, every evil thing
will be forgotten, neglecting
to mourn for every radiant thing, and so seeing
the radiance
(Franz Wright [source])
…and:
When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment—once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognize and do not believe in—what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.
{Zadie Smith [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Pleasures
I like to find
what’s not found
at once, but lieswithin something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.
Gull feathers of glass, hiddenin white pulp: the bones of squid
which I pull out and lay
blade by blade on the draining board—tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce
the heart, but fragile, substance
belying design.Or a fruit, mamey,cased in rough brown peel, the flesh
rose-amber, and the seed:
the seed a stone of wood, carved andpolished, walnut-colored, formed
like a brazilnut, but large,
large enough to fill
the hungry palm of a hand.I like the juicy stem of grass that grows
within the coarser leaf folded round,
and the butteryellow glow
in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory
opens blue and cool on a hot morning.
(Denise Levertov [source])
…and:
Our hangnails are incredibly real to us; whereas to most of us, the English village of Nether Wallop and the high Himalayan country of Bhutan, not to mention the slowly swirling spiral galaxy in Andromeda, are considerably less real, even though our intellectual selves might wish to insist that since the latter are much bigger and longer-lasting than our hangnails, they ought therefore to be far realer to us than our hangnails are. We can say this to ourselves till we’re blue in the face, but few of us act as if we really believed it. A slight slippage of subterranean stone that obliterates 20,000 people in some far-off land, the ceaseless plundering of virgin jungles in the Amazon basin, a swarm of helpless stars being swallowed up one after another by a ravenous black hole, even an ongoing collision between two huge galaxies each of which contains a hundred billion stars—such colossal events are so abstract to someone like me that they can’t even touch the sense of urgency and importance, and thus the reality, of some measly little hangnail on my left hand’s pinky.
We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself. The realest things of all are my knee, my nose, my anger, my hunger, my toothache, my sideache, my sadness, my joy, my love for math, my abstraction ceiling, and so forth. What all these things have in common, what binds them together, is the concept of “my”, which comes out of the concept of “I” or “me”, and therefore, although it is less concrete than a nose or even a toothache, this “I” thing is what ultimately seems to each of us to constitute the most solid rock of undeniability of all. Could it possibly be an illusion? Or if not a total illusion, could it possibly be less real and less solid than we think it is? Could an “I” be more like an elusive, receding, shimmering rainbow than like a tangible, heftable, transportable pot of gold?
(Douglas Hofstadter [source])
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