[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 one

Ah, a little light now

It is the hour
the moment
when it becomes possible
to distinguish a white
thread from a black,
so prayer begins

I 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 done

would 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
please

There’s nothing like today

And contributing one’s atoms to the green universe
how strange is that

and 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])

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