[Image: “Unmade Bed” (1957), by Imogen Cunningham. We saw this at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2022; for my purposes today, I found it here, at the site of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). Cunningham’s friend and fellow photographer Judy Dater once said of this photo, “She sometimes would give that photograph to people as a wedding present so that the husband would know that the wife was going to be busy, that she had things to do, and not to expect the bed to always be made.“]
From whiskey river:
St. Augustine wrote that the things of the world pour forth from God in a double way: intellectually into the minds of the angels and physically into the world of things. To the person who believes this—as the western world did up until a few centuries ago—this physical, sensible world is good because it proceeds from a divine source. The artist usually knows this by instinct; his senses, which are used to penetrating the concrete, tell him so. The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality. This in no way hinders his perception of evil but rather sharpens it, for only when the natural world is seen as good does evil become intelligible as a destructive force and a necessary result of our freedom.
(Flannery O’Connor [source])
…and (second paragraph):
…there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd.
It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd—uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don’t. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of “doing it” from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?
(Alan Watts [source])
Not from whiskey river:
…no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and […] the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.
(Charles Dickens [source])
…and:
Truth is I would like to escape myself
Truth is I would like to escape myself.
Detach my body from my skin,
peel it layer by layer to uncover
beneath the surface of petals
and thorns piled up year after year,
who I am and who I want to be.
I want to be the flower that grows
in dirt, the feather that flies free between
the cracks of fences. A wise woman
once told me, don’t worry about you,
worry about who you could be.
I want to be the woman who sits
on a desk and writes pieces of oceans,
rivers on a white space in a place
where imagination has no border.
(Nour Al Ghraowi [source])
…and:
My research was only underway a month when, quite unexpectedly, one woman dragoned—a nineteen-year-old girl from Iowa named Stella. Her dragoning was fairly consistent with the other cases documented over the years by the WRC. By all accounts, she transformed in a state of rage. Four airmen perished instantly. A fifth man—an older mechanic by the name of Cal—was the only witness. He said that he saw the men surround Stella. He called it “hassling.” He heard her yelling to be left alone, and had headed toward her at a run, hoping to help. Instead, he heard her scream, and saw her transform in a terrible burst of fire. The blast was so strong, it blew him a full twenty feet backward. The ground shook like they had been bombed. The men had been blown apart. It wasn’t clear if either the transformation or the subsequent death of the airmen was intentional. The mechanic did not believe so. When the dragon came to her senses, she noticed Cal staring at her, wetting himself with fear. She patted his head and flew away.
