fiction – Page 5 – Art & Writing

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January 4, 2014January 4, 2014

The Twelve Nights of Christmas, night ten: Raw data or further reflections on the nature of Borges Library

I’d like to think of drawing as of transforming raw data with my pen to “mean” a specific thing and not another though it is not in the nature of data to actually be one specific thing to the exclusion of all other possible “things” (meaning, manifested form, reality) in all their variations (written and unwritten) any more than a child’s building block used in a fleeting structure soon to be knocked over is identical with that intended structure’s purpose or “meaning”. A building block stays a building block, a zero stays a zero and a one stays a one no matter what it is used to communicate. It assumes a participating function in the meaning of one thing ( and not another ) but it also creates that one thing without adopting its separate ( separate from other possible thing’s) nature simply by describing it. The “thing” actually has no separate ( from other possible thing’s) nature – it is but a description of the configuration of the raw data (building blocks) at a specific moment from a specific perspective. So that, at any given moment, any thing, rearranged, could be (and is) any other thing, idea, let’s call it “book”, existing or non-existing, written and unwritten, in all possible variations. I assume that would upon further reflection have to be one of the conclusions drawn of the cosmology principle but I am getting a bit out of my depth here.

All we ever do in life is to assume a specific perspective to describe what is really a homogeneous distribution of raw data – each one of us is, with other words, but a specific, erratic close up view of that homogeneous distribution. We have no separate nature. The “separateness” of our nature not only of one thing to the exclusion of all other possible things but also of the experiencing “conscience”, the “I” to the exclusion of all other possible perspective’s (you, the other) is clearly illusional, possibly delusional.

January 3, 2014January 3, 2014

The Twelve Nights of Christmas, night 9: A rip in the fabric of the universe reveals the true nature of time

It is Borges’ library that makes another appearance in this drawing meditation. One of the themes that is never far off my mind. How does our mind chooses the images that are essential for its own comprehension of the world? How come an image such as Borges library can be so powerful that it assumes an reality of its own, in an alternate universe not so far of our own house number? Just try a different key, open a small door you have never quite paid attention to before and beyond you will find the octagonal library with all possible version of all possible books, written and unwritten … my kind of paradise.

January 3, 2014

The twelve Nights of Christmas – Night eight – Yggdrasil

It can’t be helped, I guess, but once in the twelve nights Yggdrasil is bound to show up. I do not observe Ragnarök, I do not live by the old Norse Tales nor by their subscription into a modern version of a quasi religious substitute – and yet, how would one meditate on the twelve nights and not be prone to illustrate the one tree, that tree of the beginning of the world. That time might be like a tree, unfolding in a strictly, beautifully logical pattern, giving form to light, seems like a fitting observation of the old and well worth remembering. Incorporated in this drawing are the elements of an architecture unfolding by a beautiful, strictly logical pattern, giving form to an idea about time.

December 31, 2013

The Twelve nights of Christmas – Night Six: Don Quichotte and Sancho Panza

It did not quite surprise me when these two made their appearance today, half way through the twelve nights, when mind and hand start to relax and thereby the line dances over the paper playfully and feels free to follow the imaginative mind: Don Quichotte and Sancho Panza. If you’d asked me which fictional character I would most identify with the answer would have to be Don Quichotte.

Though tonight’s version of the noble looser rather resembles a chimera, offspring by Typhon and Echidna, the mother of all monsters, a creature living and fire breathing, composed of multiple animals. Typhon, last son to Gaia, mother of all creation and creative forces. From Greek mythology to Cervantes 17th century parody to, I am sure, David Foster Wallace, the questions remain essentially the same: how to put together the fragments observed by a mind estranged from its own experience by the very act of narration, reassembling life very much like a chimera through a thousand eyes of literary characters and thereby celebrating the wondrous ability of humans to invent their own reality and then – quite bravely or quite cowardly but in all consequence – live in it.

December 30, 2013

The fifth Night of Christmas – Dragons in their lair

During the night, while I draw, I do not necessarily know what it is that I am drawing. I wait until the morning before I add the collage elements and complete the drawing. By that time I see what I have done the night before with different eyes. Every drawing seems like a message send to my future self. As often as not, I am actually surprised what it is that I have been focussing on. Like many artist I confess not to know what occupies my mind while I am drawing, I am just drawing.

The twelve nights allow me to focus on drawing despite the continuing demands of my other work. I made it hard for myself this year by choosing a technique that requires a couple of hours for each drawing – but it quite satisfying as well.

Writing and drawing have been part of my life for as long as I can remember – I’d like to think that the dragons in their library lair are an inside view of that dominant part of my brain that won’t let go of ART despite incentives offered to lead another life altogether.

December 18, 2013

deep blue pride / from my new novel (nasciturus pro iam nato habetur, quotiens de commodius eius agitur)

One day Aunt Melissy, Uncle Joe and a I had been invited to an assembly on a Sunday after church to the church elder and his wife. The men and boys were gathering in the meeting hall of the church while the womenfolk were expected to assemble at the church elder’s house. His wife was entertaining us with cake and good strong smelling coffee in her dining room that was big enough to fit at least twenty people at the table and then some around the benches placed at the wall. Even at such a gathering there was no idle chatter but the women discussed who in the community was in need of support or charity and how the community should cooperate to provide it. The girls were clearly as bored as any girl at any time would have been even though I was sure they were working as hard and obediently as I was. We were all seated alongside the wall on the benches, holding on to our mugs and a piece of cake. I exchanged glances with a girl about my age who was seated across the table at the other wall. The girl seemed strangely familiar but I could not place her face. She was dressed just a bit prettier than the other girls and in fact she was a bit prettier than everybody else. After we had finished our coffee she got up, left the room and returned with a tray to collect our mugs and the dishes we had been balancing on our knees. When she took mine she made a funny face at me, and the girl next to me giggled. I couldn’t tell whether she had been laughing at me or about me but the pretty girl had already filled her tray and carried it out of the room. When she came back into the room she did not reclaim her seat on the bench but stood next to the state elder’s wife, her hands neatly folded in front of her apron and waiting to be allowed to address the woman sitting at the table. Finally, her mother decided to look up and notice her. As soon as her eyes found her daughter’s smile you could see the smallest glimpse of pleasure and pride you will ever catch in another person’s face. I looked at Aunt Melissy. Nothing much escaped her sharp birdlike eyes and, sure enough, she was squinting her eyes in the familiar way she displayed only when she was alarmed by some misbehavior while observing elder’s wife intently. The lady was well trained though and the moment of satisfaction with her daughter’s beauty and well-displayed training had passed quickly and had been replaced with the usual sober inquiry she met everyone in her church with, never letting on that she was the first lady of the community. I think that in this moment though I knew that behind all of this admirable display of virtue people were as they are through all times – well meaning at their best, proud and ambitious underneath, full of insecurity and doubt. Maybe even Aunt Melissy knew some of these feelings. I looked at her. Nah, not Aunt Melissy, I corrected myself. Maybe every hundred years or so somebody came along who was actually virtuous and good to a fault. In this room I knew this one person not to be the church elders’ wife but Aunt Melissy.

December 18, 2013

the day the shadows disappeared

the shadows were moving slowly, swaying like branches in a light breeze or high buildings on a windy day. to detect purpose in these gentle movements required a slight degree of paranoia, and yet there was no apparent natural cause to explain the shift of the shadows away from their corresponding objects and towards the center of the village like water draining from upset glasses.
finally, there were just a bits of shadow left, like drops in a sink adhering to the enamel by their surface tension. these droplets of shadow were sparkling like rainbows, no grayness reflected. the air was still and non-expectant, noon in a depressed small town, and the realization that the world was without shadows had not yet sunk in. in a dirty jeep, parked close to the village center, a woman lit a marlboro
even those who had dismissed the shadows as inessential, felt disconcerted when the birds ceased to sing. on the morning of the third day, after a dawn without luminosity had given way to dull day light, small insects began their crawling procession towards the centers that had swallowed the shadows.
and someone laughed at the gray man in his wrinkle free woolen suit who solicited signatures on retro-active insurance policies. “one day only”, he implored, “an amazing offer”, but they shooed him away while watching the myriad of tiny, scarlet colored spiders tie a living ribbon between the outskirts of the village and the shadow drain.
and yet, the spiders said, too easily do you accept that we form a living ribbon, and wander into oblivion. one by one. what to your eyes a living ribbon is, to ours is a band of pain, and joy, and hope against all odds.

December 15, 2013

Coloring a map of the United States with Sennelier pastels

My mother was busy preparing dinner and answering questions my sister had while sitting at the big wooden table and doing her homework. This evening she was coloring and cutting out the states and gluing them in the right place on a map of the US. Both my sister and I hated coloring in worksheets and my mother had brought out her expensive Sennelier pastels to persuade my sister to employ some effort on the task. The map as far as it was completed looked like a beautiful velvet patchwork quilt. You can’t achieve that with your Crayolas. I wondered whether her teacher would be able to appreciate the difference.

Montana was already pasted in its proper place. It was colored in layers of gorgeous deep Indigo and now, with a vengeance, Phoebe was wasting pale Vermillion Orange on Idaho. I sat down at the table and watched her. There is something nice about a little kid coloring in even if she detests it. My mother walked past me and ruffled my hair in a distracted way. It was just as much part of her dinner routine as cleaning dishes right after using them. For a moment I was back in a comprehensible, friendly world. No opportunistic cannibalism, no aliens. Phoebe pasted Idaho on to her map and contemplated color choices for Washington State. “Why do they have to be different colors?” she complained but her heart wasn’t in it, you could see that she did enjoy choosing a new pastel stick. According to my mother you can never work with materials that are too good and you should always strive for beauty but I still felt a bit doubtful whether you actually needed art pastels to complete this kind of homework.

Phoebe still had the whole west coast and Alaska to color and paste and she grunted disapprovingly as she studied the worksheet after cutting out Washington State. Washington was going to be Cinnabar Green. I liked the way she held her tongue between her lips when she had to cut something out or color something in. She looked a lot like Plinius, our cat, after his dinner when he sits down on the table and probably contemplates dessert choices waiting outside in the dark beyond the kitchen door. Phoebe looked like that whenever she was focusing on something. Right now she smeared Cinnabar Green all over Washington. The pastel stick made a fat, smacking sound on the paper. At the kitchen bar behind us my mother cracked an egg. The splintering sound was very clear and pleasing to me. I thought that recently I had been much more perceptive to small sounds. Only this morning on my way to school I had stopped to listen to the sparrows hopping over the path to the front door of our school, their tiny claws scratching the bricks. How much does a sparrow weigh? 35 g?

December 14, 2013December 14, 2013

dark december vision

As I was gazing at the humanoid forms moving under the dark surface of the lake’s mirror in the east I realized that the ground underneath my feet was shifting ever so slightly as if – instead of on firm ground – I was standing on ice sheets slowly drifting apart. And just as in my previous dream the sky had ripped open to reveal the true universe beyond now the earth seemed to break through the brittle layers of the outer surface and expose its raw skin. I shuffled my feet to allow the sighing sheets of ice drift away and gingerly stepped on the grey surface underneath. It had a firm, soft feel to it. It was breathing.

I knew while I was dreaming that I was dreaming and yet I also knew that there was truth to my dream. There was a reality to my being in that place as I knew a lot of prosaic details about it one wouldn’t care to include in a dream. I knew the people but I knew myself to even in my dream be a stranger in their midst, stranded from somewhere incomprehensible. Didn’t make a difference whether that be the future or far-off New York. The people of the lake as I knew them were no-nonsense, hardworking people who made a meagre living by farming, fishing and hunting. They despised any flight of fancy. Did they know about the living ground underneath their feet? I assumed they did. There was something tense in their behavior towards strangers, secretive and potentially ill-meaning. I felt exposed and chilled as I scanned the winding street along the shore for signs of rural traffic. At the same time I was acutely aware of the breathing ground underneath my feet, a deep, rhythmic organic feeling, not in itself threatening, more like the chest of the mother might feel to a baby. I didn’t want to hurt it, even though I didn’t know what it was. Running didn’t seem to make sense. so I just stood there like someone slightly sea-sick, feeling the rhythm in my feet, and waiting to wake up. Only that I didn’t.

December 13, 2013December 13, 2013

the nonsense dictionary of lifeforms on Helium-3 and other insignificant by-products of music-poisoning

or: when will we start to harvest the moon …

surprising studies show that if the anti-venom of bureaucratic correctness is not injected in time and the victim instead continues to breathe slowly through the nose, the seemingly alarming condition develops from a hallucinatory episode to a temporal ability to find one of the hidden doors into the helium-3 universe. the first sign of this conversion from the three-dimensional limitation into a full comprehension of the “it” including helium-3 is a steady stream of blue light from the nostrils. this oscillating string of conscious matter should not alarm the victim nor bystanders as it is not a loss of matter but a reconfiguration of the same. slightly nasal intonation after readjustment not uncommon but overall harmless. for reassurance the progress of the victim’s condition can be measured at a frequency of 8.665 GHz (3.46 cm), which is emitted naturally by ionized helium-3. the comprehension of the fact that most of the matter in the universe is non-baryonic, that is to say not made of any subatomic particle that include neutrons and protons, and that this matter is thought to be the primary source of gravity recording the constellation of the universe like the grooves on a record record a song, allows the observer to deduct from the state of rapture that the poisoned mind is – for a moment – privy to nothing less than a fusion of dark matter with consciousness, the first music of time.

an intervention at this point seems not indicated.

from: the dictionary of lifeforms on Helium-3 and other insignificant by-products of music-poisoning