Back in Seattle - spotted this beautiful flyer a while ago out in Discovery Park

Right about here.

The visualization of sounds is, arguably, a modern phenomenon, another fall-out from the cathode-ray tube (CRT). I'm sure there is a whole history wrapped up with the subject as CRTs, especially in the form of oscilloscopes, must have benefited from all the tinkering the telegraph industry did with devices to represent Morse code and the various ingenious devices our ancestors were exposed to in the form of player pianos, phonographs and other such things. When the oscilloscope came along, we were primed and ready.

All that was provoked by this image.

Something else: There's this odd little Florida bird that makes a sort of high pitched squeak. It's a quite indescribable sound. Much to my delight, I realized today that it is almost exactly reproduced by dropping  a spoon in a ceramic bowl. What would that look like?

A bridge over untroubled water.

I am very fond of contradictions and anomalies (I suspect we all are). Running around in my head today were domestic anomalies. Why are paper towels always used in twos? Why does the sound drop a couple of tones when the hot water starts coming out of the tap? (that's "faucet" to those over here). Is there really no Coriolis effect when the water goes down the drain (not even a little bit)? Is the toothpaste tube ever really empty? While I'm about it, whats' the name for what's dispensed each morning out of the tube? A dose? A serving? A squirt or squeeze?

Probably time I went for a walk...

A room with a view, or at least a view of a room.

It came down cats and dogs last night, a real humdinger of  a storm, hammer and tongs, thunder and lightning,  . What fun!

My vocabulary feels somewhat impoverished in the matter of adjectival phrases to describe the weather. Perhaps texting would be better:

OMG =8-0 g8 pimp (Oh my gosh, scary, great, cool - amusing that texting for "cool" (4 letters) is also 4 letters - must have something to do with being pimp)

Florida skies again - nothing particularly Floridean about this, but I did like the way the clouds echoed the contours of the horizon.  I suppose there's always something to see, if you just look carefully enough.

Summer is a coming in

Sumer is Icumen in,

Loudly sing, cuckoo!

Grows the seed and blows the mead,

And springs the wood anew;

Sing, cuckoo! 

(Peter Shaffer - transl)

Or here in Florida

Summer is a coming in,

Loudly sing boohoo!

Mind the heat,  and up the AC

And shut the doors and windows too.

Open door:

Looking out, an invitation to come in
A view on another life,
Not a window.
Looking in, light into dark,
Incomprehension,
Somewhere else.

End of the muscle-car weekend appropriately represented by a shimmering image of a cross-walk disappearing into a muscle-car moving truck.

Apart from this one weekend when they all turn up in celebration, I do wonder where do muscles-cars go (especially Ferraris and Lamborghinis). I've no idea how much the ones parked in Celebration this weekend cost but a quick look around discovered a 2011 Ferrari 599 for $750,000. I don't know about you, but I don't think I could bring myself to actually drive something with that sort of a price tag on it, it would go in the muscle-car moving truck and stay there.  

Ferrari impressions. Ferraris in Flatland, perhaps. I am thinking of A.E.Abbott's wonderful little story

Here is Abbott's two-dimensional hero attempting to convert another Flatland creature to his newly discovered notion of a third dimension:

"Not at all silly," said I, losing my temper; "here for example, I take this Square," and, at the word, I grasped a moveable Square, which was lying at hand—"and I move it, you see, not Northward but—yes, I move it Upward—that is to say, not Northward, but I move it somewhere—not exactly like this, but somehow—" Here I brought my sentence to an inane conclusion, shaking the Square about in a purposeless manner, much to the amusement of my Grandson, who burst out laughing louder than ever, and declared that I was not teaching him, but joking with him; and so saying he unlocked the door and ran out of the room. Thus ended my first attempt to convert a pupil to the Gospel of Three Dimensions.

I imagine myself shaking the shadows in some higher dimension, producing Ferraris out of the impressions they leave behind. How amusing!

You'll be happy to know, the Blonde was not run over, no one was arrested, no Lamborghini's caught fire.

The police escorted all the Ferraris, Lamborghinis, DeLoreans and so on out of Celebration. Not entirely sure why. One would think the police would let matters take a natural course, which would seem to lead to a speeding ticket orgy (Celebration has a very strict 25 mph limit). It's hard to imagine driving any distance in one of those things at 25 mph.

Covered Ferrari; the color, the logo, the suggestion of form and substance say it all.

Is there any doubt about the gender of the horse? Oddly enough, I think there might be; angel-like, it could be androgynous (depends on  what, if anything, the palm fronds say to you).

If I had a bunch of money to throw around, I might be tempted to throw it in this direction. What an astonishingly beautiful artifact it is.

I believe it was an early 50's Ferrari. Actually I would never take on owning something like this on the grounds that I would not trust myself to look after it adequately.

Ferraris again:  I am irresistibly reminded of Tweedledum and Tweedledee and their brand new rattle. These two however were merely judging, not possessing.

Anyway, using the words "Ferrari" and "rattle" in the same sentence would no doubt get me ignominiously run over by the members of the local Ferrari fraternity. Please note, the above occurrences of "Ferrari" and "rattle" were mentions, not uses, as are those in this sentence. I rattle not, nor do I roar, I leave that to the Ferraris (actually more to the Lamborghinis; Ferraris purr,  Lamborghinis roar, as I have discovered this weekend).

Ferrari...

It's muscle-car weekend in Celebration. Enthusiasts, children and adult alike, come by to admire other people's toys. Idolatry perhaps? worship? I don't know. What would Moses say, watching them, waiting for the gorgeous, gleaming artifact to emerge from its enclosure?

Post office flag.

I resort to Auden - he was paid to write this and it shows

The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,

The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,

The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,

Clever, stupid, short and long,

The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Sentiments from another time and place, nobody types (we text), printing is anti-social, and incorrect spelling is a symptom of technological incompetence rather than simple ignorance. I like what the image and the poem say about each other.

I could believe that, in an image, context is everything, well almost everything. In this, the contrast between the bird and the light colored house, the way the static progress of the houses across the image echo the bird's flight across the water, the congruence between the angles made by the bird's wings and the planes of the roof of the house, the palm trees tapering to nothing in the sky, the passage of the bird's reflection across the rooftops; a delight for the eye, a matrix of formal relations leading to a vision of other things.

What we know about the world around us - an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in mystery; basically a Churchill quote - Churchill always tries to cheer us up a bit.

Hobbes, by contrast, with typical, brutal elegance, bludgeons us into indifference or acquiescence:

"No Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute knowledge of Fact, past, or to come. For, as for the knowledge of Fact, it is originally, Sense; and ever after, Memory. And for the knowledge of consequence, which I have said before is called Science, it is not Absolute, but Conditionall. No man can know by Discourse, that this, or that, is, has been, or will be; which is to know absolutely: but onely, that if This be, That is; if This has been, That has been; if This shall be, That shall be: which is to know conditionally; and that not the consequence of one thing to another; but of one name of a thing, to another name of the same thing."

We can personally know this or that, but our discourse is limited, we cannot mutually know anything. Leading to Hobbes' intellectual legacy: "... the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

Florida morning.

Not as late as sometimes

the clock’s bell five chimes

rings sounds as red as bright

illuminations in the dawn’s light.

Dawn surges up the sky,

the night leaves with a sigh

of its things, the chittering

chattering dawn rises

with the chiming houses

for no apparent reason.

5 o'clock is a little early, but you get the idea.

Everywhere else (well almost) they have landscapes - here in Florida you get cloudscapes, on account of the land is as flat as a pancake. The ideas are not unconnected, I think there is a real grandeur to the Florida skies that comes from  the fact that the land is so flat; there is just a lot of sky to be grand about.

There is a lovely place called the Bok Tower Gardens, somewhere south west of Orlando. It's a throw back to the early 1900's when New York tycoons woke up to the fact that Florida is a darned sight more comfortable in the winter than their native city, and now easy to get to because of the railways. So a slew (slough?) of large mansions were built all around Florida, the Bok Tower Gardens being built around one of them. That particular spot was apparently chosen because, at the time, it was though to be the highest spot in peninsular Florida; the height being an awesome 320 feet. Where I come from, there are rocks bigger than that (if you follow the link, the grey thing in the middle is Dombashawa, one large hunk of granite and it's about 400 feet high) .

Back to Florida. Familiar territory, though I sometime wonder how in the world I got here. In a way all my photographs are self portraits, I suppose I could look there for an answer.

...the genius of the heart, which imposes silence and attention on everything loud and self-conceited, which smoothes rough souls and makes them taste a new longing - to lie placid as a mirror, that the deep heavens may be reflected in them; - the genius of the heart, which teaches the clumsy and too hasty hand to hesitate, and to grasp more delicately; which scents the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet spirituality under thick dark ice...

It's Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, I wasn't sure where the sentence started and didn't even bother to try and find the end.

The other side of the Arizona mirror - this is where the light came from:

De Quincey: 'Even the articulate or brutal sounds of the globe must be all so many languages and ciphers that all have their corresponding keys -- have their own grammar and syntax; and thus the least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest.'

The Arizona mirror:

'Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It'll be easy enough to get through--' She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass WAS beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.

Not really, it's just a fountain in the evening light outside Skysong. I'll look for Alice and Lewis Carroll, another time, another place.

Robert Capa famously advised, "If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough". I tried photographing the SkySong tent with a wide angle lens but the images lacked any immediacy or sense of the tension and scope of the structure. I far prefer this:

Robert Capa was a war photographer, starting his career in the Spanish Civil war and ending it abruptly in Vietnam. When it comes to war photographers, he defined the species; delightfully even to the extent of defining himself; he was born Endre Friedmann in Hungary, but changed his name and billed himself as a famous American war photographer before anyone knew such an animal existed.

I wander safely back to my hotel, getting close by virtue of my 300mm lens. Close still counts, however you get there.

This is not the grand canyon.

It is also not a hole in the ground. The features in the middle of the photograph are mountains, not canyons. Seems appropriate that the landscape should deceive us (or me at least). This is, after all. the land of the Hopi people who managed to deceive Mr Sapir & Mr Whorf into dreaming up the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, predicated on the idea that the Hopi have no concept of time. Actually they have a quite elaborate concept of time. Perhaps Whorf suffered from too much peyote.

Possibly Whorf-like, I wander off into the philosophy of holes. Philosophically speaking it is odd that we refer to holes as things, when they are really the absence of something. The photograph appeals to me. I look at it and see a canyon, a hole, the absence of something. Then I look again and it has turned into a  mountain.

This is the Grand Canyon. Not sure of the scale of the features in the picture, but parts of the Grand Canyon are 6000 feet deep. That's probably one heck of a drop.

If you click on the picture, it'll show you a much larger image that gives a better sense of the size of the thing.

Arizona, but not the Grand Canyon.

Encountered in the Arizona light, there is something irresistibly beautiful about these green trunked trees. D.H Lawrence in Mornings in Mexico tells us of "...the overshadowing tree whose green top one never looks at. But on the trunk one hangs the various odds and ends of iron things. It is so near. One goes out of the door, and the tree-trunk is there, like a guardian angel." We have taken the angels and planted them round the parking lots and strip malls, if you see them, they remain just as beautiful. 

Bamboo spring.

Intimations of Dorothy

Somewhere over the rainbow

Bluebirds fly.

Birds fly over the rainbow.

Why then, oh why can't I?

I doubt it was a bluebird (bottom left, in case you missed it), wonderful picture all the same.

Images are merely light as it impinges on our eyes. Shadows are light failing to reach some surface because of something that stands in the way.

There is an interesting asymmetry between the two - 'asymmetry' is not symmetrical, though nearly so. Being a word that describes itself, it is autological (if it did not describe itself, like 'monosyllabic', for example, it would be heterological). 'Asymmetry' has a suggestion of symmetry about it, it is almost in a grey world between heterological and autological, defying the pigeon hole principle, but not quite.

Of course, there is the age old question, is 'heterological' heterological? Hyper-dimensional pigeons fly out the window, the world is unhinged.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

Jorge Luis Borges - Limits

Good Shepherd Center again