Back to St. Mark's, though nothing very Anglican about the picture, I suppose.

I am at a loss as to how to label it. It is certainly not a flower arrangement (no flowers) simply "arrangement" doesn't seem to convey anything useful. An offering perhaps?, too pagan. A token? but it beggars the question "Of what?" Then again, possibly it doesn't signify anything. Rather like my knee-jerk reaction to organized religion as a whole - there, perhaps it does signify something after all.

Continuing the theme of the light fantastic

Even if you don't know, this person, I can promise, you would know her if you met her. While we're all unique, some are more unique than others.

"Tripping the light fantastic" - where does that phrase come from?

This is tripping the image fantastic. What are they? Left-overs from a theme park? Candidates for a suburban garden? A concrete dissertation (in miniature) on aspects of the Marian cult? I didn't arrange them, I just found them like that

Where does the light come from?

I suppose it's a question automatically dealt with by our eyes. We use the answer to determine the spacial relationships in what we see. In the modern view, Plato's cave misses the point, we don't see shadows, we see light, by the same token ,we don't see anything, we only see light.

A spiral of images or, perhaps, a spiral in an image

The lilies were structure by repetition, this is structure by juxtaposition, by diminution, by something or other; I'm not sure, there's a word there somewhere. Then again, maybe not, a picture's worth a thousand... and all that. As Kurt Gödel taught us, in every language there is something that cannot be expressed. What a wonderful thought.

Lilies on a lake, a nice figure and ground illusion.

I suppose what it comes down to is that it's hard not to notice the absence of something. We're very good at accommodating sights, smells, sounds that are a part of the ambient world, but the absence of sound can be deafening, the absence of an image, blinding. Like Hughes Mearns little poem (which I always read to my children with great relish)

Yesterday upon the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away

Roger again, last time for a while, I promise. Roger likes to sit on the couch and can be very reluctant to move, occasionally the kids (actually the boys mostly) would pile stuff on top of him till he got fed up and moved. Here he is, refusing to move.

In the spirit of Stuff On My Cat - here's Roger with his Christmas present.

I think we were trying to interest him in actually playing with it, as you can see, he was not amused. We on the other hand were very amused. Apropos of which, apologies for the blurry picture; it's hard to take photographs and laugh at the same time.

Though, in the genre of cat themed web sites, my all time favorite has to be the Infinite Cat

For a time we had this idea of Roger being an inside cat.

Roger had other ideas. I don't think he was actually escaping from the house on this occasion, but it certainly captures the spirit of the thing.

Let's do some animals - say "Hi" to Crisco, just about the meanest horse you could ever hope to meet. Perhaps I exaggerate a little, but he definitely had a large chip on his shoulder.

An interesting study in personality and expression, you just have to look at him to know he'd love to take a bite out of something, preferably something that will squeal in response.

Another image from north east of Vancouver island.

A beautiful picture; thirds I suppose; three hills, three clouds, rainbow in the left-most third, gap in the clouds in the right (thirds up and down as well). None of it really deliberate of course, but I suppose there was some reason I pointed the camera in that particular direction at that particular moment, and then chose to single out this particular image from all the hundreds of others I took on the trip (most of which I discarded).

It's quite a large image, if you click on it you will something closer to the "natural" size of the image.

I've been listening to Sibelius' second symphony this afternoon. It sounds like this:

The picture was taken somewhere near here. I was wondering, at one point, what music would sound like that looked like Florida. Then it struck me, there's Orlando and there's everything else (when you're in Orlando at least); so actually Florida is kind of like Sibelius' music as a whole; there's Finlandia and then there's everything else.

Perhaps Daytona is Tapiola and Tampa is Valse Triste. Miami must be the violin concerto, you recognize it when you hear it but tend to forget about it otherwise. Jacksonville, forget Jacksonville, whoever heard of the place?

Normally I avoid this kind of thing, same reason I avoid drugs, the world quite wacky enough as is.

But this was just so wonderfully wacky, I couldn't resist it. I produced it, somewhat by accident, playing around with Panini, which is described here and can be downloaded from this link which will actually start the download so don't click on it unless you want the software.

Late afternoon rain gives a particular brilliancy to the evening light.

Since eyes are made of skies

and round as bells sound,

the while I sit and look at you smile

I think myself on the brink

of light, what’s more I’m right.

While I'm on the subject of birds and the moon, here's some more.

The birds over the moon evoke any number of images. For example, Coleridge in the Ancient Mariner, as the protagonist approaches the revelation that leads to his salvation, he sleeps and wakes as

The moving Moon went up the sky, 

And nowhere did abide:

Softly she was going up,

And a star or two beside-

Looking beyond the darkness of the ship's shadow, he sees in the Moon's light

O happy living things no tongue 

Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,

And I blessed them unaware;

Sure my kind saint took pity on me, 

And I blessed them unaware. 

Pelican, early morning, Tampa bay.

There is something very apt about a combination of Ogden Nash and a pelican. Here he speaks for himself:


A wonderful bird is a pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week;
But I'm damned if I see how the helican.

Orlando Moon

We are the beneficiaries of the serendipitous fact that the moon is naturally inclined to show her face to the setting sun. The cloud is a similar beneficiary, though by no means as constant as the changeable moon. Nice composition, bump, bump, bump moon!

A seagull cracking open a clam. I watched him for a while flying up above some rocks and dropping the clam shell on them.

An interesting seagull optimization problem. The higher the drop, the more likely the shell is to break; on the other hand, the more likely it is that some other seagull will nab it before the original bird can get down from the drop. This, of course, was Seattle, not Orlando; you can tell, just look at the sky.

The connection between one person and  another is such a mysterious thing.

By the nature of the thing it cannot be tangible, as both individuals are participants only in the abstract. So we look for ways to make the thing tangible; Valentine's, birthdays, gifts, correspondence in habitual behavior or location.

Fabrics

A Feynman quote:


Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Did you know, "A training zoo" is an anagram for "Organization"? - Feynman was right (as always) it all connects up.

One of those things I keep I keep coming back to thinking, "I should post that. Did I already post that?"

Ya, nea, well no fine (a phrase signify affirmation in the South African Plaatland). As a total non sequitur (at least so far as the picture is concerned) there is this wonderful little ditty from my Southern African youth:


Ach please daddy won't you take us to the drive in?
All 6, 7 of us 8, 9, 10
We're gonna see a flick about Tarzan and the Ape Men
And when the show is over you can bring us back again
Popcorn, chewing gum, peanuts and bubble gum,
Ice cream, candy floss and eskimo PIE!

Ach daddy how I miss bore balls and licorice,
Pepsi cola, Ginger beer and Canada DRY!

To get the full effect, you have to imagine it in a nice, thick South-African accent. Kids these days don't know what they're missing. Perhaps just as well. Though I'm, fairly sure the individual who wrote them was poking fun at the Afrikaaner Nationalists, the original lyrics were remarkably offensive by today's standards.

More of the same...

Woods on the Florida-Georgia boundary, somewhere west of the Okefenokee swamp. It's a wonderfully spooky place, almost ran out of petrol, felt like I could have wandered for days without finding anything.

 

Am I Late? A magnolia for an apology.

Because true wisdom lies in seeing what is the right thing to do. If you have already decided what to do, if you already have an end in mind, you cannot make wisdom subservient to that and still claim that you are pursuing her. You are not; you are pursuing some end and seeking to enslave wisdom as a means to that end. In that lies folly, not wisdom, ...

Clarity and precision, especially premature clarity and precision are lethal when it comes to making an original statement. But at some point, of course, we have to say something.

Three dimensional shadows

Interesting image - I'm not sure why it is has such a sense of depth to it, at least to my eye, it is quite pronounced.

There is an opinion out there that there is a fine line between wisdom and nonsense. I don't agree. I believe there is a very clear line, it's just that we're not very good at seeing it.

The image, I believe, is addressing the same issue. Or again:

‘Socrates, how will you enquire into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that it is the thing which you did not know?" (Anytus - the Tanner)

I suppose the tanner has a point.

Street light on the road above our house in Seattle. A good impression of the ambiance of the place, but quite misleading, the air was clear, the evening quiet and dry; it doesn't look that way.

 

I've been thinking about Sir Herbert Read for the last couple of days. An interesting character of the same generation as Orwell and T.S. Elliot. He fought in the First World War and was a vociferous pacifist in the Second. He has the wonderful distinction of having been expelled from the British Anarchist Society (presumably for being insufficiently anarchistic, as he accepted a knighthood from Winston Churchill, who, I'm sure, must have appreciated the joke).

This is an image Herbert Read would have approved of. He was basically an art critic and poet with a sensitive and very humanistic outlook. A quote:

"It is of the essence of genius to be uncommitted to any abstraction."

In an age that was driven by and to abstractions, he was always ready to recognize the significance of the concrete and the individual. Unlike some of his generation, soviet style socialism didn't fool him for very long.

Thinking about the structure of an image. It really seems to be the case that what matters is what's missing, or rather what's present in the picture even though it's not there in the image. 

I find this plaque a case in point. It has a tremendous visual impact for me, yet the eyes are strange. I see them, almost, I could say, I see out of them, but actually they're not there.