Aliens amongst us

They look as though they might have something to say, but it's beyond me to say with what. There should be a word for whatever in another creature corresponds to a face. We would claim that it is whatever  breathes, or sees or eats;  I doubt that is always the case.

Evening light through a cloth

If I were ever to have such a thing as a favorite novel, it would probably be D.H.Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. Here he describes a beautiful evening against the bitter backdrop of his mother's dis-functional relationship with his father:


The sun was going down. Every open evening, the hills of Derbyshire were blazed over with red sunset. Mrs. Morel watched the sun sink from the glistening sky, leaving a soft flower-blue overhead, while the western space went red, as if all the fire had swum down there, leaving the bell cast flawless blue. The mountain-ash berries across the field stood fierily out from the dark leaves, for a moment. A few shocks of corn in a corner of the fallow stood up as if alive; she imagined them bowing; perhaps her son would be a Joseph. In the east, a mirrored sunset floated pink opposite the west's scarlet. The big haystacks on the hillside, that butted into the glare, went cold.

Truncated image

The figure is missing it's left arm, bleeding red wax on to the upturned sole of its right foot.

Hello duck

I don't think he heard; a contemplative duck. Anyway he's lent at least the sound of his name to some wonderful English dialect. Here's a sampler


"Ayup miduck, yahreet?"
"Orlright, marrah, burrahm not backter wok yit. Ows yer babbi?"
"Oh, eez pawleh, an ees grizzlin cosee bont hissen on the stoave too. Learn im ter keep is dannies off tho."
"Bet yer missis wuz fritterdeth!"
"Sheworratthat, but she'll coap. Where yowoff"?"
"Ahm gooin uptahn"
"Yawarkin, errint car?"
"Car? Ah soadit ter that immazatoadyabaht, as bought ahr Tracey's ahse"
"Im wi nebbeh wahf?"
"Yeah, ee paid five undred quid an she were reet mardy, ad a baggon for days"
"Ahl gerterahrahse! Yow spawni bogga, it want woth arfa that!"
"Ah know, but ee were needeh"
"Well, ahd better goo backom, bit black ovver Bills"
"Well, tek care, me owd"

It's from this page. Just think, of the other side won in the Wars of the Roses, we might all be speaking like that - "cor luv-a-duck' the mind boggles.

Naked people in a tree:

Did I get your attention? A very odd picture. I find it hard not to see limbs and flesh tones. The trees themselves seem very animated, a definite sense of interaction, almost an arboreal embrace. Maybe I just need to get out and about a bit.

White sails in a blue landscape

                      Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.

Wordsworth - 13 July 1798

On stage

Something from that most theatrical of Novels - Don Quixote

And now I die, and since there is no hope
Of happiness for me in life or death,
Still to my fantasy I'll fondly cling.
I'll say that he is wise who loveth well,
And that the soul most free is that most bound
In thraldom to the ancient tyrant Love.
I'll say that she who is mine enemy
In that fair body hath as fair a mind,
And that her coldness is but my desert,
And that by virtue of the pain he sends
Love rules his kingdom with a gentle sway.
Thus, self-deluding, and in bondage sore,
And wearing out the wretched shred of life
To which I am reduced by her disdain,
I'll give this soul and body to the winds,
All hopeless of a crown of bliss in store.

Very amusing...

Shiver me timbers

Yacht masts at Golden Gardens - anything but piratical, though there is no doubt the odd load of illicit drugs being brought over from the Olympics.

Impression of a landscape.

"A mass of mountain seen against the light, may, at first, appear all of one blue; and so it is, blue as a whole, by comparison with other parts of the landscape. But look how that blue is made up. There are black shadows in it under the crags, there are green shadows along the turf, there are gray half-lights upon the rocks, there are faint touches of stealthy warmth and cautious light along their edges; every bush, every stone, every tuft of moss has its voice in the matter, and joins with individual character in the universal will."

Ruskin speaking of Turner in Modern Painters, Vol 1. We always had a copy floating round the house, I remember dipping into it, ever fascinated by what Ruskin had to say.

Silhouette

I'm sure you all recall the premise to the Star Trek series: The Galactic Federation is watching all those millions of busy little planets out there. As soon as one develops Warp Drive, it gets invited into the GF.

You might not be so familiar with the Fermi Paradox which roughly states: Given there are so many planets out there, where the heck is everyone?

I think Gene Roddenberry (or whoever wrote that series) got it wrong. There are plenty of aliens out there, they are watching all the busy little planets. Any species stupid enough to detonate a nuclear device is instantly quarantined (and immediately annihilated if they ever do invent a Warp Drive).

The other explanation might come in the form of the big bang that occurs when they do actually get CERN's Large Hadron Collider to work, i.e. every civilization capable of communicating across the vastness of space, can't 'cause they annihilate themselves first.

A favorite flower image.

A unique combination of light and artifact. Some Dylan Thomas:


Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glowworms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

...

Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts

It's all hallows' eve coming up - so a demon for your delectation.

Nobody does demons quite like the Chinese. A part of a Chi Po story:


Do you see now why I dread to summon a dragon? I should have to emit a spell of the fifth magnitude and, who knows, bewitch the world beyond recall, beyond even my own powers.” Bu Fu closed his eyes in anguish and moaned.

There wasn’t much Chi Po could answer, but the more dangerous the matter looked, the more he really longed to take a close look at a dragon, for he had convinced himself (only much later would he grasp how wrong he was) that he could never paint one convincingly unless he had seen it with his own eyes. So he kept quiet, but he decided that he would ask for a small dragon when Bu Fu was in good spirits.

Actually Oscar Mandel - not Chinese at all - then again maybe it is.

Talking about closing down, here's an old autumn picture.

Not all bad of course - here's Yves Montand, singing Les Feuilles Mortes. The lyrics in French and English are here, it's worth reading as he sings (just the refrain - he starts on the second last line of the first verse). What a wonderful presence. How very French. I love the synchronized clapping at the end.

Dinner

Nice place, pity it closed down.

A picture of isolation

Maybe it's just the music. I'm listening to "Russian Light Songs - Recordings 1930 - 1950". Music from the Gulag (that's my comment, not the liner notes). I could imagine an orchid on a red background would be as exotic as an angel in a garbage dump. La donna e mobile in Russian - what more can I say?

Looking west on the east coast - so there are sunsets in Florida.

G.M. Hopkins, Journal entry, 1873, "Fine sunset Nov. 3 -- Balks of grey cloud searched with long crimsonings running along their hanging folds – this from the lecture room window. A few minutes later the brightness over; one great dull rope coiling overhead sidelong from the sunset, its dewlaps and bellyings painted with a maddery campion-colour that seemed to stoop and drop like sopped cake; the further balk great gutterings and ropings, gilded above, jotted with a more bleedings red beneath and then a juicy tawny `clear’ below, which now is glowing orange and the full moon is rising over the house."

Every now and then I succumb to a sociological impulse, this time provoked by an article in Wired magazine - Culture Evolves Slowly, Falls Apart Quickly.

Evolution is apparently directed, linear, characterized by increasing levels of hierarchy. It begins with egalitarian bands, proceeds to egalitarian tribes, on to clustering into chiefdoms, thence to hereditary leaders and finally "united into states with bureaucracies and administrative offices". I don't know whether to cringe or laugh.

The authors go on to talk of  how "Political evolution, like biological evolution, tends to proceed through small steps rather than through major jumps in ‘design space,’ I'm not a biologist, yet even I have heard of punctuated evolution. Rather amusing I suppose; it is Wired after all.  The world is full of improbable animals, why not some improbable journalism.

By way of contrast you might compare this report on the same work from Nature.

If not for the reflection of the shadow on the water I might almost think I'm looking at the sky

I cannot tell between the two: The inadvertent vision as a witness of my blindness or a token of the reach of my mind..

Contrasting lines

There's an odd tension to the image because the corner of the building, almost obscured by the pillar in the foreground, is slightly off from the pillar; either the pillar's not straight, or the corner's not straight, or there was something about the line between the camera, the pillar and the corner. Anyway rather odd.

I like odd things (don't we all) - overheard in a supermarket this evening "This is never my last stop. I don't know why it is today." There it is, that little divergence between the expectation and the fact; we probably shouldn't look at it too closely in case the whole world falls apart.

The color isn't obvious, so perhaps it's not there at all.

Anyway it's black. This is a picture of a black car. I have an excuse, I'm listening to Taverner (the modern one), his music is color based on black (for me, at least), lots of color but fundamentally dark.

Getting on the bus

The Motor Bus - a macaronic poem written in 1914 by Alfred Denis Godley . I bet not many out there know what "macaronic" means, I didn't know till I happened to stumble across it a couple of weeks ago - it's a poem written in more than one language. Here we go, Godley's wonderful "The Motor Bus".


    What is this that roareth thus?
    Can it be a Motor Bus?
    Yes, the smell and hideous hum
    Indicat Motorem Bum!
    Implet in the Corn and High
    Terror me Motoris Bi:
    Bo Motori clamitabo
    Ne Motore caedar a Bo---
    Dative be or Ablative
    So thou only let us live:---
    Whither shall thy victims flee?
    Spare us, spare us, Motor Be!
    Thus I sang; and still anigh
    Came in hordes Motores Bi,
    Et complebat omne forum
    Copia Motorum Borum.
    How shall wretches live like us
    Cincti Bis Motoribus?
    Domine, defende nos
    Contra hos Motores Bos!

So much for hurricane season.

You can tell by the local trees that stuff happens, not while I'm around though.

Zeno's arrow paradox:

At a given instant of time, for the arrow to be moving it must either move to where it is, or it must move to where it is not. It cannot move to where it is not (this is a single instant), and it cannot move to where it is (it is already there). In the given instant of time there is no motion occurring. If it cannot move in a given instant, it cannot move in any instant, so any motion impossible.

I imagine John Cleese, dressed as a pukka British officer, breaking in "This is a silly blog! Stop it immediately." Well, first off, I can't 'cause that would be an instant in time (let's not go there again). Unless of course you want to abandon your "instant" model of time and accept some sort of continuous flow model instead (probably shouldn't go there either). Just stop it now...

Back in Orlando - seem to have a thing about brick walls at the moment

as in "another brick in..." or "no point in banging your head against...", or "talking to a..." or "thick as a..." (admittedly not a wall).

A bit of Bach. Actually mixing my images here, this was from an early baroque opera performance.

Tonight was Bach with a bit of Schutze.  Wonderful stuff, a couple of cantatas and the prelude from the second cello suite. I have been listening to the cello suites for something like 45 years and still find something new. Tonight's performance was no exception.

Brick wall

I suppose you might argue that it's a matter of what you choose to see. I would argue it's a matter of what's actually there.

Sunset in someone's windows.

This is across the other side of Lake Washington (we're on the west, the house, obviously, is on the east).

Northern red-shafted flicker (honestly, I didn't make that up - amazing what you can find on the internet)

Anyway, a very handsome fellow - I had never seen (or heard of) one before today

O Rose, thou art sick!

The Invisible worm,

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed

Of Crimson joy;

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

William Blake - now there was a strange fella, if ever there was one.