Fractal landscape 

A fractal object is one where the structure of the object remains the same no matter what scale you look at. The coastline is a good example, it's jagged and the relative jaggedness remains the same whether you look at it from a few feet away or a few miles. The scale of the image is hard to determine, it could be a group of islands, or just a muddy puddle.

Wouldn't it be interesting if life was like that, you could live it at any scale and the experience would be thee same. Borges tells a story of a man who lived a whole year between the moment the firing squad fired and the moment he actually died. When we dream, the experience of time is different in the same way.

Who do you struggle with?

The dark figure was reckoned to be one of the best jujitsu practitioners in the Seattle area. He seems more focused on himself than on his opponent.

Singing

Not entirely sure what. Some Dylan Thomas (as the singer was named, in part, for Welsh poet - I say "in part" as there were numerous other Thomases)

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms

I labour by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon I write

On these spindrift pages

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms

Round the griefs of the ages,

Who pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art.

Elgar in bronze would no doubt look something like this. Pomp and Circumstance personified, Land of Hope and Glory.

We're still in Vancouver, B.C., along with the stone image of yesterday. In the Northwest, you must be specific when mentioning Vancouver as there are two of them, Vancouver, British Columbia and Vancouver, Washington (an altogether inferior place). No Elgar bronzes. What a strange world. But he did also write the Enigma Variations, I can't help but feel a certain affection and respect for him in the context of his own time. Look at him conducting Hope and Glory in 1931, even the absurd Vancouver bronze seems right somehow. 

Another image in stone.

It evokes all kinds of antimonies for me. The harsh, polished surface of the stone versus the relaxed pose of the figure, at another level, the deliberately "cool" pose of the figure has a harshness to it that contrasts with the soft blend of the image rendered by the stone. It seems to resonate almost endlessly in my mind. Maybe, in the end, they're just the same thing.

Zombie cat

Never fear, it's just Roger in his inside cat days, looking for a way out.

Greenlake sunset. For those of you unfamiliar with Seattle; it's a very domesticated body of water on the north side of the city. Good for walking, jogging, swimming (if you don't mind the ducks) and sunsets.

It really looked like that, the camera has not exaggerated the colors.

A Chinese gentleman and a delightful few lines from Li Po ending in a wonderful non sequitur:

We both are exalted to distant thought,

Aspiring to the sky and the bright moon.

But since water still flows, though we cut it with our swords,

And sorrows return,though we drown them with wine,

Since the world can in no way answer our craving,

I will loosen my hair tomorrow and take to a fishing-boat. 

Farewell to Secretary Shu-yun at the Hsieh Tiao Villa in Hsuan-Chou

Bamboo shadows:

Almost appropriate, in any event an occasion for quoting the father of my favorite Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. - this from "The Iron Gate" a poem he read on the occasion of his 70th birthday breakfast, given in his honor by the Atlantic Monthly, December 3rd 1879:

So when the iron portal shuts behind us,

And life forgets us in its noise and whirl,

Visions that shunned the glaring noonday find us,

And glimmering starlight shows the gates of pearl.

I believe things are getting a little chilly in Seattle, they do have ways of warming themselves up.

Here we have some Seattleites, lounging around the alter in St. Mark's Cathedral, participating in one of Seattle's more endearing institutions, the Sunday Compline Service, which was conducted for over 50 years by a gentleman called Peter Hallock. Peter just retired. Compline goes on, hopefully for another 50 years at least. If you ever find yourself in Seattle on a Sunday evening it's well worth attending; the atmosphere is really quite remarkable.

Hills from the sea

"She has followed the years that are gone," he said;

"The spirits the words of the witch fulfill;

For I saw the ghost of my father dead,

By the moon's dim light on the misty hill.

He shook the plumes on his withered head,

And the wind through his pale form whistled shrill.

And a low, sad voice on the hill I heard.

Like the mournful wail of a widowed bird."

Then lo, as he looked from his lodge afar,

He saw the glow of the Evening-star;

"And yonder," he said, "is Wiwâstè's face;

She looks from her lodge on our fading race.

Devoured by famine, and fraud, and war,

And chased and hounded from woe to woe,

As the white wolves follow the buffalo."

And he named the planet the Virgin Star.

from Legends of the Northwest - Hanford Lennox Gordon

Clouds at sea - you may recall, if you click on the picture it will show a much larger version.

I have been looking at an artifact called the nltk (natural language toolkit). It has all sort of wonderful tools for analyzing texts. This is a dispersion plot for some words in Vol I of Ruskin's Modern Painters. I think it speaks for itself (I'll have to read it again one of these days and see why there is so much seeing, but no light a third of the way into the book). 

Autumn in the arboretum

Autumn lovers scattered like leaves

Hopeless in solitude all their lives

They rise up singing and follow her tune

Knowing she’ll leave to dance with the moon

Leave them abandoned to the dark of the night

Returned to their beds and the dwindling light

Forest at sea

It is a picture of contradictions - some Dylan Thomas in the same vein (though maybe you have to be slightly unhinged to really appreciate it). Am I alone in seeing the pathos in both the image and the verse?

Down, down, down, under the ground,

Under the floating villages,

Turns the moon-chained and water-wound

Metropolis of fishes,

There is nothing left of the sea but its sound,

Under the earth the loud sea walks,

In deathbeds of orchards the boat dies down

And the bait is drowned among hayricks,

Land, land, land, nothing remains

Of the pacing, famous sea but its speech,

And into its talkative seven tombs

The anchor dives through the floors of a church.

Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,

To the fisherman lost on the land.

He stands alone in the door of his home,

With his long-legged heart in his hand.

An urban landscape - downtown Tacoma - piece of the jungle

I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think of things in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This — amateur Protestant that I am — I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets.

Jorge Luis Borges

Fire in St. James

This is the center piece of a side chapel in St. James Cathedral, Seattle. The astonishing complexity of it is in some ways more evident in the shadows it casts than in the thing itself. An apt metaphor for the cathedral that contains it. This is another, perhaps more conventional, view of it.

Trees on a beach

There's very little water in the picture, but the image feels to me like a shoreline, a boundary between one element and another.

Two people.

I've done this before

The "window" is a plant holder, what looks like a wall is really the ground.  

Monstrous iconography

An urban script that a building uses to address the landscape around it.

Curious figure in Vancouver

"...our acts no longer cast shadows." Borges on what it means to achieve nirvana.

An untranslatable message prompted by Hofstadter's marvelous book on translation, Le Ton Beau de Marot.

Marot's poem at the center of the book - you really don't have to know French to appreciate it.

Ma mignonne,

Je vous donne

Le bon jour.

Le sejour

C’est prison :

Guerison

Recouvrez,

Puis ouvrez

Vostre porte,

Et qu’on sorte

Vitement :

Car Clement

Le vous mande.

Va friande

De ta bouche,

Qui se couche

En danger

Pour manger

Confitures :

Si tu dures

Trop malade,

Couleur fade

Tu prendras,

Et perdras

L’embonpoint.

Dieu te doint

Santé bonne

Ma mignonne. 

Less is more. Afternoon sky through shade cloth.

Michel de Montaigne on moderation, (Essays Vol 6)

The archer that shoots over, misses as much as he that falls short, and 'tis equally troublesome to my sight, to look up at a great light, and to look down into a dark abyss.  Callicles in Plato says, that the extremity of philosophy is hurtful, and advises not to dive into it beyond the limits of profit; that, taken moderately, it is pleasant and useful; but that in the end it renders a man brutish and vicious, a contemner of religion and the common laws, an enemy to civil conversation, and all human pleasures, incapable of all public administration, unfit either to assist others or to relieve himself, and a fit object for all sorts of injuries and affronts.

Now, oh now. Went to a performance by Plaine and Easie last night.

Now, oh, now I needs must part,

Parting tho' I absent mourn;

Abscence can no joy impart;

Joy once fled cannot return.

While I live I needs must love;

Love lives not when hope is gone,

Now at last despair doth prove:

Love divided loveth none.

Dear when I am from thee gone,

Gone are all my joys at once!

I love thee and thee alone,

In whose love I joyed once.

And altho' your sight I leave,

Sight wherein my joys do lie,

Till that death do sense bereave,

Never shall affection die.

Dear, if I do not return,

Love and I shall die together,

For my abscence never mourn

Whom you might have joyed ever.

To the tune, The Frog Gaillard, by John Dowland, from his first book of songs, 1597 (excerpts).


What a dismal fellow. I especially like the invocation of guilt in the last line  "Whom you might have joyed ever" if only you hadn't been horrible enough to chuck me out.

Angels again - Archangel this time.

The angels are two days and two nights older than we: the Lord created them on the fourth day, and from their high balcony between the recently invented sun and the first moon they scanned the infant earth, barely more than a few wheat fields and some orchards beside the waters. These primitive angels were stars. For the Hebrews, the concepts of angel and star merged effortlessly: I will select, from among many, the passage of the Book of Job (38:7) in which the Lord spoke out of the whirlwind and recalled the beginning of the world, "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.

From Jorge Luis Borges, The History of Angels

I love word origins, angel for example:

14c. fusion of O.E. engel (with hard -g-) and O.Fr. angele, both from L. angelus, from Gk. angelos "messenger," possibly related to angaros "mounted courier," both from an unknown Oriental source,

early 13c., messager, from O.Fr. messagier, from message (see message). With parasitic -n- inserted by c.1300 for no apparent reason except that people liked to say it that way (cf. passenger, harbinger, scavenger).

c.1300, "communication transmitted via a messenger," from O.Fr. message, from M.L. missaticum, from L. missus, pp. of mittere "to send" (see mission). The Latin word is glossed in O.E. by ærende. Specific religious sense of "divinely inspired communication via a prophet" (1540s) led to transferred sense of "the broad meaning (of something)," first attested 1828. As a verb, "to send messages," attested from 1580s (http://www.etymonline.com/)

So the idea of a message as having information content only came into general use sometime in the 16th century. What were we saying to each other before then?

Ran into a W.H.Auden poem in a bookshop this evening

While this is not a bookshop (or W.H.Auden) it seems appropriate somehow. And this is the poem:

Who's Who

A shilling life will give you all the facts: 

How Father beat him, how he ran away, 

What were the struggles of his youth, what acts 

Made him the greatest figure of his day; 

Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night, 

Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea; 

Some of the last researchers even write 

Love made him weep his pints like you and me. 

With all his honours on, he sighed for one 

Who, say astonished critics, lived at home; 

Did little jobs about the house with skill 

And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still 

Or potter round the garden; answered some 

Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.

Darkness in the margins

Some Dylan Thomas - the first line is the title I suppose:

Shall gods be said to thump the clouds

When clouds are cursed by thunder,

Be said to weep when weather howls?

Shall rainbows be their tunics' colour?

When it is rain where are the gods?

Shall it be said they sprinkle water

From garden cans, or free the floods?

Shall it be said that, venuswise,

An old god's dugs are pressed and pricked,

The wet night scolds me like a nurse?

It shall be said that gods are stone.

Shall a dropped stone drum on the ground, 

Flung gravel chime? Let the stones speak

With tongues that talk all tongues.

People in a window on a beach.

Images in stone

Darn - I guess I was asleep