Photography is a curious art. It instills no surprise in me that 'unmodern' cultures used to find these instruments anxious; I myself am still mildly confounded by this technology even though I was born into a culture and time that has favoured it ubiquitously, whilst also becoming equally negligent of its power.
Today is the winter solstice, the solar nadir in the northern hemisphere, a temporal event in Spaceship Earth’s rotations where the sun takes its lowest path through our sky and the daytime is least: the astronomical New Year.
In the 'modern' world we take for granted our sinks and toilets, and their capacity to remove the manifestations of our indulgences, but how long have we had this fortunate technology? Archeologists have discovered evidence for one of the first flushing toilets in ancient China, but who can really know?
We at the Institute of Semantic Reindoctrination apologise for the postings of our patient 66601723. He has now been fully restrained and will no longer have access to the computer facilities. We are currently attempting to rectify his deconstructional dysfunction, although the illiterate alliterations are proving to be heavily embedded.
I feel compelled to write a short something in praise of a film that I was lucky enough to stumble upon the other day. The film is called 'Home'; a paean to our planet, directed by the photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, well known for his stunning and emotive aerial photography.
I never had much time for mushrooms when I was young; they weren’t particularly exciting to my immature self, they didn’t animate or change colour, and they didn’t seem safe. I can’t say I ever particularly enjoyed eating them either (there is little more offensive to my palate than poorly cooked mushrooms, slimey and crunchy simultaneously, in an eyeball popping sort of way).
A decade or so ago, I read Robert M. Pirsig’s - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the copy lifted and kindly lent, from the bookshelf of a friend’s parents, a book that might have lain long languished, as so many books have come to find themselves, if it were not for the keen and sensitive eye of my friend.
In complexity theory, it is observed that when a simplified and idealised population reaches a certain threshold of component complexity, a system of negentropic novelty emerges spontaneously and sustains itself at a higher frequency of order, auto-catalysing and self-organising.
It has always been tempting for thinkers and historical observationalists to overlay a narrative onto to what they have known of the world; humans have a long and colourful history in the denial of contingency, in the art of myth, and of fevered teleological dreams.
Homo sapiens sapiens, with its burden of (partial) consciousness, seems to rely on such dichotomic constructs to generate intellectual and psychological security; Good or Evil, Right or Wrong etc. are not concepts readily or oft questioned in their undelineated essence, insomuch as such oppositions are embedded in our linguistic logic and hence ideaspace.
The majority of people who recognise the name of JG Ballard, I imagine will do so because of the Spielberg film ‘Empire Of the Sun’ which was adapted from his semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, or for the controversy that surrounded the film ‘
"..With the arrival of sentience and self-awareness, came consciousness, and speculation. In the wake of the first primordial imaginings, mental architectures manifested, memetic information cohered crystalline.
..A purging surge of energy; cooled, condensed, made material,
transmuted in stellar flame alembic and deep telluric oven,
bled molten through weeping fissures in a fragile crust,
to clot cold in harsh light, after dark eons of internment,
and be ground gently in erosion’s interminable hand, to dust.
These ancient liberated remnants, compete for permanence,
"Banish the word 'struggle' from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we have been waiting for." — Hopi elders
