After a while, the shapes and colours that spring so strongly from the work seem to invade the spaces in between. The people looking at the paintings, their shapes and angles and outlines, appear more and more as if they’d stepped out of them. A painted shock of red hair, a purple dress, a pale, drooping, interesting face, take the eye straight to another that is not painted.
Micro-Journaling and the 10-Mile App
Open Book Lab:
Location is almost the whole of meaning. Where you are pretty much defines what you are. This is not a new idea. Twitter and most mobile apps feature location data. There are limits to this feature. You can note the writer’s location if they have shared it, but you are remote. The Morning Porch improves on this by making location more than just metadata. The porch is literally the stage for the message. It adds a texture to the observations not found elsewhere. Each detail adds to the experience so you feel you know the porch and can see from it.
Summerberry
Summer’s like a mulberry,
a blueberry, dark and vivid.
It stains the day sweaty,
leaves bright pollen on our noses
as we inhale the sunon lilies…
Remembering Rio
Aqua or turquoise is a favourite colour. It always makes me think of the ocean lapping the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, the blue-green light of a natural beauty that infiltrates the soul, surpassing all the sadness, confusion and fear in a big city or a small heart.
Amos
Amos stands on a subway platform
littered with stubbed-out cigarettes.
For three sins, even for four,
I will not reverse it! The commuters
skirt his dirty robes, avoid eye contact.
Otolithic
too much august not enough snow:
A passport with stamps, the otolith acquires a new ring for every day and every sojourn in a fish’s life. One for the natal stream, separate rings for spawning and rearing. Cradles and diplomas. Stable isotopes. One for every drift and foray into distant waters. Marriage and divorce. Calcium carbonate and trace minerals. A protein skeleton.
Notes on a heart attack
They wheeled me up to the recovery ward. There was a huge tree outside the window whose foliage dipped and bobbed as a squirrel moved round in it. The room was full of a brassy, beeping monitors. I learned quite quickly to identify the tone mine made when I fibrillated or missed a beat, and for a while observed as my thoughts wandered round; every time they touched on work my heart stuttered. Somewhere around dusk a trolley came round with tea, and two digestive biscuits. They crumbled in my mouth like a sacrament.
Protest and survive
Marching with the students last Saturday was a high point in my life of protest: it was absolutely astounding, at 11:00 pm, to see not only this great throng of demonstrators, but the people in their homes, in their cars, spilling out of restaurants, bars and cafes, all cheering, making noise, smiling, waving their arms, encouraging their children to join in. It was more like a parade than a protest march.
Spread Mind
Manzotti is what they call a radical externalist: for him consciousness is not safely confined within a brain whose neurons select and store information received from a separate world, appropriating, segmenting, and manipulating various forms of input. Instead, he offers a model he calls Spread Mind: consciousness is a process shared between various otherwise distinct processes which, for convenience’s sake we have separated out and stabilized in the words subject and object. Language, or at least our modern language, thus encourages a false account of experience.
Camping in bear country
too much august not enough snow:
Our worries, we confided around the campfire, are long and keeping. No matter where we are, they stay with us. But when we camp, everything is so much bigger, we don’t think beyond the fire ring. Up here it was easy to fall silent. Sweet, really, to have an empty mind.