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It's a gentleman who articulates his mystery with intellect and grace, it's a beautiful mind.
My edition of 'goat unmasked' by goat transforming into a cathedral for 1pic 2souls.
Writer. Master Photographer, Videographer, Artist, Poet, Intellect, Organizer, Father, and Mentor, A true Friend with a heart of gold…
And sadly also a tragic victim of the ruthless 80's Crack Cocaine epidemic.
Last I heard about Stewart was his throat was cut ear to ear in a drug/get high incident gone bad. I pray and hope he is still alive and has rebound… I love you dearly my friend and brother.
A third cause of common Errors is the Credulity of men, that is, an easie assent to what is obtruded, or a believing at first ear, what is delivered by others. This is a weakness in the understanding, without examination assenting unto things, which from their Natures and Causes do carry no perswasion; whereby men often swallow falsities for truths, dubiosities for certainties, feasibilities for possibilities, and things impossible as possibilities themselves. Which, though the weakness of the Intellect, and most discoverable in vulgar heads; yet hath it sometime fallen upon wiser brains, and great advancers of Truth.
Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Chapter V: Of Credulity and Supinity.
I had the privilege to spend some time with Brad Litwin, a kinetic artist based in Philly. His ingenuity, mechanical intellect and artistic vision is exceptional visit his web site its a must see. www.bradlitwin.com/
"The glory of him who moves everything
Penetrates the universe and shines
In one part more and, in other, less.
I have been in the heaven which takes most of his light,
And I have seen things which cannot be told,
Possible, by anyone who comes down from up there;
Because, approaching the object of its desires,
Our intellect is so deeply absorbed
That memory cannot follow it all the way"
Paradiso I, 1-9
spotted when searching for walnuts in the yard (the shells are toxic to the dogs)
Rebirth, wisdom, fluidity, wholeness, transmutations, sexuality, look for transitions, changes and new opportunities. Creative forces are awakening with heightened intuition. Snake can teach about shedding what is not needed; perceptions, attitudes, ideals. Snake shows how to access vitality, ambitions and dreams along with intellect and personal power. What things are surfacing that you need to strike out and take advantage of? Perhaps a time to rest and reflect? Listen to your intuition and visions at this time. Contemplate the colors, striking ability and activity of the snake type to further understand what snake is saying.
Admiral Jim Ellis welcomed me into his Tiburon home with the calm presence of someone who has spent a lifetime navigating complexity. His wife, Elisabeth Pate-Cornell, was there too, her sharp intellect and quiet grace filling the room alongside his steady demeanor. Together, they form a partnership where conversations flow easily between national security, risk analysis, and the kind of everyday warmth that speaks to a life well balanced.
The house itself was modest in its reflection of their achievements. There were reminders, of course — a model ship resting on a shelf, a few framed photographs hinting at decades of service and scholarship — but nothing that spoke loudly of titles or accolades. It felt more like the home of two people who had long since understood that true accomplishment doesn’t need to be displayed.
Admiral Ellis has held responsibilities that most of us can scarcely imagine. As Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, he was entrusted with decisions that touched the edges of global stability. Yet in person, there is no trace of the theatrical. His authority feels earned and effortless, the result of years spent making impossible choices with clarity and composure.
Elisabeth Pate-Cornell is equally formidable. A renowned Stanford professor and pioneer in engineering risk analysis, she has dedicated her career to understanding how complex systems fail and how to keep them from doing so. Watching them together, it became clear that theirs is a meeting of equals. They share a deep fluency in the language of risk, responsibility, and leadership, each bringing a different lens to the same fundamental questions about uncertainty and decision-making.
Both remain active at Stanford, mentoring, advising, and lending their experience to shape future leaders. Retirement, in their world, is simply a shift in focus rather than a slowing down.
Photographing Admiral Ellis that day was less about capturing a man defined by military command and more about revealing the quiet strength that remains when uniforms are put away. It was about the bond he shares with Elisabeth, the life they’ve built around intellect, service, and a steady commitment to guiding others through complexity. In their presence, you are reminded that true leadership often speaks softly, grounded in experience, reflection, and a shared sense of duty that endures long after the official roles have changed.
"Logic and intellect can take an artist to the dance, but intuition and creativity are the dance itself."
~ Greg Packard ~
Bringing this image back to the forefront to celebrate today, the first day of Spring,
and 8 years since I've been on flickr! Below is the first image I posted, quite controversially, back in 2006, since it was more "art" than photograph! Feel free to click on it for more history!
"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven."
~ Ecclesiastes 3:1 ~
To care for only one person in the whole universe, she thought, was very different to not caring about anyone at all.
(not from the novel)
alison will become charmed by the master, but not in the way he's used to charming people. he's used to manipulating people consciously (on his part) and unnoticed (on their part)
but she's been analysing him from first interaction (she's always analysing people: why i'd bet on her being good at chess) and she stays wary. but then she keeps accidentally catching him being lovely to the doctor, when he doesn't notice he's being watched...
and the master, too, will soften towards the human companion, as he notices and respects her intellect and emotional intelligence.
they will see that they have something in common: they both feel protective of the strange, damaged, and intriguing person that is the doctor.
Sold on Etsy
The son of a notorious punk rock icon, Edgar Allan grew up listening to 'Nevermind the Bollocks' instead of Mother Goose. He prefers the Pistols to princesses and always made sure his legos were somewhere they could be stepped on. He's developing a prodigious intellect gone slightly awry, and goes around saying things like "happiness is the agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of others."
His father thinks he will become a brilliant lyricist.
4'O clock flower
Tamil :Anthi Mandhaarai ( அந்தி மந்தாரை) Telugu : Chandrakantha(చ౦దరకా౦త).
malayalam : Naalu mani poovu.
Marathi : Gulabakshi (गुलबक्षी).
Bengali : sandhyamaloti (সন্ধ্যামালতি).
SOOC except for resizing and Frame
Year of the Monkey
Lunar Lanterns, giant lanterns representing animal signs of the Chinese zodiac in city centre locations from 6–14 February.
Dragon
"People born in the Year of the Monkey are fun-loving, energetic and inquisitive. Their intellect allows them to adapt to any situation, they are confident, charismatic, loyal and inventive.
Sometimes, the Monkey can be a little too curious for his or her own good, as well as careless, restless, immature and arrogant."
Today, 9 August, is the feast of the Carmelite saint and philosopher, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
The youngest child of a large Jewish family, Edith Stein, as she was known before entering Carmel, was born in Breslau, Poland. She was a woman of great piety and outstanding intellect. In 1916 she was awarded a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Göttingen, and worked with Martin Heidigger before becoming a member of the faculty at the University of Freiburg. While on holiday in Göttingen in 1921 she read a biography of the Carmelite mystic and reformer St Teresa of Avila and was drawn to the Catholic Faith. She was baptized on January 1st 1922. Having read and translated into German De Veritate by St Thomas Aquinas, she abandoned her interest in phenomenology and became a Thomist.
In 1932 she was appointed lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy at Münster, but anti-Semitic legislation passed by the Nazi government forced her to resign the post in 1933. In the same year she entered the Carmel at Echt, in Holland. When the Nazis invaded Holland Teresa was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. She died in the gas chamber in 1942 aged 51. In taking the religious name 'Teresa Benedicta of the Cross', this brave saint had said: "I told our Lord that I knew it was His cross that was now being placed upon the Jewish people; that most of them did not understand this, but that those who did would have to take it up willingly in the name of all. I would do that".
Her life of dedication, consecration, prayer, fasting and penance is testimony to the strength of her faith even amidst the unimaginable human suffering that surrounded her at the end. She was beatified in 1987 and canonized on October 11th 1998. In 1999 she was proclaimed one of the Patronesses of Europe.
This Crucifix, with Our Lady of Carmel above it, is in the Carmelite church in Salamanca.
Date: 11 Febr 2011 ( 11 - II - 11 )
Computer Mirror Image: "THE BLUE BUTTERFLY IS 33YO NOW"
The picture "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" made by Marcel Duchamp in 1912,
is widely regarded as a Modernist classic and has become one of the most famous of its time
Using the computer program Photoshop, we can see from the picture a face to appear.
How is it made ?
Use a Photoshop computer-program with 2 layers.
1e Layer : picture "Nude Descending a Staircase".
2e Layer : negative Mirror picture "Nude Descending a Staircase".
Use the function DIFFERENCE between the layers.
This new "Work of Art" called "THE BLUE BUTTERFLY IS 33YO NOW",
can only be made visible on a computer
~Duchamp~ Artmaking is making the invisible, visible.
~ Aristotle ~ The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
UNMOVED MOVER
Motion is therefore "the actuality of any potentiality insofar as it is still a potentiality"
Aristotle describes the "Unmoved Mover" as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: itself contemplating, the Active Intellect.
1. There exists movement in the world.
2. Things that move were set into motion by something else.
3. If everything that moves were caused to move by something else, there would be an infinite chain of causes. This can't happen.
4. Thus, there must have been something that caused the first movement.
5. From 3, this first cause cannot itself have been moved.
6. From 4, there must be an "Unmoved Mover".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover
Lady ”I have no sence of art” GaGa:
"I’m not fucking Duchamp but I love pissing with you”
style.com/stylefile/2010/07/r-mutt-meet-l-gaga/
"I don't want to be a part of the machine, I want the machine to be a part of me"
~AHRIMAN has the greatest possible interest in instructing men in mathematics, but not in instructing them that mathematical-mechanistic concepts of the universe are merely illusions. . . . that they are only points of view, like photographs from one side.
~Lucifer & AHRIMAN must be regarded as two scales of a balance and its we who must hold the beam in equipoise.
~'cosmic triad' - Lucifer, Christ and AHRIMAN.
~Electricity is AHRIMANIC light.
~AHRIMANIC "elemental spirits" inhabit our artificial machines.
~In the absolute sense, nothing is good in itself, but is always good or bad according to the use to which it is put.
RIP Sri Sathya Sai Baba. Aum Shanti, shanti, shanti.
"Science must confine its inquiry only to things belonging to the human senses, while spiritualism transcends the senses. If you want to understand the nature of spiritual power you can do so only through the path of spirituality and not science. What science has been able to unravel is merely a fraction of the cosmic phenomena ..."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sathya_Sai_Baba
Date: 30 jan 2011
O(+> DEDICATED TO "science2art"
Because LOVE is Universal....
www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLpHdJQdhL8
Date: 11 Jan 2011 ( 11 - 1 - 11 )
Emergency Protection Sought for Disappearing Miami Blue Butterfly
biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2011/miam...
Date: 7 Aug 2009 ( 7 - 8 - 9 )
Human Butterfly Crop Circle Mystery
youtube.com/watch?v=MhqM7hXvX6k
Damien Hirst Butterflies
www.othercriteria.com/browse/hirst/
flickr.com/photos/daydreampilot/2628127181/
Watch my internet channels:
metacafe.com/channels/Namirha/
Copyright free download:
400x200pix
i1265.photobucket.com/albums/jj508/Namirha/Butterfly400x2...
In 1912 Impressionist Marcel Duchamp exhibited a
painting entitled NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE.
The painting created a sensation. Worth millions today
it is held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
==========================================
The explanation of exactly why this painting
is so famous has always been a mystery.
==========================================
A number of art experts have pointed out that the painting
is similar to Edward Muybridge.
He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion
in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture
motion in stop-action photographs
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Muybridge
This fact was even publicly acknowledged by Duchamp
himself according to the Wikipedia article:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Descending_a_Staircase
Of course Duchamp's painting "impressionistically" adds
a sense of motion to the figure which is missing in
Muybridge's still-frame photos.
=========================================
HOWEVER..... the fact that Duchamp got his inspiration
from one of Muybridge's photographs IS NOT WHY
Duchamp's painting is WORLD FAMOUS.
THERE IS ANOTHER SCIENTIFIC REASON
FOR THE WORLD FAME OF
MARCEL DUCHAMP'S PAINTING---
FACT IS...... THE PAINTING IS A DIRECT
VISUAL CONFIRMATION OF THE
EXISTENCE OF GOD.................!!!!!
AND HERE I WILL EXPLAIN WHY:
=========================================
When you look at something new and unfamiliar,
your mind tries to "logically guess" what it is.... then
your mind imagines the object and tries to fit that image
to what it is seeing to see if they can be matched.
For instance, if you are out hunting and you see a
distant object which you think might be a deer, you
must check carefully before you shoot. Your mind
tries different possibilities... is it a man?.... so you try
to fit the object to the mental image of a man.... no...
it won't work.... is it a cow?.... so you try to fit the
object to a cow.... no, can't be.... is it a large dog....
so you imagine it as a large dog.... nope.... won't
work.....is it a scarecrow...so you try to imagine it as a
scarecrow..nope.... wrong again.... wait a minute.... it
could be a motorcycle parked on the side of a dirt road....
immediately you imagine a motorcycle... with a wind shield
and handle bars......... BINGO....... turns out that's
exactly what it is......... thank God you didn't pull that
trigger!
WELL.... it turns out almost all objects are "partially
invisible"..... as I have explained before, in fact about
20% of true reality is INVISIBLE to the average person
due to the Secular Trend Braingrowth Deficit... and
this is known as the "Invisible World" of Religion
(commonly called "Heaven").
What this means is that we are constantly using the
above described "GUESS AND COMPARE" method
of recognizing objects (and persons too by the way).
In fact it is this fundamental "guess and compare"
method which is what eventually leads the average person
to begin to suspect that there is an "unseen world"..
at least historically that is where Religion comes from.
Now... in fact.... the human visual system does this
automatically and very rapidly... trying in some
cases 3, 4 or half a dozen "guesses" before it
recognizes an unfamiliar object or person.
This (subconscious) process looks very much
like one of Muybridges "freeze motion" photos...
or like Duchamp's Nude Descending the Staircase
for that matter.
AND THAT IS EXACTLY WHY
the average person gets an overwhelming
sense of DEJA VUE the minute he first see's
Marcel Duchamp's famous painting.... he says to
himself... "hey..I've see that somewhere before.."
... and guess what.... he has.. in his subconscious mind,
and what it is is :
TWO PICTURES... ONE OF HEAVEN
(an extrapolated possibility) AND ONE OF
EARTH (a known reality).... BEING
QUICLY ALTERNATED FOR COMPARISON
BACK AND FORTH IN THE MIND !!!!
........... and that is
EXACTLY HOW
THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS DISCOVERED
NOT ONLY HISTORICALLY,
BUT BY AVERAGE PEOPLE
EVERY SINGLE DAY !
Of course Duchamp is also a pop psychologist and
that is why the figure is "descending a staircase"
because the vision of God is all about ascending
and descending (perceptually) and "stairs" are
a well known historical symbology (ladders too).
also... a "nude" is used to involve the basic
"perceptual ascension" involved in sexual
desire and attraction.
However... the "movie film sequence"
of the jittery "glimpses of heaven" that
we undergoe daily when perceiving
unfamiliar objects or scenes is BRILLIANTLY
captured by Duchamp's famous painting.
and that is why Marcel Duchamp's
painting is world famous !
Now George Hammond has proved all of this using
the Fusion Frequency of movie films to
prove the existence of the invisible world,
and has confirmed the proof to two decimal point
accuracy using 100 years of published Psychometry
data and showing that it is IDENTICAL to
Linearized Gravity and thus that the "invisible world"
is a simple classical Einsteinian Time and Space
dilation which makes as much as 20% of reality
INVISIBLE to the average person, thus explaining
both "God" and the "Invisible World" (Heaven).
HOWEVER..... a GENIUS like Marcel Duchamp
doesn't need theoretical Physics to explain God...
he can "paint God with a paint brush" and the
opinion of world has now confirmed the enduring
validity of his "1912 portrait of God
www.archivum.info/sci.psychology.theory/2006-09/00000/GOD...
Thomas argued that God, while perfectly united, also is perfectly described by Three Interrelated Persons. These three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) are constituted by their relations within the essence of God. Thomas wrote that the term "Trinity" "does not mean the relations themselves of the Persons, but rather the number of persons related to each other; and hence it is that the word in itself does not express regard to another."[88] The Father generates the Son (or the Word) by the relation of self-awareness. This eternal generation then produces an eternal Spirit "who enjoys the divine nature as the Love of God, the Love of the Father for the Word."
This Trinity exists independently from the world. It transcends the created world, but the Trinity also decided to give grace to human beings. This takes place through the Incarnation of the Word in the person of Jesus Christ and through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within those who have experienced salvation by God; according to Aidan Nichols.
(Nature of the Trinity)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas#Nature_of_the_Trinity
Substantial form (the human soul) configures prime matter (the physical body) and is the form by which a material composite belongs to that species it does; in the case of human beings, that species is rational animal. So, a human being is a matter-form composite that is organized to be a rational animal. Matter cannot exist without being configured by form, but form can exist without matter—which allows for the separation of soul from body. Aquinas says that the soul shares in the material and spiritual worlds, and so has some features of matter and other, immaterial, features (such as access to universals). The human soul is different from other material and spiritual things; it is created by God, but also only comes into existence in the material body.
Aquinas’s account of the soul focuses on epistemology and metaphysics, and because of this he believes it gives a clear account of the immaterial nature of the soul.
(The afterlife and resurrection)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas#The_afterlife_and_re...
In recent years, the cognitive neuroscientist Walter Freeman proposes that Thomism is the philosophical system explaining cognition that is most compatible with neurodynamics, in a 2008 article in the journal Mind and Matter entitled "Nonlinear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas."
(Impact of Thomism)
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_______________________________________________
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Searching for Thoughts
A poem by Peter S. Quinn
Searching for thoughts goes on from start to end,
Quickened with passion that gives each calling;
Like a blank page where fingers move and bend,
Passion and pain from the footsteps falling.
Again now and now the movements go on,
Deeper within darkness enter a step;
Ignite corners in blaze millimicron,
Starting to grow and becoming more help.
All from the searching from within the brain,
Play with what you know in bitter and sweet;
Narrow each law by reshaping the rein,
Each of its way becomes clear in its beat.
Across clearings a mind searches all through,
Symbols of play know how to continue.
-------------
Poem's source: www.poemhunter.com/peter-s-quinn
Zeyon: One of the last Great Beings Know as the Ventrillions. Zeyon is One of if Not the most powerful being in the Multiverse Capable of taking on Huge armies Single handily, His Super speed ,Strength, time Manipulation , strategic Capabilities , And Genius intellect Make him A match for anyone!
In the Swiss Alps near the Italian border is a small valley town called Lostallo. For the 5th summer in a row Shankra festival made this place its home for a goa-psytrance festival.
Video from 2017 youtu.be/sGJAhJp605k
Downloads on Flickr are free for fiends & followers but do tell the people where you got the picture.
The Rolls Royce Spirit of Ecstasy "Flying Lady" concealed a hidden passion. This marvellous mascot was modelled after a woman who had bewitching beauty, intellect and esprit - but not the social status which might have permitted her to marry the man with whom she had fallen in love.
This is the story of Eleanor Velasco Thornton, whose liaison with JohnWalter Edward-Scott-Montagu (second Lord Montagu of Beaulieu) was to remain a secret for a decade or more, principally because both partners acted with the utmost discretion. From 1902 he was editor of an illustrated magazine. Eleanor V Thornton was employed as his secretary. Friends of the pair knew of their close relationship but they were sufficiently understanding as to overlook it.
A member of this circle of friends was the sculptor Charles S Sykes. To Lord Montagu's order he created a special mascot for his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.
The small statue illustrated a young woman in fluttering robes having placed one forefinger to her lips. The sculptor had chosen Eleanor Thornton as model for this figurine. Since 1911, this sensuous lady has adorned the radiators of Rolls-Royce motor cars.
Mary's foot among Christians, can at any time by the false light (the temptations of this world) bite it "mortally" to keep it in the entropic cyclicity of the times. He is mortal, literally and figuratively, by an Achilles' heel that expresses his fatal weakness despite a great general strength, which can lead him to his loss. This is what the creeping serpent - the Luciferic energy - reminds us, which in the absence of being firmly contained by the sacred feminine. Transmutation is about making the form disappear or changing its nature. Alchemy is not a science, it is a Great Art, its phenomena are inexplicable for our intellect.
"If we turn to the light, there is no more shadow." All initiatory quests consist in letting the light in, not seeking it. While the chemist works on shadows (matter), the alchemist works on the obstacles that prevent light from passing through and create shadows. The alchemist's goal is therefore to transmute matter into light by removing its shadows (and if a body is able to no longer resist true light, then it no longer has any weight...!)
The alchemist who only polishes his mirror to become transparent to himself. It will thus avoid the weight of light that
would prevent out of body experience, very useful to its transcendence. It is this alignment (the inner straightness) that is symbolized by this image of the half-disappeared virgin. A process of individuation will free the individuality of the collective psyche through a deliberate act of no longer stopping the light, thus the absence of shadow allows this transmutation into the fifth dimension.. Brandemarked as the irrefutable sacred text by its more or less faithful followers, Biblical Genesis (1:3) says: "Let there be Light! And the Light was...". We can logically deduce from this that if the Light was, it is not eternal, and if it is not eternal, it was created... Also, if it was created, it was not created by the Light! By who, then? This Luciferic lesson tells us that we cannot understand Genesis, because human beings think with thoughts that come from elsewhere, instead of creating thoughts that come from the energy of Intelligence, the One who gives Light, and the devotees assimilate to God, the Creator Father, who detached a small part of His Holy Light from His divine Sphere! Only the clarity of our mind adjusted to the universal Spirit indicates the path of our evolution.
The word Light is a danger, because it forces us to have a certain notion of luminosity. And as soon as we have any notion of luminosity, we tend to be attracted by our ego-mental source of emotions, the manifestation of the soul aspiring to be liberated, to be attracted by this luminosity! That is why when we die, we are drawn to luminosity, that is, the Astral vitiated by our unclarified civilizational memories... A human being who dies must never go to the Light, source of illusions revealing his inflammatory neuroses and psychoses!
The word Light "simply" makes the human being understand that there is an Absolute Energy in the Cosmos. By radiation, It creates the atomic burst, which is the Light. In other words, Light is always an illusion projected into the Cosmos by the radiation of the Original Absolute Energy. Light is a creation, not an absolute, never to be conceived or considered as the Absolute, Which Is. In What Is, there is no Light, only clarity, Clarity. And as we know it in our transitional state, it is not very luminous... If the clarity is too luminous to our limited mystical mind, we must be careful, because we can very easily be attracted by it. And that's what happens in the Death World *!
The immortals, when they change the Plan for having successfully transmuted the material body, when they leave their material body, they do not go into the Light. They are themselves Light! Being themselves Light, they approach the more perfected Lights with which they have a vibratory relationship, and it is They who lead them to be on the planes that suit them. It is necessary to be unconscious, human and spiritual to be limited to it, to be attracted by the Light! It is one of the greatest dangers of esotericism, that of religious groups or sects, New Age, and secret societies, Freemasonry in the first place. Because in esotericism, we talk about the Light all the time, to be attracted by the Light for its wonderful promises. The day when human beings understand that Light is a creation of Universal Energy, they no longer have to go to the Light. He is the bearer of Light! Lumen Dei, the light proceeding from the unmanifest Godhead, the other is Lumen Naturae, the light hidden in matter and the forces of nature. While the Divine Light may be discerned and appreciated in revelation and in the mystery of the Incarnation, the Light of Nature needs to be released through alchemy before it can become fully operative. God redeems humanity, but nature needs to be redeemed by human alchemists, who are able to induce the process of transformation which alone is capable of liberating the light imprisoned in physical creation.The cosmos, according to Paracelsus, contains the divine light or life, but this holy essence is enmeshed in a mechanical trap, presided over by a kind of demiurge, named by Paracelsus Hylaster (from hyle, "matter," and astrum, "star"). The cosmic spider-god has spun a web within which the light, like an insect, is caught, until the alchemical process bursts the web. The web is none other than the consensus reality composed of the four elements of earth, water, fire and air, within which all creatures exist. The first operation of alchemy therefore addresses itself to the breaking up (torturing, bleeding, dismembering) of this confining structure and reducing it to a condition of creative chaos (massa confusa, prima materia). From this, in the process of transformation, the true, creative binaries emerge and begin their interaction designed to bring about the coniunctio or alchemical union. In this ultimate union, says Jung, the previously confined light is redeemed and brought to the point of its ultimate and redemptive fulfillment.
Through this work of manipulating energies by aiming to repair his inner structure, the alchemist is placed before the symbols and dreamlike processes of his inner world, this archetypal reality of the dream mixing the unconscious with the conscious. By proceeding in this way, it operates in 4th reality density, where the physical laws specific to 3-D no longer apply. It is the key to opening the doors of space-time for the purpose of exiting the Entropic Matrix, the opening of the third eye - that of the heart
Soul have both descended independently of one another into the depths of man's collective psyche and have there come upon realities which look so alike because thy are equally anchored in truth. Time and again he pointed out the affinities and contrasts between alchemical figures and those of Christianity, demonstrating a sort of mirror-like analogy not only between the stone of the philosophers and the image of Christ, but between alchemy and Christianity themselves.Alchemy, stands in a compensatory relationship to mainstream Christianity, rather like a dream does to the conscious attitudes of the dreamer. The Stone of alchemy is in many respects the stone rejected by the builders of Christian culture, demanding recognition and reincorporation into the building itself. . While these statements ostensibly refer to the material universe and to nature, those glassed Virgin perceives in them a model or paradigm for the material and natural aspect of human nature as well. Under the guise of liberating the light confined in matter, the alchemists were endeavoring to redeem the spirit or psychic energy locked up in the body and psyche (the "natural man" of St. Paul) and thus make this energy available for the greater tasks of the spirit or spiritual man. To better understand the Mysteries, it is necessary to consider the High as the nests of this fact represent the Forces and the old Races that are and have been more powerful in Us. Our Body is also a micro-universe. The planets are gaseous and chtonians, and are to be connected with the Earth and with the various forms of terrestrial humanities that we have known and our different cerebral, anatomical and physiological abilities past and present. As with the ones represent the Matter spirit, their composition and the speed of the electrons around it. is far from the nucleus and emits photon light, accelerates its speed and changes its orbit as the sapphire of a reading head jumps from one furrow to another. every other cell of the Spirit. The quantum leap occurs when an electron, which is an electron, would cross USA in one second twice and could therefore do so much faster; which would change our reality and our physical appearance. Virgin Saturne? Look at his right Index, his way of standing and his belly.
Harold Edward Elliott, was born at West Charlton in north-west Victoria on 19 June 1878. He was the fifth of eight children of Thomas Elliott and his wife Helen, née Janverin, who had arrived in Victoria during the gold rushes of the 1850s. Thomas and Helen, both English-born, married at St Michael’s Church of England, Talbot, in 1867 and settled in nearby Cockatoo. After years of adventurous gold-seeking had produced meagre returns, Thomas selected a block of land five miles from Charlton and switched to farming, which he found just as arduous and unremunerative. Young Harold grew up in an impoverished environment dominated by the perpetual struggle to extract a living from the soil. Life was a constant battle against the elements; bushfires, snakes, rabbits and too much or too little water were just some of them. He acquired a rudimentary primary education at the one-teacher outpost at West Charlton known as the Rock Tank School.
In 1894 his life was transformed. His father, who had never lost his fascination with the pursuit of gold, had ventured to Western Australia, where he ‘struck it rich in a big way’. Thomas purchased a stately residence, ‘Elsinore’, in Ballarat and the whole family moved there the following year, when Harold and his younger brothers began attending Ballarat College. Having been unexpectedly plucked from rural poverty and presented with a marvellous opportunity, Harold was determined to make the most of it.
Supplementing considerable aptitude with great dedication, he excelled scholastically at Ballarat College and in 1897 was dux of the school. At the University of Melbourne, where he resided at Ormond College, he again demonstrated that he could harness his above-average intellect with exceptional self-discipline and powers of concentration. In 1906 he crowned the successful completion of his law degree with the award of the Supreme Court prize for the top final-year student. He was called to the Victorian Bar in 1907. (In 1920 he completed his BA and LL M.)
Elliott was interested in sport—football and athletics principally—but his main recreational activity during these years was his involvement in military pursuits. He had a passionate interest in all aspects of soldiering. He read widely about military history, participated purposefully in peacetime defence units, and dreamed about emulating the feats of the great commanders of the past. During the Boer War he interrupted his scholarly endeavours at the university to serve in South Africa. Enlisting as a private, he returned as a lieutenant with the Distinguished Conduct Medal, which he had been awarded for a particularly daring exploit.
On 27 December 1909 Elliott married Catherine Frazer Campbell, under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church, at the Melbourne suburb of Northcote. They had two children, Violet Isabel in 1911 and Neil Campbell the following year. Now a partner in the firm of solicitors, Roberts and Elliott, he attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in Australia’s militia forces. A conventional middle-class conservative, he read the Argus and agreed with its advocacy of free trade rather than the protectionist views of the more progressive Age. He supported the White Australia policy. Like many other Protestants of Anglo-Scottish descent, he was inclined to be suspiciously hostile to Roman Catholics.[1]
At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Elliott enlisted immediately and was away for almost five years. He returned as Brigadier General ‘Pompey’ Elliott, a household name, after commanding the 7th Battalion at Gallipoli and the 15th Brigade at the Western Front. The nickname, which he acquired early in the war, endured for the rest of his life; it was derived from a well-known pre-war footballer in Melbourne, Fred ‘Pompey’ Elliott (no relation).
His reputation as one of the AIF’s most famous commanders was founded on his capacity and temperament. He was intelligent, well informed, energetic and decisive. His own bravery was exceptional, but he was vigilant and frank when assessing the advisability of proposed enterprises involving the men under him. It became an article of faith that he would never send a man anywhere he was not prepared to go himself. Emotional and tempestuous, he was also a real character. Anecdotes about him flourished, amusing the men he led and sometimes disconcerting his superiors.
In April 1915 he was wounded at the Gallipoli landing, and rejoined the 7th Battalion in June. In the desperate fighting at Lone Pine in August his battalion performed outstandingly; four of his men were awarded the Victoria Cross. Promoted to brigadier in 1916, he protested with characteristic forcefulness about the inadequacies, in his opinion, of three of the four battalion commanders allotted to his brigade. Having arrived at the Western Front, he saw his carefully prepared brigade butchered in an appallingly botched attack at Fromelles, which he had opposed and tried to prevent. This disaster affected him profoundly, but he soldiered on and rebuilt the brigade once more. His fine leadership was particularly evident at the battle of Polygon Wood, where his brigade overcame severe difficulties arising from the retreat of a British unit and, according to the historian C. E. W. Bean, ‘snatched complete success from an almost desperate situation’. It was, Bean continued, ‘the driving force of this stout-hearted leader’ that ‘was in a large measure responsible for this victory’. His crowning achievement as a commander was his prominent role in the famous counter-attack at Villers-Bretonneux in April 1918.
Elliott was devastated to learn in May 1918 that three other brigadiers had been preferred to him for promotion to divisional command. He was overlooked, despite his outstanding record, because of what his superiors regarded as his intermittently erratic judgment. Pompey nursed this deeply felt and enduring grievance, which he referred to as his supersession, while leading his brigade with customary fire until the end of the war. He arrived back in Melbourne in mid-1919. Later that year Nationalist representatives invited a number of prominent soldiers to stand as candidates at the next federal election.[2]
To the Nationalist powerbrokers Pompey was a highly desirable recruit. He had appropriately conservative political attitudes. His extraordinary popularity among returned soldiers and their families was underlined by the rapturous receptions he was given at the various welcome home functions he attended. And his political usefulness was also demonstrated after a disturbing incident in July when Harry Lawson, the Victorian Premier, was invaded in his office by an angry group of returned soldiers, one of whom hurled an inkstand at him. Pompey played a leading role in pacifying the aggrieved soldiers. Senior Nationalist strategists were concerned about the volatility and disruptive tendencies of the returned soldiers. They were keen to make use of leaders such as Elliott, who had sound, ‘right-thinking’ views as well as popularity and influence in AIF circles.
Pompey was flattered, but wary. The year 1919 was a worrying one for many Australians, who were understandably concerned about the Spanish influenza pandemic, widespread industrial unrest, bitter political conflict and the thousands of soldiers struggling to adjust to their peacetime circumstances. In this unsettling environment Elliott felt he could make a worthwhile contribution. However, the way the party system required politicians to commit themselves in advance to numerous detailed policies was abhorrent to him. ‘If any one wants me to stand for Parliament’, he told a friend in August, ‘they must have sufficient confidence in me as an honest man to trust me to run straight without binding me or attempting to bind me body and soul’. The Nationalist strategists were not deterred. The risk that Elliott might take an independent stance on some issues was outweighed by the electoral advantages accruing from his reputation as a charismatic, courageous commander.
The strategists were sufficiently flexible for him to acquiesce, although another factor may have affected his decision. As recorded by his friend, Frank Green, Elliott confided years afterwards that part of the stimulus for him to stand for the Senate in 1919 was to join a group secretly committed to supporting S. M. Bruce as party leader rather than W. M. Hughes, then Prime Minister. While this is an intriguing notion, there is no doubt that Elliott felt acutely motivated to do what he could to assist returned soldiers, and was influenced by the encouragement he received from many of them to go into Parliament to help ‘fix things up’. Nevertheless one 7th Battalion veteran urged him to avoid Parliament because it was ‘no place for an honest man’.
His campaign tour around Victoria was an odd mixture. There were tumultuous reunions with soldiers who had served under him interspersed with less exhilarating meetings of the political variety, where he laboured in workmanlike fashion through essentially the same lacklustre speech in every district. But the election result confirmed the wisdom of the Nationalists’ strategy. Not only did he top the poll himself; his candidature was instrumental in the election of his colleagues, Frank Guthrie and Ted Russell, giving the Nationalists success in all three Senate vacancies in Victoria.[3]
Entering the Senate in July 1920, Elliott lost no time in living up to his pre-election assertions about his political independence. He called on the Government to ‘revise drastically’ some of its proposals to overhaul public service administration, on one occasion coming up against another lawyer, Senator Keating, over definitions of terms used in the legislation. In August Elliott moved an amendment to the War Service Homes Bill, managing to convince the Minister for Repatriation, Senator E. D. Millen, that the amendment was necessary. The amended clause meant that returned soldiers who had commenced building their houses before the bill’s enactment would not be disadvantaged.
In October he and Guthrie vigorously denounced the expenditure on Canberra proposed by the Government. Amid testy exchanges with Nationalist colleagues Elliott declared: ‘I feel so strongly upon this matter that I have no desire to sit behind the Ministry if they are going to incur this expenditure. I would rather form a party of my own’. Elliott did not carry out this threat, but did rapidly establish a reputation for outspokenness in Parliament. This was dramatically reinforced the following year. Embittered by being again passed over for a divisional vacancy (this time in the postwar militia force), Elliott vented his spleen in a series of extraordinary Senate speeches during debate on the Government’s amending Defence Bill. Pompey repeatedly had his Senate colleagues, who included several fellow generals, on the edge of their seats as he lifted the lid on numerous controversial anecdotes about his wartime experiences and made some remarkable allegations about certain AIF individuals. He was repeatedly scathing about the leaders he blamed for his supersession, the AIF commander General Birdwood and his influential chief staff officer, Brudenell White.
Elliott made headlines when he alleged in the Senate on 21 April 1921 that he had been overlooked for promotion in 1918, after being the chief architect of the stunningly successful Australian counter-attack at Villers‑Bretonneux. He claimed this was because of an earlier incident during those desperate days of defence against the ominous German onslaught. He described how he and his brigade, having been rushed to the rescue, had been flung into a series of alarming situations, and on more than one occasion had to march all night. He went on to tell how his men had been hampered by the unauthorised occupation of a village by a detachment of British ‘fugitives’, his own forceful intervention causing the staff officer in charge of these ‘renegades’ to protest to his superiors. Three weeks later, Elliott told the Senate, his divisional commander paid him a visit:
He said, ‘I want to speak to you privately’, and took me out into the garden. He then said to me, ‘General, I have instructions to tell you that while you are in the Australian Imperial Force you will receive no further promotion by reason of your conduct to the [British] officers’. When he said that, I turned away rather dumbfounded, and he struck me on the back and said, ‘I have got to tell you that; but by God! you were right’. It turned out that this staff officer was the son of a Duke, and ‘put the acid’ on General Birdwood for my conduct, and you see the result.
With numerous other senior commanders in the Senate, the response to Elliott’s barrage of startling revelations was almost as interesting as the revelations themselves. ‘Fighting Charlie’ Cox, a Light Horse brigadier, consistently unleashed vacuous disapproval, but there were more discerning responses from other generals, such as E. A. Drake‑Brockman. Longstanding defence minister George Pearce was unsettled by Elliott’s account of the campaign and did not conceal his distaste. As for ‘Jupp’ Gardiner, Labor’s solitary senator in 1921, he concluded that ‘whoever is engaged in writing up the history of the war should be supplied with a special desk in this chamber and should be given a special invitation to be in regular attendance in the Senate, because matters of the greatest interest to them may crop up here at any time’. That observation by Gardiner had been triggered by one of Elliott’s more astonishing outbursts:
In France, one of the biggest ‘duds’ I know of commanded a regiment of Light Horse, and he was stationed in a village behind the lines for the whole period of the war. During practically the whole of the time he was there he was intoxicated, and the villagers, in pity and contempt, named him ‘Le Toujours Zig-Zag’, by which they meant that he was always drunk . . . He returned to Australia and is now in command of the troops in Tasmania.
Elliott did not name the commander concerned, but it was Brudenell White’s brother, whose lameness and slight speech impediment stemmed from a pre-war accident—he had not been repeatedly drunk at all. After this, Pompey had to eat humble pie, though not for the first or last time. His tendency to lash out rashly, at times relying on inadequately checked information, left him vulnerable to sharp criticism and sometimes undermined his credibility, but his extraordinary exposés were rarely without foundation.[4]
Such contentious contributions confirmed his reputation as a redoubtable gladiator. Throughout his postwar years he was inundated with requests for assistance from returned soldiers. In the main he sought to do good by stealth, but sometimes he raised grievances in Parliament. One such episode led to the formation of the Senate select committee that investigated the case of Warrant Officer J. R. Allen. Elliott chaired it. A majority of the committee concluded that the treatment of Allen by his commander had been justified. Elliott, still convinced that Allen had been unfairly treated, submitted a minority report jointly with Senator Allan McDougall. Elliott was also a member of the Royal Commission on the Navigation Act (1923–25), participating in most of its extensive investigations and contributing to its main report before resigning in August 1924.[5]
At one stage Elliott was single-handedly—though inadvertently—responsible for a change in government policy. One memorable day he was hurrying across King’s Hall when he happened to slip on the highly polished jarrah floor. His burly frame executed a dramatic tumble, reputedly rocking the Parliament House foundations; he accomplished such a spectacular slide on his back that he ended up entering the Senate chamber in arrestingly horizontal style, feet first. This amusing incident led to a less zealous polishing regime. When it was suggested that cleaning costs at Parliament House had been reduced, the press announced that ‘“Pompey” Elliott’s Slip May Save Australia Money’.
In view of Elliott’s forthrightness and maverick tendencies, it is unlikely that he was ever considered ministerial material even though he was in Parliament for over a decade and his party in government for almost all that time. That some of his strident utterances were detrimental to the Nationalist cause does not seem to have resulted in any significant pressure for him to be disowned by his party. His immense popularity—confirmed at the 1925 election when he again topped the Senate poll in Victoria—was simply too valuable to the Nationalists. Besides, apart from some characteristically idiosyncratic outbursts and his occasional willingness to cross the floor in the Senate, he was generally a wholehearted supporter of the Hughes and Bruce–Page governments. During the interminable 1921 tariff debates which resulted in considerable increases to Australian levels of protection, Elliott admitted publicly that he had abandoned his previous faith in free trade. With the zeal of the convert he consistently aligned himself with manufacturers and Victoria’s traditional adherence to the protectionist cause. Whether it was beer or malted milk, corsets or chamois leather, explosives or porcelain insulators, Elliott wanted the local product protected.
Moreover, when Bruce suddenly informed his government backbenchers of his intention to announce an about-turn on arbitration policy in 1929, Elliott responded with an immediate assurance to the Prime Minister that he would support the new policy absolutely. And when the Scullin Labor Government took office without a majority in the Senate later that year, Elliott was one of the opposition senators whose remorseless obstructionist tactics did much to demoralise the government. Nevertheless, as Senator Dooley remarked, Labor senators ‘always knew that with him the political fight was over as soon as he left the chamber’, although Elliott and D. C. McGrath, the ALP Member for Ballarat, had a sustained mutual enmity.[6]
Elliott’s parliamentary career ended with his death on 23 March 1931. The huge toll inflicted by the war on his nervous system, aggravated by the distress and misery of the Depression together with his deeply felt sense of injustice about his supersession grievance (and also, it seems, by a head injury incurred in a horse-riding accident) had undermined his mental and emotional stability. At the age of fifty-two Elliott committed suicide in hospital. His wife Kate and their children, Violet and Neil, survived him. The funeral was an extraordinary event; few, if any, in Melbourne had been bigger. Thousands lined the four-mile route the cortège travelled between his Camberwell home and Burwood Cemetery where he was buried with Presbyterian rites. Many returned soldiers marched sombrely behind the gun carriage bearing the coffin. One of them, Bruce, wrote that he had ‘never seen a greater tribute paid to a man’. Several of the parliamentary obituaries referred to Elliott’s geniality and friendliness as well as his outstanding military leadership. Opposition Leader, J. G. Latham, who had known Elliott well throughout his adult life, captured the essence of Pompey in this brief description: ‘He was a fearless man, of remarkable resolution and tenacity of purpose’. The manner of Elliott’s death was muzzled until it was controversially revealed a few weeks later by Smith’s Weekly.
Pompey Elliott was one of the best-known parliamentarians of his decade in federal politics. The characteristics and temperament which had won him extraordinary fame as a soldier ensured that his political career would prove lively and interesting, but he was clearly more suited to soldiering than Parliament.[7]
Okay, what's this - a singing, winking barnacle? Maybe. All I know is that of the millions upon millions of barnacles covering the beach rocks, this jumped out at me. No thought went into this image. I saw it, smiled, set my tripod, fiddled with the settings, and that was all.
I know there are rules - I prefer to think of them as design principles - underlying all visual art, just as there are in music, and probably in dance and other forms of creative expression. I even know what some of them are. But I almost never try to build a composition with these in mind; if anything, I prefer my mind to be as empty as possible when I'm shooting. In the field, I work via instinct: does it feel right, like this? Shooting from the gut; shooting from the heart, not the intellect.
But it's really a mystery to me, where and how the creative impulse manifests through art. There is no formula that can explain it. I've had students - an accomplished chemist comes to mind - who demanded to know the rule for a given photo situation, and were disappointed and even angry when I insisted there are no rules. Sorry. I can divulge technique, but I can't reveal any "shortcuts to seeing well", because they do not exist. Put in the time. Look and shoot and then assess, and do it all over, again and again, and never stop doing it, and something exciting may happen. Maybe just a glimmer at first, but then, if you persist and do the work, a breakthrough. I still miss far more shots than I get. The process is ongoing for us all.
For the record, I think there are two species of barnacle here, the Common Acorn Barnacle and several Small Acorn Barnacles. Not being a barnacle expert, though, I may be wrong. Evidently the large one has been attacked and mostly eaten by some predator - most likely a shorebird such as the Black Turnstone, that I saw here in great numbers. The white marks appear to be places where other barnacles once lived. Life and death: we stumble through this drama every time we take a walk on the wild side. Sometimes it can even make us smile.
Photographed along the coast of British Columbia (Canada). Don't use this image on websites, blogs, or other media without explicit permission © 2018 James R. Page - all rights reserved.
OM
Auṃ or Oṃ, Sanskrit: ॐ) is a sacred sound and a spiritual icon in Indian religions.[1][2] It is also a mantra in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism.[3][4]
Om is part of the iconography found in ancient and medieval era manuscripts, temples, monasteries and spiritual retreats in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.[5][6] The symbol has a spiritual meaning in all Indian dharmas, but the meaning and connotations of Om vary between the diverse schools within and across the various traditions.
In Hinduism, Om is one of the most important spiritual symbols (pratima).[7][8] It refers to Atman (soul, self within) andBrahman (ultimate reality, entirety of the universe, truth, divine, supreme spirit, cosmic principles, knowledge).[9][10][11] The syllable is often found at the beginning and the end of chapters in the Vedas, the Upanishads, and other Hindu texts. It is a sacred spiritual incantation made before and during the recitation of spiritual texts, during puja and private prayers, in ceremonies of rites of passages (sanskara) such as weddings, and sometimes during meditative and spiritual activities such as Yoga.
Vedic literature
The syllable "Om" is described with various meanings in the Vedas and different early Upanishads.[19] The meanings include "the sacred sound, the Yes!, the Vedas, the Udgitha (song of the universe), the infinite, the all encompassing, the whole world, the truth, the ultimate reality, the finest essence, the cause of the Universe, the essence of life, theBrahman, the Atman, the vehicle of deepest knowledge, and Self-knowledge".
Vedas
The chapters in Vedas, and numerous hymns, chants and benedictions therein use the syllable Om. The Gayatri mantra from the Rig Veda, for example, begins with Om. The mantra is extracted from the 10th verse of Hymn 62 in Book III of the Rig Veda.These recitations continue to be in use, and major incantations and ceremonial functions begin and end with Om.
ॐ भूर्भुवस्व: |
तत्सवितुर्वरेण्यम् |
भर्गो देवस्य धीमहि |
धियो यो न: प्रचोदयात् ||
Om. Earth, atmosphere, heaven.
Let us think on that desirable splendour
of Savitr, the Inspirer. May he stimulate
us to insightful thoughts.
Om is a common symbol found in the ancient texts of Hinduism, such as in the first line of Rig veda (top), as well as a icon in temples and spiritual retreats.
The Chandogya Upanishad is one of the oldest Upanishads of Hinduism. It opens with the recommendation that "let a man meditate on Om".[26] It calls the syllable Om as udgitha (उद्गीथ, song, chant), and asserts that the significance of the syllable is thus: the essence of all beings is earth, the essence of earth is water, the essence of water are the plants, the essence of plants is man, the essence of man is speech, the essence of speech is the Rig Veda, the essence of the Rig Veda is the Sama Veda, and the essence of Sama Veda is the udgitha (song, Om).[27]
Rik (ऋच्, Ṛc) is speech, states the text, and Sāman (सामन्) is breath; they are pairs, and because they have love and desire for each other, speech and breath find themselves together and mate to produce song.[26][27] The highest song is Om, asserts section 1.1 of Chandogya Upanishad. It is the symbol of awe, of reverence, of threefold knowledge because Adhvaryu invokes it, the Hotr recites it, and Udgatr sings it.[27][28]
The second volume of the first chapter continues its discussion of syllable Om, explaining its use as a struggle between Devas (gods) and Asuras (demons).[29] Max Muller states that this struggle between gods and demons is considered allegorical by ancient Indian scholars, as good and evil inclinations within man, respectively.[30] The legend in section 1.2 of Chandogya Upanishad states that gods took the Udgitha (song of Om) unto themselves, thinking, "with this [song] we shall overcome the demons".[31] The syllable Om is thus implied as that which inspires the good inclinations within each person.[30][31]
Chandogya Upanishad's exposition of syllable Om in its opening chapter combines etymological speculations, symbolism, metric structure and philosophical themes.[28][32] In the second chapter of the Chandogya Upanishad, the meaning and significance of Om evolves into a philosophical discourse, such as in section 2.10 where Om is linked to the Highest Self,[33] and section 2.23 where the text asserts Om is the essence of three forms of knowledge, Om is Brahman and "Om is all this [observed world]".[34]
Katha Upanishad
The Katha Upanishad is the legendary story of a little boy, Nachiketa – the son of sage Vajasravasa, who meetsYama – the Indian deity of death. Their conversation evolves to a discussion of the nature of man, knowledge,Atman (Soul, Self) and moksha (liberation).[35] In section 1.2, Katha Upanishad characterizes Knowledge/Wisdom as the pursuit of good, and Ignorance/Delusion as the pursuit of pleasant,[36] that the essence of Veda is make man liberated and free, look past what has happened and what has not happened, free from the past and the future, beyond good and evil, and one word for this essence is the word Om.[37]
The word which all the Vedas proclaim,
That which is expressed in every Tapas (penance, austerity, meditation),
That for which they live the life of a Brahmacharin,
Understand that word in its essence: Om! that is the word.
Yes, this syllable is Brahman,
This syllable is the highest.
He who knows that syllable,
Whatever he desires, is his.
— Katha Upanishad,
Maitri Upanishad
The Maitrayaniya Upanishad in sixth Prapathakas (lesson) discusses the meaning and significance of Om. The text asserts that Om represents Brahman-Atman. The three roots of the syllable, states the Maitri Upanishad, are A + U + M.[39] The sound is the body of Soul, and it repeatedly manifests in three: as gender-endowed body - feminine, masculine, neuter; as light-endowed body - Agni, Vayu and Aditya; as deity-endowed body - Brahma, Rudra[40] and Vishnu; as mouth-endowed body - Garhapatya, Dakshinagni and Ahavaniya;[41] as knowledge-endowed body - Rig, Saman and Yajur;[42] as world-endowed body - Bhūr, Bhuvaḥ and Svaḥ; as time-endowed body - Past, Present and Future; as heat-endowed body - Breath, Fire and Sun; as growth-endowed body - Food, Water and Moon; as thought-endowed body - intellect, mind and pysche.[39][43] Brahman exists in two forms - the material form, and the immaterial formless.[44] The material form is changing, unreal. The immaterial formless isn't changing, real. The immortal formless is truth, the truth is the Brahman, the Brahman is the light, the light is the Sun which is the syllable Om as the Self.[45][46]
The world is Om, its light is Sun, and the Sun is also the light of the syllable Om, asserts the Upanishad. Meditating on Om, is acknowledging and meditating on the Brahman-Atman (Soul, Self).[39]
Mundaka Upanishad[edit source]
The Mundaka Upanishad in the second Mundakam (part), suggests the means to knowing the Self and the Brahman to be meditation, self-reflection and introspection, that can be aided by the symbol Om.[47][48]
That which is flaming, which is subtler than the subtle,
on which the worlds are set, and their inhabitants –
That is the indestructible Brahman.[49]
It is life, it is speech, it is mind. That is the real. It is immortal.
It is a mark to be penetrated. Penetrate It, my friend.
Taking as a bow the great weapon of the Upanishad,
one should put upon it an arrow sharpened by meditation,
Stretching it with a thought directed to the essence of That,
Penetrate[50] that Imperishable as the mark, my friend.
Om is the bow, the arrow is the Soul, Brahman the mark,
By the undistracted man is It to be penetrated,
One should come to be in It,
as the arrow becomes one with the mark.
— Mundaka Upanishad, 2.2.2 - 2.2.4[51][52]
Adi Shankara, in his review of the Mundaka Upanishad, states Om as a symbolism for Atman (soul, self).[53]
Mandukya Upanishad
The Mandukya Upanishad opens by declaring, "Om!, this syllable is this whole world".[54] Thereafter it presents various explanations and theories on what it means and signifies.[55] This discussion is built on a structure of "four fourths" or "fourfold", derived from A + U + M + "silence" (or without an element).[54][55]
Aum as all states of time
In verse 1, the Upanishad states that time is threefold: the past, the present and the future, that these three are "Aum". The four fourth of time is that which transcends time, that too is "Aum" expressed.[55]
Aum as all states of Atman
In verse 2, states the Upanishad, everything is Brahman, but Brahman is Atman (the Soul, Self), and that the Atman is fourfold.[54] Johnston summarizes these four states of Self, respectively, as seeking the physical, seeking inner thought, seeking the causes and spiritual consciousness, and the fourth state is realizing oneness with the Self, the Eternal.[56]
Aum as all states of consciousness
In verses 3 to 6, the Mandukya Upanishad enumerates four states of consciousness: wakeful, dream, deep sleep and the state of ekatma (being one with Self, the oneness of Self).[55] These four are A + U + M + "without an element" respectively.[55]
Aum as all of knowledge
In verses 9 to 12, the Mandukya Upanishad enumerates fourfold etymological roots of the syllable "Aum". It states that the first element of "Aum" is A, which is from Apti (obtaining, reaching) or from Adimatva (being first).[54] The second element is U, which is from Utkarsa (exaltation) or from Ubhayatva(intermediateness).[55] The third element is M, from Miti (erecting, constructing) or from Mi Minati, or apīti (annihilation).[54] The fourth is without an element, without development, beyond the expanse of universe. In this way, states the Upanishad, the syllable Om is indeed the Atman (the self).[54][55]
Shvetashvatara Upanishad
The Shvetashvatara Upanishad, in verses 1.14 to 1.16, suggests meditating with the help of syllable Om, where one's perishable body is like one fuel-stick and the syllable Om is the second fuel-stick, which with discipline and diligent rubbing of the sticks unleashes the concealed fire of thought and awareness within. Such knowledge, asserts the Upanishad, is the goal of Upanishads.[57][58] The text asserts that Om is a tool of meditation empowering one to know the God within oneself, to realize one's Atman (Soul, Self).[59]
Epics[edit source]
The Bhagavad Gita, in the Epic Mahabharata, mentions the meaning and significance of Om in several verses. For example, Fowler notes that verse 9.17 of the Bhagavad Gita synthesizes the competing dualistic and monist streams of thought in Hinduism, by using "Om which is the symbol for the indescribable, impersonal Brahman".[60]
I am the Father of this world, Mother, Ordainer, Grandfather, the Thing to be known, the Purifier, the syllable Om, Rik, Saman and also Yajus.
— Krishna to Arjuna, Bhagavad Gita 9.17, [60]
The significance of the sacred syllable in the Hindu traditions, is similarly highlighted in various of its verses, such as verse 17.24 where the importance of Omduring prayers, charity and meditative practices is explained as follows,[61]
Therefore, uttering Om, the acts of yajna (fire ritual), dāna (charity) and tapas (austerity) as enjoined in the scriptures, are always begun by those who study the Brahman.
— Bhagavad Gita
Yoga Sutra
The aphoristic verse 1.27 of Pantanjali's Yogasutra links Om to Yoga practice, as follows,
तस्य वाचकः प्रणवः ॥२७॥
His word is Om.
— Yogasutra 1.27,
Johnston states this verse highlights the importance of Om in the meditative practice of Yoga, where it symbolizes three worlds in the Soul; the three times – past, present and future eternity, the three divine powers – creation, preservation and transformation in one Being; and three essences in one Spirit – immortality, omniscience and joy. It is, asserts Johnston, a symbol for the perfected Spiritual Man (his emphasis).
The being is a hybrid of Einstein and Cthulhu — an ancient cosmic intellect given form.
Its anatomy merges human cognition with incomprehensible scale. The head and upper structure echo a cybernetic human design: exposed brain matter partially encased in biomechanical architecture. Organic folds, veins, and subtle mechanical interfaces fuse seamlessly, as if evolution and engineering reached the same conclusion from opposite ends.
The brain emits a faint, cold glow — not radiant, but deliberate — suggesting intelligence that does not seek attention, only understanding.
Beauty - a combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, esp. the sight: I was struck by her beauty | an area of outstanding natural beauty.
• a combination of qualities that pleases the intellect or moral sense.
We went to a funeral on Tuesday, it was north two hours in a small town. On our way home we took a different route, it was a winding road and there were numerous lakes and huge rocks…it was beautiful…true Canadian lake country. We had taken someone with us who needed a ride to the funeral and all I heard from the backseat for quite awhile was her remarking at all the beautiful landscape we were passing and how peaceful it was. That made me smile and realize the beauty that was in her. And even though the day was dreary the beauty was still evident. When we see something beautiful we want to stay, linger and take it in. As human beings we are drawn to beauty.
As women the whole beauty thing can be hard. We are bombarded with what culture says is beautiful when it comes to women and often times it is outward beauty and something the majority of us can never attain. And when we try to attain it it becomes our idol, our driving force for acceptance. We try so hard to conform to what culture says is beautiful that we end up destroying the true beauty that is within us. I know this is an area where I struggle. I don't want to conform to what the world says is beautiful, I want to be true to who God has created me to be.
Often times when I am struggling and feel I don't measure up my husband will pull me aside, stand in front of me and say "Tina, you know what true beauty is, it's in here" as he points to my heart "and I see it in your eyes, that's true beauty, that's what I'm looking for." And I know he's right and it's what the world needs. Physical beauty is fleeting…we all grow old…but true beauty remains and grows, it's life giving. Straight physical beauty is not life giving, if that's all we're looking and striving for it actually robs us and those around us of life.
The funeral we attended was from the mother of a woman who goes to our Church. I never knew her mother, I only saw her once and she was old and frail. Yet to hear her daughter and pastor speak of her, she was a woman of true beauty, she lived her life selflessly giving to others. Her daughter said her front door was always swinging open. She gave freely to those whose paths she crossed, she saw the need in others and gave what she could. Her beauty was life giving.
The beauty that trips some of us women up…what we see on magazine covers, billboards, commercials, movies, television shows, etc. may be outward physical beauty but it's not what we're to strive for, it's not what the world needs, it's not what our families need, it's a false reality.
Accept who you are…I say this to myself too :-) Each of us is special and has a place in this world and at this time…embrace it and be you…it's the most freeing place to be, the most rewarding and the most life-giving.
I've posted a number of images of some of the beautiful women in my life, check it out if you'd like.
tina-ramblingsofacountrywoman.blogspot.ca/2012/04/some-of...
The Postcard
A postally unused postcard that was published prior to June 1918. The card has a divided back.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was born on the 4th. August 1792, was one of the major English Romantic poets.
A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death, and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets, including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats.
American literary critic Harold Bloom describes Shelley as:
"A superb craftsman, a lyric poet without
rival, and surely one of the most advanced
sceptical intellects ever to write a poem."
Shelly's reputation fluctuated during the 20th. century, but in recent decades he has achieved increasing critical acclaim for the sweeping momentum of his poetic imagery, his mastery of genres and verse forms, and the complex interplay of sceptical, idealist, and materialist ideas in his work.
Among his best-known works are "Ozymandias" (1818), "Ode to the West Wind" (1819), "To a Skylark" (1820), the philosophical essay "The Necessity of Atheism" written alongside his friend T. J. Hogg (1811), and the political ballad "The Mask of Anarchy" (1819).
Shelley's other major works include the verse drama "The Cenci" (1819) and long poems such as "Alastor", or "The Spirit of Solitude" (1815), "Julian and Maddalo" (1819), "Adonais" (1821), "Prometheus Unbound" (1820) - widely considered his masterpiece - "Hellas" (1822), and his final, unfinished work, "The Triumph of Life" (1822).
Shelley also wrote prose fiction and a quantity of essays on political, social, and philosophical issues.
Much of his poetry and prose was not published in his lifetime, or only published in expurgated form, due to the risk of prosecution for political and religious libel.
From the 1820's, his poems and political and ethical writings became popular in Owenist, Chartist, and radical political circles, and later drew admirers as diverse as Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, and George Bernard Shaw.
Shelley's life was marked by family crises, ill health, and a backlash against his atheism, political views and defiance of social conventions. He went into permanent self-exile in Italy in 1818, and over the next four years produced what Leader and O'Neill call:
"Some of the finest poetry
of the Romantic period".
His second wife, Mary Shelley, was the author of Frankenstein.
Shelley died in a boating accident in 1822 at the age of 29.
Percy Bysshe Shelley - The Early Years
Shelley was born at Field Place, Warnham, West Sussex. He was the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley (1753–1844), a Whig Member of Parliament for Horsham from 1790 to 1792 and for Shoreham between 1806 and 1812, and his wife, Elizabeth Pilfold (1763–1846), the daughter of a successful butcher.
Percy had four younger sisters and one much younger brother. Shelley's early childhood was sheltered and mostly happy. He was particularly close to his sisters and his mother, who encouraged him to hunt, fish and ride.
At the age of six, he was sent to a day school run by the vicar of Warnham church, where he displayed an impressive memory and gift for languages.
In 1802 he entered the Syon House Academy in Brentford. Shelley was bullied and unhappy at the school, and sometimes responded with violent rage. He also began suffering from the nightmares, hallucinations and sleep walking that were periodically to afflict him throughout his life.
Shelley developed an interest in science which supplemented his voracious reading of tales of mystery, romance and the supernatural. During his holidays at Field Place, his sisters were often terrified by being subjected to his experiments with gunpowder, acids and electricity. Back at school he blew up a fence with gunpowder.
In 1804, Shelley entered Eton College, a period which he later recalled with loathing. He was subjected to particularly severe mob bullying which the perpetrators called "Shelley-baits".
A number of biographers and contemporaries have attributed the bullying to Shelley's aloofness, nonconformity and refusal to take part in fagging. His peculiarities and violent rages earned him the nickname "Mad Shelley".
His interest in the occult and science continued, and contemporaries describe him giving an electric shock to a master, blowing up a tree stump with gunpowder and attempting to raise spirits with occult rituals.
In his senior years, Shelley came under the influence of a part-time teacher, Dr James Lind, who encouraged his interest in the occult, and introduced him to liberal and radical authors.
Shelley also developed an interest in Plato and idealist philosophy which he pursued in later years through self-study. According to Richard Holmes, Shelley, by his leaving year, had gained a reputation as a classical scholar and a tolerated eccentric.
In his last term at Eton, Shelley's first novel Zastrozzi appeared, and by then he had established a following among his fellow students. Prior to enrolling at University College, Oxford in October 1810, Shelley completed Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (written with his sister Elizabeth), the verse melodrama The Wandering Jew and the Gothic novel St. Irvine; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance (published 1811).
At Oxford Shelley attended few lectures, instead spending long hours reading and conducting scientific experiments in the laboratory he set up in his room. He met a fellow student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who became his closest friend.
Shelley became increasingly politicised under Hogg's influence, developing strong radical and anti-Christian views. Such views were dangerous in the reactionary political climate prevailing during Britain's war with Napoleonic France, and Shelley's father warned him against Hogg's influence.
In the winter of 1810–1811, Shelley published a series of anonymous political poems and tracts: Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, The Necessity of Atheism (written in collaboration with Hogg) and A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things.
Shelley mailed The Necessity of Atheism to all the bishops and heads of colleges at Oxford, and he was called to appear before the college's fellows, including the Dean, George Rowley.
In the work, Shelley argued that since a person’s beliefs are involuntary, it is unjust to persecute someone for having beliefs that they cannot control. Since this was the early 1800's, Shelley faced serious punishment from Oxford’s administration.
His refusal to answer questions put by college authorities regarding whether or not he authored the pamphlet resulted in his expulsion from Oxford on the 25th. March 1811, along with Hogg.
Hearing of his son's expulsion, Shelley's father threatened to cut all contact with Shelley unless he agreed to return home and study under tutors appointed by him. Shelley's refusal to do so led to a falling-out with his father.
Shelley's Marriage to Harriet Westbrook
In late December 1810, Shelley had met Harriet Westbrook, a pupil at the same boarding school as Shelley's sisters. They corresponded frequently that winter, and also after Shelley had been expelled from Oxford.
Shelley expounded his radical ideas on politics, religion and marriage to Harriet, and they gradually convinced each other that she was oppressed by her father and at school.
Shelley's infatuation with Harriet developed in the months following his expulsion, when he was under severe emotional strain due to the conflict with his family, his bitterness over the breakdown of his romance with his cousin Harriet Grove, and his unfounded belief that he might be suffering from a fatal illness.
At the same time, Harriet Westbrook's elder sister Eliza, to whom Harriet was very close, encouraged the young girl's romance with Shelley. Shelley's correspondence with Harriet intensified in July, while he was holidaying in Wales, and in response to her urgent pleas for his protection, he returned to London in early August.
Putting aside his philosophical objections to matrimony, he left with the sixteen-year-old Harriet for Edinburgh on the 25th. August 1811, and they were married there on the 28th.
Hearing of the elopement, Harriet's father, John Westbrook, and Shelley's father cut off the allowances of the bride and groom. Shelley's father believed that his son had married beneath him, as Harriet's father had earned his fortune in trade, and was the owner of a tavern and coffee house.
Surviving on borrowed money, Shelley and Harriet stayed in Edinburgh for a month, with Hogg living under the same roof. The trio left for York in October, and Shelley went on to Sussex to settle matters with his father, leaving Harriet behind with Hogg.
Shelley returned from his unsuccessful excursion to find that Harriet's sister Eliza had moved in with Harriet and Hogg. Harriet confessed that Hogg had tried to seduce her while Shelley had been away. Accordingly Shelley, Harriet and Eliza soon left for Keswick in the Lake District, leaving Hogg in York.
At this time Shelley was involved in an intense platonic relationship with Elizabeth Hitchener, a 28-year-old unmarried schoolteacher of advanced views, with whom he had been corresponding. Hitchener, whom Shelley called the "sister of my soul" and "my second self", became his confidante and intellectual companion as he developed his views on politics, religion, ethics and personal relationships.
Shelley proposed that Elizabeth join him, Harriet and Eliza in a communal household where all property would be shared.
The Shelleys and Eliza spent December and January in Keswick where Shelley visited Robert Southey whose poetry he admired. Southey was taken with Shelley, even though there was a wide gulf between them politically, and predicted great things for him as a poet.
Southey also informed Shelley that William Godwin, author of Political Justice, which had greatly influenced him in his youth, and which Shelley also admired, was still alive. Shelley wrote to Godwin, offering himself as his devoted disciple. Godwin, who had modified many of his earlier radical views, advised Shelley to reconcile with his father, become a scholar before he published anything else, and give up his avowed plans for political agitation in Ireland.
Meanwhile, Shelley had met his father's patron, Charles Howard, 11th. Duke of Norfolk, who helped secure the reinstatement of Shelley's allowance.
With Harriet's allowance also restored, Shelley now had the funds for his Irish venture. Their departure for Ireland was precipitated by increasing hostility towards the Shelley household from their landlord and neighbours who were alarmed by Shelley's scientific experiments, pistol shooting and radical political views.
As tension mounted, Shelley claimed he had been attacked in his home by ruffians, an event which might have been real, or a delusional episode triggered by stress. This was the first of a series of episodes in subsequent years where Shelley claimed to have been attacked by strangers during periods of personal crisis.
Early in 1812, Shelley wrote, published and personally distributed in Dublin three political tracts: An Address, to the Irish People; Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists; and Declaration of Rights. He also delivered a speech at a meeting of O'Connell's Catholic Committee in which he called for Catholic emancipation, repeal of the Acts of Union and an end to the oppression of the Irish poor. Reports of Shelley's subversive activities were sent to the Home Secretary.
Returning from Ireland, the Shelley household travelled to Wales, then Devon, where they again came under government surveillance for distributing subversive literature. Elizabeth Hitchener joined the household in Devon, but several months later had a falling out with the Shelleys and left.
The Shelley household settled in Tremadog, Wales in September 1812, where Shelley worked on Queen Mab, a utopian allegory with extensive notes preaching atheism, free love, republicanism and vegetarianism. The poem was published the following year in a private edition of 250 copies, although few were initially distributed, because of the risk of prosecution for seditious and religious libel.
In February 1813, Shelley claimed he was attacked in his home at night. The incident might have been real, a hallucination brought on by stress, or a hoax staged by Shelley in order to escape government surveillance, creditors and his entanglements in local politics. The Shelleys and Eliza fled to Ireland, then London.
Back in England, Shelley's debts mounted as he tried unsuccessfully to reach a financial settlement with his father. On the 23rd. June 1813, Harriet gave birth to a girl, Eliza Ianthe Shelley, but in the following months the relationship between Shelley and his wife deteriorated.
Shelley resented the influence that Harriet's sister had over her, while Harriet was alienated by Shelley's close friendship with an attractive widow, Harriet Boinville, and her daughter Cornelia Turner.
Following Ianthe's birth, the Shelleys moved frequently across London, Wales, the Lake District, Scotland and Berkshire to escape creditors and to search for a home.
In March 1814, Shelley remarried Harriet in London to settle any doubts about the legality of their Edinburgh wedding and to secure the rights of their child. Nevertheless, the Shelleys lived apart for most of the following months, and Shelley reflected bitterly on:
"My rash & heartless union with Harriet".
Shelley's Elopement with Mary Godwin
In May 1814, Shelley began visiting his mentor William Godwin almost daily, and soon fell in love with Mary, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Godwin and the late feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft.
Shelley and Mary declared their love for each other during a visit to her mother's grave in the churchyard of St. Pancras Old Church on the 26th. June 1814. When Shelley told William Godwin that he intended to leave Harriet and live with Godwin's daughter, his mentor banished him from the house, and forbade Mary from seeing him.
Shelley and Mary however eloped to Europe on the 28th. July 1814, taking Mary's step-sister Claire Clairmont with them. Before leaving, Shelley had secured a loan of £3,000, but had left most of the funds at the disposal of Godwin and Harriet, who was now pregnant. The financial arrangement with Godwin led to rumours that he had sold his daughters to Shelley.
Shelley, Mary Godwin and Claire made their way across war-ravaged France where Shelley wrote to Harriet, asking her to meet them in Switzerland with the money he had left for her.
However, hearing nothing from Harriet in Switzerland, and being unable to secure sufficient funds or suitable accommodation, the three travelled to Germany and Holland before returning to England on the 13th. September 1814.
Shelley spent the next few months trying to raise loans and avoid bailiffs. Mary was pregnant, lonely, depressed and ill. Her mood was not improved when she heard that, on the 30th. November 1814, Harriet had given birth to Charles Bysshe Shelley, heir to the Shelley fortune and baronetcy.
This was followed, in early January 1815, by news that Shelley's grandfather, Sir Bysshe, had died leaving an estate worth £220,000. The settlement of the estate, and a financial settlement between Shelley and his father (now Sir Timothy), however, was not concluded until April the following year.
In February 1815, Mary gave premature birth to a baby girl who died ten days later, deepening her depression. In the following weeks, Mary became close to Hogg who temporarily moved into the household.
Shelley was almost certainly having a sexual relationship with Claire at this time, and it is possible that Mary, with Shelley's encouragement, was also having a sexual relationship with Hogg. In May Claire left the household, at Mary's insistence, to reside in Lynmouth.
In August 1815 Shelley and Mary moved to Bishopsgate where Shelley worked on Alastor, a long poem in blank verse based on the myth of Narcissus and Echo. Alastor was published in an edition of 250 in early 1816 to poor sales and largely unfavourable reviews from the conservative press.
On the 24th. January 1816, Mary gave birth to William Shelley. Percy was delighted to have another son, but was suffering from the strain of prolonged financial negotiations with his father, Harriet and William Godwin. Shelley showed signs of delusional behaviour, and was contemplating an escape to the continent.
Lord Byron
Claire initiated a sexual relationship with Lord Byron in April 1816, just before his self-exile on the continent, and then arranged for Byron to meet Shelley, Mary and her in Geneva.
Shelley admired Byron's poetry, and had sent him Queen Mab and other poems. Shelley's party arrived in Geneva in May and rented a house close to Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Byron was staying. There Shelley, Byron and the others engaged in discussions about literature, science and "various philosophical doctrines".
One night, while Byron was reciting Coleridge's Christabel, Shelley suffered a severe panic attack with hallucinations. The previous night Mary had had a more productive vision or nightmare which inspired her novel Frankenstein.
Shelley and Byron then took a boating tour around Lake Geneva, which inspired Shelley to write his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", his first substantial poem since Alastor.
A tour of Chamonix in the French Alps inspired "Mont Blanc", which has been described as an atheistic response to Coleridge's "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamoni". During this tour, Shelley often signed guest books with a declaration that he was an atheist. These declarations were seen by other British tourists, including Southey, which hardened attitudes against Shelley back home.
Relations between Byron and Shelley's party became strained when Byron was told that Claire was pregnant with his child. Shelley, Mary, and Claire left Switzerland in late August, with arrangements for the expected baby still unclear, although Shelley made provision for Claire and the baby in his will.
In January 1817 Claire gave birth to a daughter by Byron who she named Alba, but later renamed Allegra in accordance with Byron's wishes.
Shelley's Marriage to Mary Godwin
Shelley and Mary returned to England in September 1816, and in early October they heard that Mary's half-sister Fanny Imlay had killed herself. Mary believed that Fanny had been in love with Shelley, and Shelley himself suffered depression and guilt over her death, writing:
"Friend had I known thy
secret grief
Should we have parted so."
Further tragedy followed in December 1816 when Shelley's estranged wife Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Harriet, pregnant and living alone at the time, believed that she had been abandoned by her new lover. In her suicide letter she asked Shelley to take custody of their son Charles but to leave their daughter in her sister Eliza's care.
Shelley married Mary Godwin on the 30 December 1816, despite his philosophical objections to the institution. The marriage was intended to help secure Shelley's custody of his children by Harriet and to placate Godwin who had refused to see Shelley and Mary because of their previous adulterous relationship.
After a prolonged legal battle, the Court of Chancery eventually awarded custody of Shelley and Harriet's children to foster parents, on the grounds that Shelley had abandoned his first wife for Mary without cause, and was an atheist.
In March 1817 the Shelleys moved to the village of Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where Shelley's friend Thomas Love Peacock lived. The Shelley household included Claire and her baby Allegra, both of whose presence was resented by Mary. Shelley's generosity with money and increasing debts also led to financial and marital stress, as did Godwin's frequent requests for financial help.
On the 2nd. September 1817 Mary gave birth to a daughter, Clara Everina Shelley. Soon after, Shelley left for London with Claire, which increased Mary's resentment towards her step-sister. Shelley was arrested for two days in London over money he owed, and attorneys visited Mary in Marlowe over Shelley's debts.
Shelley was part of the literary and political circle that surrounded Leigh Hunt, and during this period he met William Hazlitt and John Keats. Shelley's major work during this time was Laon and Cythna, a long narrative poem featuring incest and attacks on religion.
It was hastily withdrawn after publication due to fears of prosecution for religious libel, and was re-edited and reissued as The Revolt of Islam in January 1818. Shelley also published two political tracts under a pseudonym: A Proposal for putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom (March 1817) and An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte (November 1817).
In December he wrote "Ozymandias", which is considered to be one of his finest sonnets, as part of a competition with friend and fellow poet Horace Smith.
Shelley in Italy
On the 12th. March 1818 the Shelleys and Claire left England:
"To escape its tyranny civil and religious".
A doctor had also recommended that Shelley go to Italy for his chronic lung complaint, and Shelley had arranged to take Claire's daughter, Allegra, to her father Byron who was now in Venice.
After travelling some months through France and Italy, Shelley left Mary and baby Clara at Bagni di Lucca (in today's Tuscany) while he travelled with Claire to Venice to see Byron and make arrangements for visiting Allegra.
Byron invited the Shelleys to stay at his summer residence at Este, and Shelley urged Mary to meet him there. Clara became seriously ill on the journey, and died on the 24th. September 1818 in Venice.
Following Clara's death, Mary fell into a long period of depression and emotional estrangement from Shelley.
The Shelleys moved to Naples on the 1st. December 1818, where they stayed for three months. During this period Shelley was ill, depressed and almost suicidal: a state of mind reflected in his poem "Stanzas written in Dejection – December 1818, Near Naples".
While in Naples, Shelley registered the birth and baptism of a baby girl, Elena Adelaide Shelley (born on the 27th. December 1818), naming himself as the father and falsely naming Mary as the mother.
The parentage of Elena has never been conclusively established. Biographers have variously speculated that she was adopted by Shelley to console Mary for the loss of Clara, that she was Shelley's child to Claire, that she was his child to his servant Elise Foggi, or that she was the child of a "mysterious lady" who had followed Shelley to the continent.
Shelley registered the birth and baptism on the 27th. February 1819, and the household left Naples for Rome the following day, leaving Elena with carers. Elena died in a poor suburb of Naples on the 9th. June 1820.
In Rome, Shelley was in poor health, probably suffering from nephritis and tuberculosis which later was in remission. Nevertheless, he made significant progress on three major works: Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, and The Cenci.
Julian and Maddalo is an autobiographical poem which explores the relationship between Shelley and Byron, and analyses Shelley's personal crises of 1818 and 1819. The poem was completed in the summer of 1819, but was not published in Shelley's lifetime.
Prometheus Unbound is a long dramatic poem inspired by Aeschylus's retelling of the Prometheus myth. It was completed in late 1819 and published in 1820.
The Cenci is a verse drama of rape, murder and incest based on the story of the Renaissance Count Cenci of Rome and his daughter Beatrice. Shelley completed the play in September, and the first edition was published that year. It was to become one of his most popular works, and the only one to have two authorised editions during his lifetime.
Shelley's three-year-old son William died in June, probably of malaria. The new tragedy caused a further decline in Shelley's health, and deepened Mary's depression. On the 4th. August she wrote:
"We have now lived five years together;
and if all the events of the five years
were blotted out, I might be happy".
The Shelleys were now living in Livorno where, in September, Shelley heard of the Peterloo Massacre of peaceful protesters in Manchester. Within two weeks he had completed one of his most famous political poems, The Mask of Anarchy, and despatched it to Leigh Hunt for publication. Hunt, however, decided not to publish it for fear of prosecution for seditious libel. The poem was only officially published in 1832.
The Shelleys moved to Florence in October, where Shelley read a scathing review of the Revolt of Islam (and its earlier version Laon and Cythna) in the conservative Quarterly Review. Shelley was angered by the personal attack on him in the article which he erroneously believed had been written by Southey. His bitterness over the review lasted for the rest of his life.
On the 12th. November, Mary gave birth to a boy, Percy Florence Shelley. Around the time of Percy's birth, the Shelleys met Sophia Stacey, who was a ward of one of Shelley's uncles, and who was staying at the same pension as the Shelleys.
Sophia, a talented harpist and singer, formed a friendship with Shelley while Mary was preoccupied with her newborn son. Shelley wrote at least five love poems and fragments for Sophia including "Song Written for an Indian Air".
The Shelleys moved to Pisa in January 1820, ostensibly to consult a doctor who had been recommended to them. There they became friends with the Irish republican Margaret Mason (Lady Margaret Mountcashell) and her common-law husband George William Tighe. Mrs Mason became the inspiration for Shelley's poem "The Sensitive Plant", and Shelley's discussions with Mason and Tighe influenced his political thought and his critical interest in the population theories of Thomas Malthus.
In March Shelley wrote to friends that Mary was depressed, suicidal and hostile towards him. Shelley was also beset by financial worries, as creditors from England pressed him for payment and he was obliged to make secret payments in connection with his "Neapolitan charge" Elena.
Meanwhile, Shelley was writing A Philosophical View of Reform, a political essay which he had begun in Rome. The unfinished essay, which remained unpublished in Shelley's lifetime, has been called:
"One of the most advanced and
sophisticated documents of political
philosophy in the nineteenth century".
Another crisis erupted in June when Shelley claimed that he had been assaulted in the Pisan post office by a man accusing him of foul crimes. Shelley's biographer James Bieri suggests that this incident was possibly a delusional episode brought on by extreme stress, as Shelley was being blackmailed by a former servant, Paolo Foggi, over baby Elena.
It is likely that the blackmail was connected with a story spread by another former servant, Elise Foggi, that Shelley had fathered a child to Claire in Naples and had sent it to a foundling home. Shelley, Claire and Mary denied this story, and Elise later recanted.
In July, hearing that John Keats was seriously ill in England, Shelley wrote to the poet inviting him to stay with him at Pisa. Keats replied with hopes of seeing him, but instead, arrangements were made for Keats to travel to Rome.
In early July 1820, Shelley heard that baby Elena had died on 9 June. In the months following the post office incident and Elena's death, relations between Mary and Claire deteriorated, and Claire spent most of the next two years living separately from the Shelleys, mainly in Florence.
That December Shelley met Teresa (Emilia) Viviani, who was the 19-year-old daughter of the Governor of Pisa and who was living in a convent awaiting a suitable marriage. Shelley visited her several times over the next few months, and they started a passionate correspondence which dwindled after her marriage the following September. Emilia was the inspiration for Shelley's major poem Epipsychidion.
In March 1821 Shelley completed "A Defence of Poetry", a response to Peacock's article "The Four Ages of Poetry". Shelley's essay, with its famous conclusion "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", remained unpublished in his lifetime.
Following the death of Keats in 1821, Shelley wrote Adonais, which is considered to be one of the major pastoral elegies. The poem was published in Pisa in July 1821, but sold few copies.
Shelley went alone to Ravenna in early August to see Byron, making a detour to Livorno for a rendezvous with Claire. Shelley stayed with Byron for two weeks and invited the older poet to spend the winter in Pisa. After Shelley heard Byron read his newly completed fifth canto of Don Juan he wrote to Mary:
"I despair of rivalling Byron."
In November Byron moved into Villa Lanfranchi in Pisa, just across the river from the Shelleys. Byron became the centre of the "Pisan circle" which was to include Shelley, Thomas Medwin, Edward Williams and Edward Trelawny.
In the early months of 1822, Shelley became increasingly close to Jane Williams, who was living with her partner Edward Williams in the same building as the Shelleys.
Shelley wrote a number of love poems for Jane, including "The Serpent is Shut out of Paradise" and "With a Guitar, to Jane". Shelley's obvious affection for Jane was to cause increasing tension between Shelley, Edward Williams and Mary.
Claire arrived in Pisa in April at Shelley's invitation, and soon after they heard that her daughter Allegra had died of typhus in Ravenna. The Shelleys and Claire then moved to Villa Magni, near Lerici on the shores of the Gulf of La Spezia.
Shelley acted as mediator between Claire and Byron over arrangements for the burial of their daughter, and the added strain led to Shelley having a series of hallucinations.
Mary almost died from a miscarriage on the 16th, June, her life only being saved by Shelley's effective first aid. Two days later Shelley wrote to a friend that there was no sympathy between Mary and him, and if the past and future could be obliterated he would be content in his boat with Jane and her guitar.
That same day he also wrote to Trelawny asking for prussic acid. The following week, Shelley woke the household with his screaming over a nightmare or hallucination in which he saw Edward and Jane Williams as walking corpses, and himself strangling Mary.
During this time, Shelley was writing his final major poem, the unfinished The Triumph of Life, which Harold Bloom has called:
"The most despairing poem he wrote".
The Death of Shelley
On the 1st. July 1822, Shelley and Edward Williams sailed in Shelley's new boat the Don Juan to Livorno where Shelley met Leigh Hunt and Byron in order to make arrangements for a new journal, The Liberal.
After the meeting, on the 8th. July, Shelley, Williams and their boat boy sailed out of Livorno for Lerici. A few hours later, the Don Juan and its inexperienced crew were lost in a storm. The vessel, an open boat, had been custom-built in Genoa for Shelley.
Mary Shelley declared in her "Note on Poems of 1822" that the design had a defect, and that the boat was never seaworthy. In fact, however, the Don Juan was overmasted; the sinking was due to a severe storm and poor seamanship of the three men on board.
Shelley's badly decomposed body washed ashore at Viareggio ten days later, and was identified by Trelawny from the clothing and a copy of Keats's Lamia in a jacket pocket. On the 16th. August, his body was cremated on a beach near Viareggio, and the ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome.
When news of Shelley's death reached England, the Tory London newspaper The Courier printed:
"Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry,
has been drowned; now he knows whether
there is God or no."
Shelley's ashes were reburied in a different plot at the cemetery in 1823. His grave bears the Latin inscription Cor Cordium (Heart of Hearts), and a few lines of "Ariel's Song" from Shakespeare's The Tempest:
'Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange'.
When Shelley's body was cremated on the beach, his presumed heart resisted burning, and was retrieved by Trelawny. The heart was possibly calcified from an earlier tubercular infection, or was perhaps his liver.
Trelawny gave the scorched organ to Hunt, who preserved it in spirits of wine and refused to hand it over to Mary. He finally relented, and the heart was eventually buried either at St Peter's Church, Bournemouth or in Christchurch Priory. Hunt also retrieved a piece of Shelley's jawbone which, in 1913, was given to the Shelley-Keats Memorial in Rome.
Shelley's Political, Religious and Ethical views
-- Politics
Shelley was a political radical who was influenced by thinkers such as Rousseau, Paine, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Leigh Hunt. He advocated Catholic Emancipation, republicanism, parliamentary reform, the extension of the franchise, freedom of speech and peaceful assembly, an end to aristocratic and clerical privilege, and a more equal distribution of income and wealth.
The views he expressed in his published works were often more moderate than those he advocated privately, because of the risk of prosecution for seditious libel and his desire not to alienate more moderate friends and political allies. Nevertheless, his political writings and activism brought him to the attention of the Home Office, and he came under government surveillance at various periods.
Shelley's most influential political work in the years immediately following his death was the poem Queen Mab, which included extensive notes on political themes. The work went through 14 official and pirated editions by 1845, and became popular in Owenist and Chartist circles. His longest political essay, A Philosophical View of Reform, was written in 1820, but not published until 1920.
-- Nonviolence
Shelley's advocacy of nonviolent resistance was largely based on his reflections on the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, and his belief that violent protest would increase the prospect of a military despotism.
Although Shelley sympathised with supporters of Irish independence, he did not support violent rebellion. In his early pamphlet An Address, to the Irish People (1812) he wrote:
"I do not wish to see things changed now,
because it cannot be done without violence,
and we may assure ourselves that none of
us are fit for any change, however good, if
we condescend to employ force in a cause
we think right."
In his later essay A Philosophical View of Reform, Shelley did concede that there were political circumstances in which force might be justified:
"The last resort of resistance is
undoubtedly insurrection.
The right of insurrection is derived
from the employment of armed
force to counteract the will of the
nation."
Shelley supported the 1820 armed rebellion against absolute monarchy in Spain, and the 1821 armed Greek uprising against Ottoman rule.
Shelley's poem "The Mask of Anarchy" (written in 1819, but first published in 1832) has been called:
"Perhaps the first modern statement of
the principle of nonviolent resistance".
Gandhi was familiar with the poem, and it is possible that Shelley had an indirect influence on Gandhi through Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.
-- Religion
Shelley was an avowed atheist, who was influenced by the materialist arguments in Holbach's Le Système de la Nature. His atheism was an important element of his political radicalism, as he saw organised religion as inextricably linked to social oppression.
The overt and implied atheism in many of his works raised a serious risk of prosecution for religious libel. His early pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism was withdrawn from sale soon after publication following a complaint from a priest.
Shelley's poem Queen Mab, which includes sustained attacks on the priesthood, Christianity and religion in general, was twice prosecuted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1821. A number of his other works were edited before publication to reduce the risk of prosecution.
-- Free Love
Shelley's advocacy of free love drew heavily on the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and the early work of William Godwin. In his notes to Queen Mab, he wrote:
"A system could not well have been
devised more studiously hostile to
human happiness than marriage."
He argued that:
"The children of unhappy marriages
are nursed in a systematic school of
ill-humour, violence and falsehood".
Shelley believed that the ideal of chastity outside marriage was "a monkish and evangelical superstition" which led to the hypocrisy of prostitution and promiscuity.
Shelley believed that "sexual connection" should be free among those who loved each other, and last only as long as their mutual love. Love should also be free, and not subject to obedience, jealousy and fear.
He denied that free love would lead to promiscuity and the disruption of stable human relationships, arguing that relationships based on love would generally be of long duration and marked by generosity and self-devotion.
When Shelley's friend T. J. Hogg made an unwanted sexual advance to Shelley's first wife Harriet, Shelley forgave him of his "horrible error" and assured him that he was not jealous. It is very likely that Shelley encouraged Hogg and Shelley's second wife Mary to have a sexual relationship.
-- Vegetarianism
Shelley converted to a vegetable diet in early March 1812 and sustained it, with occasional lapses, for the remainder of his life. Shelley's vegetarianism was influenced by ancient authors such as Hesiod, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Ovid and Plutarch, but more directly by John Frank Newton, author of The Return to Nature, or, A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen (1811).
Shelley wrote two essays on vegetarianism: A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813) and "On the Vegetable System of Diet" (written circa 1813–1815, but first published in 1929).
William Owen Jones argues that Shelley's advocacy of vegetarianism was strikingly modern, emphasising its health benefits, the alleviation of animal suffering, the inefficient use of agricultural land involved in animal husbandry, and the economic inequality resulting from the commercialisation of animal food production. Shelley's life and works inspired the founding of the Vegetarian Society in England (1847) and directly influenced the vegetarianism of George Bernard Shaw and perhaps Gandhi.
Reception and Influence of Shelley's Work
Shelley's work was not widely read in his lifetime outside a small circle of friends, poets and critics. Most of his poetry, drama and fiction was published in editions of only 250 copies which generally sold poorly. Only The Cenci went to an authorised second edition while Shelley was alive – in contrast, Byron's The Corsair (1814) sold out its first edition of 10,000 copies in one day.
The initial reception of Shelley's work in mainstream periodicals (with the exception of the liberal Examiner) was generally unfavourable. Reviewers often launched personal attacks on Shelley's private life and political, social and religious views, even when conceding that his poetry contained beautiful imagery and poetic expression.
There was also criticism of Shelley's intelligibility and style, Hazlitt describing it as:
"A passionate dream, a straining
after impossibilities, a record of fond
conjectures, a confused embodying
of vague abstraction".
Shelley's poetry soon however gained a wider audience in radical and reformist circles. Queen Mab became popular with Owenists and Chartists, and Revolt of Islam influenced poets sympathetic to the workers' movement such as Thomas Hood, Thomas Cooper and William Morris.
However, Shelley's mainstream following did not develop until a generation after his death. Bieri argues that editions of Shelley's poems published in 1824 and 1839 were edited by Mary Shelley to highlight her late husband's lyrical gifts and downplay his radical ideas. Matthew Arnold famously described Shelley as a "beautiful and ineffectual angel".
Shelley was a major influence on a number of important poets in the following decades, including Robert Browning, Swinburne, Hardy and Yeats.
Shelley-like characters frequently appeared in nineteenth-century literature, such as Scythrop in Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, Ladislaw in George Eliot's Middlemarch, and Angel Clare in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
Twentieth-century critics such as Eliot, Leavis, Allen Tate and Auden variously criticised Shelley's poetry for deficiencies in style, "repellent" ideas, and immaturity of intellect and sensibility.
However, Shelley's critical reputation rose from the 1960's as a new generation of critics highlighted Shelley's debt to Spenser and Milton, his mastery of genres and verse forms, and the complex interplay of sceptical, idealist and materialist ideas in his work.
American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as:
"A superb craftsman, a lyric poet
without rival, and surely one of the
most advanced sceptical intellects
ever to write a poem".
According to Donald H. Reiman:
"Shelley belongs to the great tradition
of Western writers that includes Dante,
Shakespeare and Milton".
John Lauritsen and Charles E. Robinson have argued that Shelley's contribution to Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein was extensive, and that he should be considered a collaborator or co-author.
However Professor Charlotte Gordon and others have disputed this contention. Fiona Sampson has said:
"In recent years Percy's corrections, visible
in the Frankenstein notebooks held at the
Bodleian Library in Oxford, have been
seized on as evidence that he must have
at least co-authored the novel. In fact, when
I examined the notebooks myself, I realised
that Percy did rather less than any line editor
working in publishing today."
Final Thoughts From Percy Shelley
"The soul's joy lies in doing."
"I have drunken deep of joy, And
I will taste no other wine tonight."
"A poet is a nightingale, who sits in
darkness and sings to cheer its own
solitude with sweet sounds."
"War is the statesman's game, the
priest's delight, the lawyer's jest,
the hired assassin's trade."
"Soul meets soul on lovers' lips."
"Fear not for the future,
weep not for the past."
"Our sincerest laughter with some
pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs
are those that tell of saddest thought."
"O, wind, if winter comes, can
can spring be far behind?"
This is a quick summary of the chart I use for comparing strength, agility, and intellect for my characters. It is meant as a guideline on how I rate abilities and powers. It's also based on Marvel, so I could answer some questions on how those heroes or villains are rated by comparison. Enjoy.
Question: Philosophical superhero with a genius intellect, brilliant detective skills, martial arts prowess, and a special chemical mask to hide his face.
Riddler: Smooth-talking supervillain with genius-level deductive reasoning, cunning skills in criminal strategy, engineering abilities, and vast esoteric knowledge.
If they had to fight, who would win?
#95 in the Duel 365 series.
“Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Rambler
Sérdeilis spennandi dagskrá þar sem fléttast saman hljóðverk eftir hljóð - og myndlistarmanninn Joe Banks og margvísleg kvikmyndaljóð sem varpað verður á vegg Mengis. VIð sögu koma meðal annars Schubert og T.S. Eliot, Dolce og Gabbana, mexíkósk ljóðskáld og seigfljótandi hljóð utan úr geimnum. Að baki hlustunarpartýinu stendur enski hljóð og myndlistarmaðurinn Joe Banks sem hefur starfað undir nafninu Disinformation frá árinu 1995 og skapað hljóðverk, hljóðinnsetningar og vídeóverk. Hann hefur gefið út rómaðar plötur á vegum útgáfufyrirtækisins Ash International (systurútgáfu Touch Records), Iris Light og Adaadat Records og haldið fjölda einkasýninga. Í Mengi býður hann upp á verk sem byggja á upptökum stuttbylgjuútvarpa af segulstormum sem myndast vegna kórónugoss eða kórónuskvettu en svo nefnist það þegar gríðarstórar gasbólur springa út frá kórónu sólar.
PoetryFilm var stofnað af sýningastjóranum og listamanninum Zata Banks árið 2002. PoetryFilm Paradox er klukkustunda löng dagskrá með stuttmyndum sem eiga það sammerkt að rannsaka og velta fyrir sér margvíslegum birtingarmyndum ástarinnar, erótík, rómantík og væntumþykju. Myndirnar eru þrettán talsins - þar á meðal er stuttmynd eftir Kate Jessop þar sem við sögu koma hjartnæm bréfaskipti hönnuðanna Domenico Dolce og Stefano Gabbana, kvikmyndafantasía Bruno Teixidor sem byggir á ljóði eftir mexíkóska rithöfundinn og þýðandann Tomas Segovia, táknmálsmynd eftir Brooke Griffin sem byggir á ljóðum Raymond Luczak, kvikmynd Stuart Pound sem byggir á ljóðasöngnum “Die Nebensonnen” úr Vetrarferð Franz Schuberts og Wilhelm Müller, myndræn túlkun Martin Pickles og Mikey Georgeson á ljóði T.S. Eliot “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, stuttmyndin “Fucking Him” eftir listamennina C. O. Moed & Adrian Garcia Gomez, og “447: Intellect - N” eftir Jane Glennie.
Mengi, Reykjavik, 10 March 2016
2,000 ISK - starts at 9pm sharp
Viðburðurinn hefst klukkan 21
Miðaverð 2000 krónur
Mengi, Óðinsgata 2
Reykjavik 101
Iceland
The Disinformation Listening Party focusses on shortwave radio recordings of so-called “Type II” (slow-drift) noise storms - interstellar shock-waves produced by coronal mass ejections from the surface of the sun.
rorschachaudio.com/2016/02/12/kvikmyndaljod-upplysingafol...
Ionic Capital from the columns encircling the Great Court at the British Museum
The major features of the Ionic order are the volutes of its capital, which have been the subject of much theoretical and practical discourse, based on a brief and obscure passage in Vitruvius. The only tools required were a straight-edge, a right angle, string (to establish half-lengths) and a compass. Below the volutes, the Ionic column may have a wide collar or banding separating the capital from the fluted shaft, as at Castle Coole. Or a swag of fruit and flowers may swing from the clefts formed by the volutes, or from their "neck."
Originally the volutes lay in a single plane then it was seen that they could be angled out on the corners. This feature of the Ionic order made it more pliant and satisfactory than the Doric to critical eyes in the 4th century BC: angling the volutes on the corner columns, ensured that they "read" equally when seen from either front or side facade. The 16th-century Renaissance architect and theorist Vincenzo Scamozzi designed a version of such a perfectly four-sided Ionic capital; Scamozzi's version became so much the standard, that when a Greek Ionic order was eventually reintroduced, in the later 18th century Greek Revival, it conveyed an air of archaic freshness and primitive, perhaps even republican, vitality.
The Ionic column is always more slender than the Doric: Ionic columns are eight and nine column-diameters tall, and even more in the Antebellum colonnades of late American Greek revival plantation houses.
Ionic columns are most often fluted. After a little early experimentation, the number of hollow flutes in the shaft settled at 24. This standardization kept the fluting in a familiar proportion to the diameter of the column at any scale, even when the height of the column was exaggerated. Roman fluting leaves a little of the column surface between each hollow; Greek fluting runs out to a knife edge that was easily scarred.
In some instances, the fluting has been omitted. English architect Inigo Jones introduced a note of sobriety with plain Ionic columns on his Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace, London, and when Beaux-Arts architect John Russell Pope wanted to convey the manly stamina combined with intellect of Theodore Roosevelt, he left colossal Ionic columns unfluted on the Roosevelt memorial at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, for an unusual impression of strength and stature.
The entablature resting on the columns has three parts: a plain architrave divided into two, or more generally three, bands, with a frieze resting on it that may be richly sculptural, and a cornice built up with dentils (like the closely spaced ends of joists), with a corona ("crown") and cyma ("ogee") molding to support the projecting roof. Pictorial often narrative bas-relief frieze carving provides a characteristic feature of the Ionic order, in the area where the Doric order is articulated with triglyphs. Roman and Renaissance practice condensed the height of the entablature by reducing the proportions of the architrave, which made the frieze more prominent.
The Postcard
A postally unused Post Office Picture Card Series. On the divided back of the card is printed:
'Children (United Nations Year
of the Child).
(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland).
Reproduced from a stamp designed
by Edward Hughes ARCA FSIAD
and issued by the Post Office on the
18th. July 1979.
Postcard Price 8p.'
Charles Dodgson
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer of children's fiction, notably 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' and its sequel 'Through the Looking-Glass'.
He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. The poems 'Jabberwocky' and 'The Hunting of the Snark' are classified in the genre of literary nonsense.
Charles was also a mathematician, photographer, inventor, and Anglican deacon.
Carroll came from a family of high-church Anglicans, and developed a long relationship with Christ Church, Oxford, where he lived for most of his life as a scholar and teacher.
Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, Henry Liddell, is widely identified as the original for Alice in Wonderland, though Carroll always denied this.
Scholars are divided about whether his relationship with children included an erotic component.
In 1982, a memorial stone to Carroll was unveiled in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. There are Lewis Carroll societies in many parts of the world dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works.
-- Charles Dodgson - The Early Years
Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, conservative and high-church Anglican. Most of Dodgson's male ancestors were army officers or Church of England clergy.
His paternal grandfather Charles Dodgson had been an army captain, killed in action in Ireland in 1803 when his two sons were hardly more than babies. The older of these sons – yet another Charles Dodgson – was Carroll's father. He went to Westminster School and then to Christ Church, Oxford.
Lewis Carroll's father reverted to the other family tradition and took holy orders. He was mathematically gifted, and won a double first degree, which could have been the prelude to a brilliant academic career. Instead, he married his first cousin Frances Jane Lutwidge in 1830 and became a country parson.
Dodgson was born on the 27th. January 1832 in All Saints' Vicarage at Daresbury, Cheshire, the eldest boy and the third child. Eight more children followed. When Charles was 11, his father was given the living of Croft-on-Tees in the North Riding of Yorkshire, and the whole family moved to the spacious rectory. This remained their home for the next 25 years.
Charles's father was an active and highly conservative cleric of the Church of England who later became the Archdeacon of Richmond and involved himself in the intense religious disputes that were dividing the church. He was high church, inclining toward Anglo-Catholicism. Young Charles was to develop an ambivalent relationship with his father's values, and with the Church of England as a whole.
-- Charles Dodgson's Education
During his early youth, Dodgson was educated at home. His "reading lists" preserved in the family archives testify to a precocious intellect: at the age of seven, he was reading books such as The Pilgrim's Progress.
He also spoke with a stammer - a condition shared by most of his siblings - that often inhibited his social life throughout his years. At the age of twelve he was sent to Richmond Grammar School in Richmond, North Yorkshire.
-- Charles Dodgson at Rugby
In 1846, Dodgson entered Rugby School where he was evidently unhappy, as he wrote some years after leaving:
"I cannot say that any earthly considerations would
induce me to go through my three years again. I can
honestly say that if I could have been secure from
annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life
would have been comparative trifles to bear."
Dodgson did not claim he suffered from bullying, but cited little boys as the main targets of older bullies at Rugby. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, who was Dodgson's nephew, wrote that:
"Even though it is hard for those who have only
known him as the gentle and retiring don to
believe it, it is nevertheless true that long after
he left school, his name was remembered as that
of a boy who knew well how to use his fists in
defence of a righteous cause, which was the
protection of the smaller boys."
Scholastically, though, he excelled with apparent ease. Mathematics master R. B. Mayor observed:
"I have not had a more promising boy
at his age since I came to Rugby."
The mathematics textbook that the young Dodgson used was
Francis Walkingame's 'The Tutor's Assistant; Being a Compendium of Arithmetic.' It still survives and contains an inscription in Latin, which translates as:
"This book belongs to Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson: hands off!"
Some pages also included annotations such as the one found on page 129, where he wrote "Not a fair question in decimals" next to a question.
-- Charles Dodgson at Oxford
Charles left Rugby at the end of 1849 and matriculated at the University of Oxford in May 1850 as a member of his father's old college, Christ Church.
He went into residence in January 1851. He had been at Oxford only two days when he received a summons home. His mother had died of "inflammation of the brain" - perhaps meningitis or a stroke - at the age of 47.
Charles' early academic career veered between high promise and irresistible distraction. He did not always work hard, but was exceptionally gifted, and achievement came easily to him.
In 1852, he obtained first-class honours in Mathematics Moderations, and was shortly thereafter nominated to a Studentship by his father's old friend Canon Edward Pusey.
In 1854, he obtained first-class honours in the Final Honours School of Mathematics, standing first on the list, graduating Bachelor of Arts. He remained at Christ Church studying and teaching, but the next year he failed an important scholarship through his self-confessed inability to apply himself to study.
Even so, his talent as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship in 1855, which he continued to hold for the next 26 years. Despite early unhappiness,
Dodgson was to remain at Christ Church, in various capacities, until his death, including that of Sub-Librarian of the Christ Church library, where his office was close to the Deanery, where Alice Liddell lived.
-- Charles Dodgson's Health Issues
As a very young child, Charles suffered a fever that left him deaf in one ear. At the age of 17, he suffered a severe attack of whooping cough, which was probably responsible for his chronically weak chest in later life. In early childhood, he acquired a stammer, which he referred to as his "hesitation"; it remained throughout his life.
The young adult Charles Dodgson was about 6 feet (1.83 m) tall and slender, with curly brown hair and blue or grey eyes (depending on the account). He was described in later life as somewhat asymmetrical, and as carrying himself rather stiffly and awkwardly, although this might be on account of a knee injury sustained in middle age.
-- Charles Dodgson's Stammer
The stammer has always been a significant part of the image of Dodgson. While one apocryphal story says that he stammered only in adult company and was free and fluent with children, there is no evidence to support this idea. Many children of his acquaintance remembered the stammer, while many adults failed to notice it.
Dodgson himself seems to have been far more acutely aware of it than most people whom he met; it is said that he caricatured himself as the Dodo in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, referring to his difficulty in pronouncing his last name, but this is one of the many supposed facts often repeated for which no first-hand evidence remains.
He did indeed refer to himself as the dodo, but whether or not this reference was to his stammer is simply speculation.
Dodgson's stammer did trouble him, but it was never so debilitating that it prevented him from applying his other personal qualities to do well in society. He lived in a time when people commonly devised their own amusements, and when singing and recitation were required social skills, the young Dodgson was well equipped to be an engaging entertainer.
He reportedly could sing tolerably well, and was not afraid to do so before an audience. He was adept at mimicry and storytelling, and was reputedly quite good at charades.
-- Charles Dodgson's Social Connections
In the interim between his early published writings and the success of the Alice books, Dodgson began to move in the pre-Raphaelite social circle. He first met John Ruskin in 1857 and became friendly with him.
Around 1863, he developed a close relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his family. He would often take pictures of the family in the garden of the Rossetti's house in Chelsea. He also knew William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, among other artists.
Charles knew fairy-tale author George MacDonald well - in fact it was the enthusiastic reception of Alice by the young MacDonald children that persuaded him to submit the work for publication.
-- Charles Dodgson's Politics, Religion, and Philosophy
In broad terms, Dodgson has traditionally been regarded as politically, religiously, and personally conservative. Martin Gardner labelled Dodgson as:
"A Tory who was awed by lords and
inclined to be snobbish towards
inferiors".
The Reverend W. Tuckwell, in his Reminiscences of Oxford (1900), regarded him as:
"Austere, shy, precise, absorbed in mathematical
reverie, watchfully tenacious of his dignity, stiffly
conservative in political, theological, social theory,
his life mapped out in squares like Alice's landscape".
Dodgson was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England on the 22nd. December 1861. In 'The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll', the editor states that:
"His Diary is full of such modest depreciations of
himself and his work, interspersed with earnest
prayers (too sacred and private to be reproduced
here) that God would forgive him the past, and
help him to perform His holy will in the future."
When a friend asked him in 1897 about his religious views, Dodgson wrote in response that he was a member of the Church of England, but doubted if he was fully a 'High Churchman'. He added:
"I believe that when you and I come to lie down
for the last time, if only we can keep firm hold of
the great truths Christ taught us - our own utter
worthlessness and His infinite worth; and that He
has brought us back to our one Father, and made
us His brethren, and so brethren to one another -
we shall have all we need to guide us through the
shadows.
Most assuredly I accept to the full the doctrines
you refer to - that Christ died to save us, that we
have no other way of salvation open to us but
through His death, and that it is by faith in Him,
and through no merit of ours, that we are
reconciled to God; and most assuredly I can
cordially say I owe all to Him who loved me, and
died on the Cross of Calvary."
Dodgson also expressed interest in other fields. He was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research, and one of his letters suggests that he accepted as real what was then called 'thought reading.'
In 1895, Charles developed an argument on deductive reasoning in his article 'What the Tortoise Said to Achilles', which appeared in one of the early volumes of Mind. The article was reprinted in the same journal a hundred years later in 1995, with a subsequent article by Simon Blackburn entitled 'Practical Tortoise Raising.'
-- Charles Dodgson's Literary and Artistic Activities
From a young age, Dodgson wrote poetry and short stories, contributing heavily to the family magazine Mischmasch and later sending them to various magazines, enjoying moderate success.
Some time after 1850, he wrote puppet plays for his siblings' entertainment, of which one has survived: 'La Guida di Bragia'.
Between 1854 and 1856, his work appeared in the national publications The Comic Times and The Train, as well as smaller magazines such as the Whitby Gazette and the Oxford Critic. Most of this output was humorous, sometimes satirical, but his standards and ambitions were exacting. In July 1855 he wrote:
"I do not think I have yet written anything
worthy of real publication (in which I do not
include the Whitby Gazette or the Oxonian
Advertiser), but I do not despair of doing
so someday."
In March 1856, he published his first piece of work under the name that would make him famous. A romantic poem called 'Solitude' appeared in The Train under the authorship of 'Lewis Carroll.'
This pseudonym was a play on his real name: Lewis was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll an Irish surname similar to the Latin name Carolus, from which comes the name Charles. The pseudonym was chosen by editor Edmund Yates from a list of four submitted by Dodgson, the others being Edgar Cuthwellis, Edgar U. C. Westhill, and Louis Carroll.
-- The Alice Books
In 1856, Dean Henry Liddell arrived at Christ Church, bringing with him his young family, all of whom would figure largely in Dodgson's life over the following years, and would greatly influence his writing career.
Dodgson became close friends with Liddell's wife Lorina and their children, particularly the three sisters Lorina, Edith, and Alice Liddell.
Charles was widely assumed for many years to have derived his own 'Alice' from Alice Liddell; the acrostic poem at the end of Through the Looking-Glass spells out her name in full, and there are also many superficial references to her hidden in the text of both books.
Dodgson himself repeatedly denied in later life that his 'little heroine' was based on any real child, and he frequently dedicated his works to girls of his acquaintance, adding their names in acrostic poems at the beginning of the text.
Gertrude Chataway's name appears in this form at the beginning of The Hunting of the Snark, and it is not suggested that this means that any of the characters in the narrative are based on her.
Information is scarce (Dodgson's diaries for the years 1858–1862 are missing), but it seems clear that his friendship with the Liddell family was an important part of his life in the late 1850's, and he grew into the habit of taking the children on rowing trips (first the boy Harry, and later the three girls) accompanied by an adult friend to nearby Nuneham Courtenay or Godstow.
It was on one such expedition on the 4th. July 1862 that Dodgson invented the outline of the story that eventually became his first and greatest commercial success. He told the story to Alice Liddell, and she begged him to write it down, and Dodgson eventually (after much delay) presented her with a handwritten, illustrated manuscript entitled 'Alice's Adventures Under Ground' in November 1864.
Before this, the family of friend and mentor George MacDonald read Dodgson's incomplete manuscript, and the enthusiasm of the MacDonald children encouraged Dodgson to seek publication. In 1863, he took the unfinished manuscript to Macmillan the publisher, who liked it immediately.
After possible alternative titles were rejected - 'Alice Among the Fairies' and 'Alice's Golden Hour' - the work was finally published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 under the Lewis Carroll pen-name, which Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier.
The illustrations were by Sir John Tenniel; Dodgson evidently thought that a published book would need the skills of a professional artist. Annotated versions provide insights into many of the ideas and hidden meanings that are prevalent in these books.[ Critical literature has often proposed Freudian interpretations of the book as "a descent into the dark world of the subconscious", as well as seeing it as a satire upon contemporary mathematical advances.
The overwhelming commercial success of the first Alice book changed Dodgson's life in many ways. The fame of his alter ego Lewis Carroll soon spread around the world. He was inundated with fan mail, and with sometimes unwanted attention.
Indeed, according to one popular story, Queen Victoria herself enjoyed Alice in Wonderland so much that she commanded that he dedicate his next book to her, and was accordingly presented with his next work, a scholarly mathematical volume entitled 'An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.'
Dodgson himself vehemently denied this story, commenting:
"It is utterly false in every particular:
nothing even resembling it has
occurred."
It is also unlikely for other reasons. As T. B. Strong commented in a Times article:
"It would have been clean contrary to all
his practice to identify the author of Alice
with the author of his mathematical works".
Although Charles began earning quite substantial sums of money, he continued with his seemingly disliked post at Christ Church.
Late in 1871, he published the sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Its somewhat darker mood possibly reflects changes in Dodgson's life. His father's death in 1868 plunged him into a depression that lasted some years.
-- The Hunting of the Snark
In 1876, Dodgson produced his next great work, The Hunting of the Snark, a fantastical 'nonsense' poem, with illustrations by Henry Holiday, exploring the adventures of a bizarre crew of nine tradesmen and one beaver, who set off to find the snark.
It received largely mixed reviews from Carroll's contemporary reviewers, but was enormously popular with the public, having been reprinted seventeen times between 1876 and 1908. It has seen various adaptations into musicals, opera, theatre, plays and music. Painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti reputedly became convinced that the poem was about him.
-- Sylvie and Bruno
In 1895, 30 years after the publication of his masterpieces, Carroll attempted a comeback, producing a two-volume tale of the fairy siblings Sylvie and Bruno. Carroll entwines two plots set in two alternative worlds, one set in rural England and the other in the fairytale kingdoms of Elfland, Outland, and others.
The fairytale world satirises English society, and more specifically the world of academia. Sylvie and Bruno came out in two volumes and is considered a lesser work, although it has remained in print for over a century.
-- Charles Dodgson's Photography (1856–1880)
In 1856, Dodgson took up the new art form of photography under the influence first of his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge, and later of his Oxford friend Reginald Southey. He soon excelled at the art, and became a well-known gentleman-photographer. Charles even toyed with the idea of making a living out of it in his early years.
A study by Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over half of his surviving work depicts young girls, though about 60% of his original photographic portfolio is now missing.
Dodgson also made many studies of men, women, boys, and landscapes; his subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues, paintings, and trees. His pictures of children were taken with a parent in attendance, and many of the pictures were taken in the Liddell garden because natural sunlight was required for good exposures.
Charles also found photography to be a useful entrée into higher social circles. During the most productive part of his career, he made portraits of notable sitters such as John Everett Millais, Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Michael Faraday, Lord Salisbury, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
By the time that Dodgson abruptly ceased photography in 1880, over 24 years), he had established his own studio on the roof of Tom Quad. Over the course of 24 years he created around 3,000 images, and was an amateur master of the medium, although fewer than 1,000 images have survived time and deliberate destruction.
Charles stopped taking photographs because keeping his studio working was too time-consuming. He used the wet collodion process; commercial photographers who started using the dry-plate process in the 1870's took pictures more quickly.
-- Charles Dodgson's Inventions
In order to promote letter writing, Dodgson invented "The Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case" in 1889. This was a cloth-backed folder with twelve slots, two marked for inserting the most commonly used penny stamp, and one each for the other current denominations up to one shilling.
The folder was then put into a slipcase decorated with a picture of Alice on the front, and the Cheshire Cat on the back. It was intended to organize stamps wherever writing utensils were stored. Carroll expressly noted in 'Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-Writing' that it was not intended to be carried in a pocket or purse, as individual stamps could easily be carried on their own. The pack included a copy of a pamphlet version of this lecture.
Another invention was a writing tablet called the nyctograph that allowed note-taking in the dark, thus eliminating the need to get out of bed and strike a light when one woke with an idea. The device consisted of a gridded card with sixteen squares and a system of symbols representing an alphabet of Dodgson's design, using letter shapes similar to the Graffiti writing system on a Palm device.
Charles also devised a number of games, including an early version of what today is known as Scrabble. He appears to have invented - or at least certainly popularised - the 'doublet', a form of brain-teaser that is still popular today, changing one word into another by altering one letter at a time, each successive change always resulting in a genuine word.
The games and puzzles of Lewis Carroll were the subject of Martin Gardner's March 1960 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.
Charles' other inventions include:
-- A rule for finding the day of the week for any date
-- A a means for justifying right margins on a typewriter
-- A steering device for a velociam (a type of tricycle)
-- Fairer elimination rules for tennis tournaments
-- A new type of postal money order
-- Rules for reckoning postage
-- Rules for a win in betting
-- Rules for dividing a number by various divisors
-- A cardboard scale for the Senior Common Room at Christ Church which, held next to a glass, ensured the right amount of liqueur for the price paid
-- A double-sided adhesive strip to fasten envelopes or mount things in books
-- A device for helping a bedridden invalid to read from a book placed sideways
-- At least two ciphers for cryptography.
Charles also proposed alternative systems of parliamentary representation. He proposed the so-called Dodgson's method. In 1884, he proposed a proportional representation system based on multi-member districts, each voter casting only a single vote, quotas as minimum requirements to take seats, and votes transferable by candidates through what is now called Liquid democracy.
-- Charles Dodgson's Mathematical Work
Within the academic discipline of mathematics, Dodgson worked primarily in the fields of geometry, linear and matrix algebra, mathematical logic, and recreational mathematics, producing nearly a dozen books under his real name.
Dodgson also developed new ideas in probability and linear algebra (e.g., the first printed proof of the Kronecker–Capelli theorem). He also researched the process of elections and committees; some of this work was not published until well after his death.
-- Charles Dodgson's Mathematical Logic
Charles' work in the field of mathematical logic attracted renewed interest in the late 20th. century. Martin Gardner's book on logic machines and diagrams, and William Warren Bartley's posthumous publication of the second part of Dodgson's symbolic logic book have sparked a re-evaluation of Dodgson's contributions to symbolic logic.
In his Symbolic Logic Part II, Dodgson introduced the Method of Trees, the earliest modern use of a truth tree.
-- Charles Dodgson's Algebra
Robbins' and Rumsey's investigation of Dodgson condensation, a method of evaluating determinants, led them to the alternating sign matrix conjecture, which is now a theorem.
-- Charles Dodgson's Recreational Mathematics
The discovery in the 1990's of additional ciphers that Dodgson had constructed, in addition to his 'Memoria Technica', showed that he had employed sophisticated mathematical ideas in their creation.
-- Charles Dodgson's Correspondence
Dodgson wrote and received as many as 98,721 letters, according to a special letter register which he devised. He documented his advice about how to write more satisfying letters in a missive entitled 'Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-Writing'.
-- Charles Dodgson - The Later Years
Dodgson's existence remained little changed over the final twenty years of his life, despite his growing wealth and fame. He continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881, and remained in residence there until his death.
Public appearances included attending the West End musical Alice in Wonderland (the first major live production of his Alice books) at the Prince of Wales Theatre on the 30th. December 1886.
The two volumes of his last novel, Sylvie and Bruno, were published in 1889 and 1893, but the intricacy of this work was apparently not appreciated by contemporary readers; it achieved nothing like the success of the Alice books, with disappointing reviews and sales of only 13,000 copies.
The only known occasion on which Charles travelled abroad was a trip to Russia in 1867 as an ecclesiastic, together with the Reverend Henry Liddon. He recounts the travel in his 'Russian Journal', which was first commercially published in 1935.
-- The Death of Charles Dodgson
Dodgson died of pneumonia following influenza on the 14th. January 1898 at his sisters' home, 'The Chestnuts', in Guildford, Surrey, just four days before the death of Henry Liddell. Charles was two weeks away from turning 66 years old.
His funeral service was held at the nearby St. Mary's Church, and he was laid to rest at the Mount Cemetery in Guildford.
-- Charles Dodgson's Sexuality
Some late twentieth-century biographers have suggested that Dodgson's interest in children had an erotic element, including Morton N. Cohen in his 1995 book 'Lewis Carroll: A Biography.'
Cohen, speculates that:
"Dodgson's sexual energies sought unconventional
outlets.
We cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay
behind Charles's preference for drawing and
photographing children in the nude. He contended
the preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his
emotional attachment to children as well as his
aesthetic appreciation of their forms, his assertion
that his interest was strictly artistic is naïve.
He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge,
even to himself."
Cohen goes on to note that:
"Dodgson apparently convinced many of his friends
that his attachment to the nude female child form
was free of any eroticism, however later generations
look beneath the surface."
He argues that Dodgson may have wanted to marry the 11-year-old Alice Liddell, and that this was the cause of the unexplained "break" with the family in June 1863, an event for which other explanations are offered.
Biographers Derek Hudson and Roger Lancelyn Green stop short of identifying Dodgson as a paedophile (Green also edited Dodgson's diaries and papers), but they concur that he had a passion for small female children and next to no interest in the adult world. Catherine Robson refers to Carroll as:
"The Victorian era's most
famous (or infamous) girl
lover".
Several other writers and scholars have challenged the evidential basis for Cohen's and others' views about Dodgson's sexual interests. Hugues Lebailly has endeavoured to set Dodgson's child photography within the "Victorian Child Cult", which perceived child nudity as essentially an expression of innocence.
Lebailly claims that studies of child nudes were mainstream and fashionable in Dodgson's time, and that most photographers made them as a matter of course. Lebailly states that child nudes even appeared on Victorian Christmas cards, implying a very different social and aesthetic assessment of such material.
Lebailly concludes that it has been an error of Dodgson's biographers to view his child-photography with 20th.- or 21st.-century eyes, and to have presented it as some form of personal idiosyncrasy, when it was consistent with the norms of the time.
Karoline Leach's re-appraisal of Dodgson focused on his controversial sexuality. She argues that the allegations of paedophilia rose initially from a misunderstanding of Victorian morals, as well as the mistaken idea - fostered by Dodgson's various biographers - that he had no interest in adult women.
Leach termed the traditional image of Dodgson "the Carroll Myth". She drew attention to the large amounts of evidence in his diaries and letters that he was also keenly interested in adult women, married and single, and enjoyed several relationships with them that would have been considered scandalous by the social standards of his time.
She also pointed to the fact that many of those whom he described as "child-friends" were girls in their late teens and even twenties. She argues that suggestions of paedophilia emerged only many years after his death, when his well-meaning family had suppressed all evidence of his relationships with women in an effort to preserve his reputation, thus giving a false impression of a man interested only in little girls.
Similarly, Leach points to a 1932 biography by Langford Reed as the source of the dubious claim that many of Carroll's female friendships ended when the girls reached the age of 14.
In addition to the biographical works that have discussed Dodgson's sexuality, there are modern artistic interpretations of his life and work that do so as well – in particular, Dennis Potter in his play 'Alice' and his screenplay for the motion picture 'Dreamchild', and Robert Wilson in his musical 'Alice'.
-- Charles Dodgson's Ordination
Dodgson had been groomed for the ordained ministry in the Church of England from a very early age, and was expected to be ordained within four years of obtaining his master's degree, as a condition of his residency at Christ Church.
Charles delayed the process for some time, but was eventually ordained as a deacon on the 22nd. December 1861. But when the time came a year later to be ordained as a priest, Dodgson appealed to the dean for permission not to proceed.
This was against college rules and, initially, Dean Liddell told him that he would have to consult the college ruling body, which would almost certainly have resulted in his being expelled.
However for unknown reasons, Liddell changed his mind overnight, and permitted him to remain at the college in defiance of the rules. Dodgson never became a priest, unique amongst senior students of his time.
There is no conclusive evidence about why Dodgson rejected the priesthood. Some have suggested that his stammer made him reluctant because he was afraid of having to preach. Wilson quotes letters by Dodgson describing difficulty in reading lessons and prayers rather than preaching in his own words.
However Dodgson did indeed preach in later life, even though not in priest's orders, so it seems unlikely that his impediment was a major factor affecting his choice.
Wilson also points out that the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, who ordained Dodgson, had strong views against clergy going to the theatre, one of Dodgson's great interests. Charles was interested in minority forms of Christianity (he was an admirer of F. D. Maurice) and "alternative" religions such as theosophy.
Dodgson became deeply troubled by an unexplained sense of sin and guilt at this time (the early 1860's), and frequently expressed the view in his diaries that he was a "vile and worthless" sinner, unworthy of the priesthood. This feeling of sin and unworthiness may well have affected his decision to abandon being ordained into the priesthood.
-- The Missing Diaries
At least four complete volumes and around seven pages of text are missing from Dodgson's 13 diaries. The loss of the volumes remains unexplained; the pages have been removed by an unknown hand.
Most scholars assume that the diary material was removed by family members in the interests of preserving the family name, but this has not been proven. Except for one page, material is missing from his diaries for the period between 1853 and 1863 (when Dodgson was 21–31 years old).
This was a period when Dodgson began suffering great mental and spiritual anguish, and confessing to an overwhelming sense of his own sin. This was also the period of time when he composed his extensive love poetry, leading to speculation that the poems may have been autobiographical.
Many theories have been put forward to explain the missing material. A popular explanation for one missing page (27th. June 1863) is that it might have been torn out to conceal a proposal of marriage on that day to the 11-year-old Alice Liddell.
However, there has never been any evidence to suggest that this was so, and a paper offers some evidence to the contrary which was discovered by Karoline Leach in the Dodgson family archive in 1996.
This paper is known as the "Cut Pages in Diary" document, and was compiled by various members of Carroll's family after his death. Part of it may have been written at the time when the pages were destroyed, though this is unclear.
The document offers a brief summary of two diary pages that are missing, including the one for the 27th. June 1863. The summary for this page states that Mrs. Liddell told Dodgson that there was gossip circulating about him and the Liddell family's governess, as well as about his relationship with "Ina", presumably Alice's older sister Lorina Liddell.
The "break" with the Liddell family that occurred soon after was presumably in response to this gossip. An alternative interpretation has been made regarding Carroll's rumoured involvement with "Ina": Lorina was also the name of Alice Liddell's mother.
What is deemed most crucial and surprising is that the document seems to imply that Dodgson's break with the family was not connected with Alice at all; until a primary source is discovered, the events of the 27th. June 1863 will remain in doubt.
-- Charles Dodgson's Migraine and Epilepsy
In his diary for 1880, Dodgson recorded experiencing his first episode of migraine with aura, describing very accurately the process of "moving fortifications" that are a manifestation of the aura stage of the syndrome.
Unfortunately, there is no clear evidence to show whether this was his first experience of migraine per se, or whether he may have previously suffered the far more common form of migraine without aura. The latter seems most likely, given that migraine most commonly develops in the teens or early adulthood.
Another form of migraine aura called Alice in Wonderland syndrome has been named after Dodgson's little heroine because its manifestation can resemble the sudden size-changes in the book. It is also known as micropsia and macropsia, a brain condition affecting the way that objects are perceived.
For example, an afflicted person may look at a larger object such as a basketball and perceive it as if it were the size of a golf ball. Some authors have suggested that Dodgson may have suffered from this type of aura, and used it as an inspiration in his work, although there is no evidence that he did.
Dodgson also suffered two attacks in which he lost consciousness.They were diagnosed as "epileptiform" seizures. Some have concluded from this that he was a lifetime sufferer of this condition, but there is no evidence of this in his diaries beyond these two attacks.
Sadi Ranson has suggested that Carroll may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, in which consciousness is not always completely lost but altered, and in which the symptoms mimic many of the same experiences as Alice in Wonderland.
Carroll had at least one incident in which he suffered full loss of consciousness and awoke with a bloody nose, which he recorded in his diary and noted that the episode left him not feeling himself for "quite sometime afterward". This attack was diagnosed as possibly "epileptiform" and Carroll himself later wrote of his "seizures" in the same diary.
Most of the standard diagnostic tests of today were not available in the nineteenth century. Yvonne Hart, consultant neurologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, has concluded that Dodgson very likely had migraine, and may have had epilepsy, but she emphasises that she would have considerable doubt about making a diagnosis of epilepsy without further information.
-- Charles Dodgson's Legacy
There are societies in many parts of the world dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of Charles' works and the investigation of his life.
Copenhagen Street in Islington, north London is the location of the Lewis Carroll Children's Library.
In 1982, Charles' great-nephew unveiled a memorial stone to him in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.
In January 1994, an asteroid, 6984 Lewiscarroll, was discovered and named after Carroll.
The Lewis Carroll Centenary Wood near his birthplace in Daresbury opened in 2000.
Born in All Saints' Vicarage, Daresbury, Cheshire, in 1832, Lewis Carroll is commemorated at All Saints' Church, Daresbury in its stained glass windows depicting characters from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In March 2012, the Lewis Carroll Centre, attached to the church, was opened.
The Eastern American Toad (Bufo or Anaxyrus americanus americanus) is as American as apple pie and fireworks. With their pensive gaze and thoughtful intellect, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that a toad had served as one of our nation's founding fathers. Bursts of color that one might not expect adorn their warty skin, and these amphibians are surprisingly long-lived, attaining ages of up to 40 years! Remember that the old wive's tale of getting warts from touching toads is just that--a wive's tale. However, you can hurt toads by touching them, as your own oily hands can clog the pores on their bellies, through which they absorb oxygen and water.
“As we plunge into that darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing.”
-Pseudo-Dionysius, “Mystical Theology,” 139.
"In sunshine, in prosperity, the flowers are very well; but how many wet days are there in life—November seasons of disaster, when a man's hearth and home would be cold indeed, without the clear, cheering gleam of intellect."
— Charlotte Brontë
This is Ana B from Sao Paulo, Brasil. She's a student at Georgetown Univ. I was struck by her kindness, intellect and stylistic beauty. Here she is being photographed by her friend Dee, who is trying to put the tip of the Washington Monument between her index finger and thumb. Washington DC, 2017
San Francisco salutes the Beat Generation poets Jack Kerouac, Philip Lamania, Michael MClure, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen. By Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier and Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books.
Howl
BY ALLEN GINSBERG
For Carl Solomon:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blur floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
III
Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland
where you’re madder than I am
I’m with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I’m with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I’m with you in Rockland
where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries
I’m with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I’m with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I’m with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I’m with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I’m with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I’m with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I’m with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I’m with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I’m with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I’m with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I’m with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I’m with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep
I’m with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
An organic entity found wounded and close to death, the BR4-1N was grafted into a spaceship to ensure her survival. She now serves as part of the fleet using her superior intellect to strategise attack patterns before relaying them to the other fighters.
This is the 3rd ship in my fleet of Neo Classic Space inspired attack craft.