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My New Novel
B♭ (B Flat)
I once declared I would never publish again.
But here I am, publishing even more. (^ ^)
Not decided yet.
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Scene: Madison Square Garden 1
Jack stepped into the elevator, shifted the box of donuts in his hand, and pressed the button for Basement Level 3.
As the lit panel above him slowly ticked downward, he wiped the sweat from his forehead. The chill inside the air-conditioned elevator blurred his vision slightly from the heat contrast with the outside world.
Once the elevator doors opened, he turned right. A door appeared immediately on his left. A security guard in a rumpled suit greeted him.
“They’re all waiting for you.”
Jack swiped his security card and smiled faintly.
“Brought donuts. Share them with everyone later.”
The guard grinned, his white teeth flashing behind his sunglasses.
Beyond the thick soundproof door, a dimly lit room opened up—thirty-two monitors glowed pale blue in the dark. Staff moved quickly between equipment, speaking little, focused on their tasks.
The low hum of servers and the occasional alert tone filled the space. In the center stood the command seat, surrounded in a circle by workstations. Along the far wall, a massive screen switched rapidly through live feeds from over 400 cameras placed throughout the arena: audience seats, lobbies, hallways, VIP lounges, loading docks, backstage, electrical rooms, underground passages…
If a single rat showed up in the basement, they could trace it all the way to the sewers.
Jack sat in the command chair and flipped the switch on the gooseneck microphone in front of him. The flexible neck gave a small twitch, and the red indicator light lit up.
“Everyone, I got donuts. Sadly, the glazed ones were sold out. I’ve got Boston Cream, Chocolate Frosted, Strawberry Frosted, and Old-Fashioned. No coffee either. Help yourselves.”
“Jack, I’ll take the Old-Fashioned.”
That was Ben at the loading dock, adjusting the transparent earpiece tubing that coiled into his collar. He muttered through the mic, eyes on the monitor.
Jack gave a faint smile in return, then straightened his voice and spoke seriously into the mic before him.
“The presidential candidate is arriving soon. He’ll enter through Ben’s dock, then head to the VIP room in three minutes. After a 15-minute meeting, he’ll take the stage. Let me be clear—tonight is the national convention where the official nomination will be finalized. The Republican Party hasn’t held it here in over twenty years. And he’s bringing his fiancée, Eleanor Blake. A brilliant and stunning woman. Do not get mesmerized. The only ones you're allowed to admire are the ripped, muscle-bound lunatics. Also, Vice Presidential candidate Cole Harrison will be with them. He’s the watchdog for Justin and his foul mouth. No matter what he says, do not punch him. I’m the one who’ll get punched afterward.”
Jack glanced at his watch.
“They arrive in one minute. Once Justin’s team leaves, enjoy the donuts to your heart’s content. That’s all.”
Darryl, who had been staring at the VIP lounge feed on the left screen, called to Jack from behind.
“Jack, better check in with Elijah at the hospital. Make sure he’s on standby.”
Still facing forward, Jack raised a hand in reply and spoke to Elijah.
“You hear that, Elijah? Darryl thinks you’re lounging at Starbucks.”
Laughter came through immediately. Behind Elijah’s voice, the frantic hospital announcements echoed—at odds with his relaxed tone.
“Darryl, how’d you know? I was just about to fire Jack.”
Swiveling in his chair, Darryl smiled as he looked at his monitor.
“Let’s hope Justin doesn’t end up on your table.”
Jack cut in, ending the banter.
“Everyone, go time. Justin’s here. Follow the plan. I’m counting on you.”
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Scene: Red Hook 1
Amir and Rafi
Red Hook stood apart, even within Brooklyn.
Shielded by the shadows of high-rises, its wind-worn red-brick warehouses and rusted harbor cranes groaned in the breeze. The scent of saltwater layered upon itself with every tide, raising red corrosion on the iron doors.
Beyond a fence with a broken lock, a warehouse door—unused for years—slowly creaked open.
Amir stepped inside, letting his eyes adjust to the lightless space. The smell of oil soaked into the concrete hit his nose.
“Let’s start from here.”
At those words, Rafi gave a silent nod.
Their first visit to this place had been five winters ago.
After losing everything in Gaza to the Israeli military, they fled legally from Egypt through Turkey, reaching Tapachula in southern Mexico. There, they contacted a coyote, a smuggler of undocumented migrants.
Rafi paid $12,000 per person to the trafficker.
The entire sum was paid in cryptocurrency hacked via North Korean channels. The money came from coins stolen through a hacking group linked to North Korea. Amir had written the code himself and erased all traces. They crossed borders not with blood, but with numbers.
Later, they slipped under the border fence at night and entered the U.S. by land.
The Texas night sky was a blue-black deeper than anything they had ever seen. Its low, crystalline blue gave them a flicker of hope—but the fire of hatred still burned brighter.
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Set in New York City.
1
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54599616429/in/dateposted...
2
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54628511025/in/dateposted...
Note: I gave a brief explanation of this novel in the following video:
youtu.be/3w65lqUF-YI?si=yG7qy6TPeCL9xRJV
iTunes Playlist Link::
music.apple.com/jp/playlist/b/pl.u-47DJGhopxMD
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Notes
1. "Bombay Blood Type (hh type)"
•Characteristics: A rare blood type that lacks the usual ABO antigens — cannot be classified as A, B, or O.
•Discovery: First identified in 1952 in Mumbai, India (formerly Bombay).
•Prevalence: Roughly 1 in 10,000 people in India; globally, about 1 in 2.5 million.
•Transfusion Compatibility: Only compatible with blood from other Bombay type donors.
2. 2024 Harvard University Valedictorian Speech – The Power of Not Knowing
youtu.be/SOUH8iVqSOI?si=Ju-Y728irtcWR71K
3. Shots Fired at Trump Rally
youtu.be/1ejfAkzjEhk?si=ASqJwEmkY-2rW_hT
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
僕の新しい小説。
B♭ （ビーフラット）
僕は、もう公開しないと断言しましたが、さらに公開します。(^ ^)
まだ、決定ではありません。
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
場面 マディソンスクエアガーデン１
エレベーターに乗ったジャックは、手にしたドーナツの箱を持ち替えると、地下三階へのボタンを押した。冷房の効いたエレベーター内で下っていくランプを見上げたまま、額の汗を拭った。熱した地上からの温度差で多少視界が滲んでいた。
降りて、右手に行くと、すぐ左側に扉があり、よれたスーツを着たセキュリティーの男性がジャックに挨拶した。
「みなさん、もうお待ちですよ」
セキュリティーカードを通してから、ジャックは、口元を緩めていった。
「ドーナツ買ってきたよ。あとでみんなで食べてくれ」
セキュリティーの男性は、白い歯を見せ、サングラス越しに微笑んだ。
厚い防音扉を越えると、薄暗い空間に32面のモニターが青白く光っていた。スタッフが機器の合間を縫って、言葉少なに忙しなく行き交っていく。室内には低く唸るサーバーの音と、時折アラート音だけが響いている。部屋の中央には指揮官席、その周囲に円を描くように並んだワークステーション。壁面いっぱいの巨大スクリーンには、アリーナ内400台以上のカメラがライブ映像を忙しなく切り替え、流し続けている。客席、ロビー、通路、VIPラウンジ、搬入口、ステージ裏、電気設備室、地下通路….
もしも地下通路にねずみが一匹現れたら、下水溝まで追跡できるはずだ。
ジャックは指揮官席に腰を下ろし、前方に据え付けられたグースネックマイクのスイッチを押した。しなる首元がわずかに揺れ、赤いインジケーターが点灯した。
「みんな、ドーナツを買ってきた。残念ながらグレーズドは売り切れだった。ボストンクリーム、チョコフロステッド、ストロベリーフロステッド、オールドファッション、以上だ。コーヒーもないからな。勝手に飲むように」
「ジャック、俺はオールドファッションな」
搬入口にいるベンが、耳に伸びたセキュリティイヤピースの透明なチューブを整えながら、襟元に指を添え、モニター越しに呟いた。
ジャックは軽く微笑み返してから、声を整え、目の前のマイクに向かって、真剣に伝えた。
「まもなく、大統領候補がやってくる。ベンのいる搬入口から入り、３分でVIPルームへ。１５分の打ち合わせ後、アリーナへ登壇する。もう一度確認するが、今夜は大統領候補の指名が正式に確定する全国党大会だ。共和党は、２０年以上振りにここで開催するらしい。それから、フィアンセのエリノア・ブレイクもいっしょだ。容姿端麗な才女だ。見惚れるなよ。お前らが見惚れていいのは筋肉隆々の荒くれものだけだ。さらに副大統領候補のコール・ハリソンもいっしょだ。口の悪いジャスティンのお目付役だ。何を言われても決して殴り返すな。俺があとで殴られるからな」
ジャックは腕時計を見た。
「あと１分で到着だ。ジャスティン一行が帰宅したら、ドーナツをたらふく食べてくれ。以上だ」
画面左側に映ったVIPラウンジに見入っていたダリルが、ジャックの背中にいった。
「ジャック、病院のイライジャにも確認したほうがいい。ちゃんと待機しているようにってね」
ジャックは背を向けたまま、腕を上げて返答するとイライジャに問いかけた。
「聞こえるか、イライジャ。お前がスタバでくつろいでると疑われてるぞ、ダリルに」
イライジャは、笑いながら即答した。背後に、ベルビュー病院内の忙しないアナウンスが走っている。のんびりしたイライジャの声とは正反対だ。
「ダリル、なんでばれた？ そろそろジャックの首を飛ばそうと思ってさ」
椅子を回転させたダリルは、右手のモニターに目を落としながら、イライジャに笑いながらいった。
「お前のところに、ジャスティンが運ばれないことを祈るよ」
ジャックは、二人の会話を遮った。
「全員、スタートだ。ジャスティンが到着した。打ち合わせどおりに。頼んだぞ」
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場面 レッドフック１ アミール、ラフィ
レッドフックは、ブルックリンの中でも異質だった。
高層ビルの影に守られ、風雨に洗われた赤レンガの倉庫と錆びた港湾クレーンが、風に軋んでいる街だ。やってくる潮の匂いが重なるたびに上塗りされ、倉庫の鉄の扉に赤錆を浮かせていく。
鍵の壊れたフェンスの向こう、何年も使われていなかった倉庫の扉が静かに開いた。
アミールは一歩踏み入れ、光のない空間に目を慣らした。コンクリートに染み込んだ油の臭いが鼻をついた。
「ここから始めよう」
その声に、ラフィが黙って頷いた。
ふたりが初めてここにやってきたのは５年前の冬だ。イスラエルによってガザ地区ですべてを失った二人は、合法的にエジプトからトルコを経由し、メキシコの南部タパチュラへ行き、コヨーテと呼ばれる密入国請負人と接触した。ラフィは密入国業者へ一人あたり１２，０００ドルを支払った。すべて、北朝鮮経由でハッキングした仮想通貨での支払いだ。金の出どころは、北朝鮮系ハッカー集団を通じて奪ったコインだった。アミールの手でコードが組まれ、記録は消された。彼らは、血を流さずに数字を流して国境を超えたのだ。その後、国境のフェンスを夜に潜り、陸路でアメリカに入った。
テキサスの夜空は、彼らが見たことのないほど青黒かった。低く、澄んだ深い青の美しさは、彼らの胸にいくらかの希望を与えていたが、それ以上に憎しみの強さが上回っていた。
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これまでのメモ
1
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54599616429/in/dateposted...
2
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54628511025/in/dateposted...
舞台はニューヨークです。
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54599616429/in/dateposted...
追記 この小説を多少説明しました。
youtu.be/3w65lqUF-YI?si=yG7qy6TPeCL9xRJV
iTunes Playlist Link::
music.apple.com/jp/playlist/b/pl.u-47DJGhopxMD
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メモ
1
「Bombay型（ボンベイ型、hh型）」
•特徴：通常のABO血液型を持たない（A、B、Oに分類されない）特殊な型。
•発見地：1952年、インド・ムンバイ（旧ボンベイ）で初めて確認。
•発生頻度：インドでは1万人に1人程度だが、世界的には約250万人に1人とも。
•輸血制限：同じBombay型しか輸血できない。
2
2024年ハーバード大学首席の卒業式スピーチ『知らないことの力』
youtu.be/SOUH8iVqSOI?si=Ju-Y728irtcWR71K
3
Shots fired at Trump rally
youtu.be/1ejfAkzjEhk?si=ASqJwEmkY-2rW_hT
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~ Love is timeless, love is purity.
It is the lightless light, the rays of the sunrise dancing on the surface of the sea.
Love is you, and love is me.
It is the deepest knowing,
The serenity of being, the laughter of the earth,
The limitless breath of the wind, the wonder of potential,
The power of thought, the gift of life, the highest vibration,
The most profound awareness... the knower.
Life. Love. Infinite. within you. Now. Always. ~
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If you like you can follow me on facebook
© Copyright by Floriana Thor 2013-2015
My New Novel
B♭ (B Flat)
I once declared I would never publish again.
But here I am, publishing even more. (^ ^)
Not decided yet.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Scene: Madison Square Garden 1
Jack stepped into the elevator, shifted the box of donuts in his hand, and pressed the button for Basement Level 3.
As the lit panel above him slowly ticked downward, he wiped the sweat from his forehead. The chill inside the air-conditioned elevator blurred his vision slightly from the heat contrast with the outside world.
Once the elevator doors opened, he turned right. A door appeared immediately on his left. A security guard in a rumpled suit greeted him.
“They’re all waiting for you.”
Jack swiped his security card and smiled faintly.
“Brought donuts. Share them with everyone later.”
The guard grinned, his white teeth flashing behind his sunglasses.
Beyond the thick soundproof door, a dimly lit room opened up—thirty-two monitors glowed pale blue in the dark. Staff moved quickly between equipment, speaking little, focused on their tasks.
The low hum of servers and the occasional alert tone filled the space. In the center stood the command seat, surrounded in a circle by workstations. Along the far wall, a massive screen switched rapidly through live feeds from over 400 cameras placed throughout the arena: audience seats, lobbies, hallways, VIP lounges, loading docks, backstage, electrical rooms, underground passages…
If a single rat showed up in the basement, they could trace it all the way to the sewers.
Jack sat in the command chair and flipped the switch on the gooseneck microphone in front of him. The flexible neck gave a small twitch, and the red indicator light lit up.
“Everyone, I got donuts. Sadly, the glazed ones were sold out. I’ve got Boston Cream, Chocolate Frosted, Strawberry Frosted, and Old-Fashioned. No coffee either. Help yourselves.”
“Jack, I’ll take the Old-Fashioned.”
That was Ben at the loading dock, adjusting the transparent earpiece tubing that coiled into his collar. He muttered through the mic, eyes on the monitor.
Jack gave a faint smile in return, then straightened his voice and spoke seriously into the mic before him.
“The presidential candidate is arriving soon. He’ll enter through Ben’s dock, then head to the VIP room in three minutes. After a 15-minute meeting, he’ll take the stage. Let me be clear—tonight is the national convention where the official nomination will be finalized. The Republican Party hasn’t held it here in over twenty years. And he’s bringing his fiancée, Eleanor Blake. A brilliant and stunning woman. Do not get mesmerized. The only ones you're allowed to admire are the ripped, muscle-bound lunatics. Also, Vice Presidential candidate Cole Harrison will be with them. He’s the watchdog for Justin and his foul mouth. No matter what he says, do not punch him. I’m the one who’ll get punched afterward.”
Jack glanced at his watch.
“They arrive in one minute. Once Justin’s team leaves, enjoy the donuts to your heart’s content. That’s all.”
Darryl, who had been staring at the VIP lounge feed on the left screen, called to Jack from behind.
“Jack, better check in with Elijah at the hospital. Make sure he’s on standby.”
Still facing forward, Jack raised a hand in reply and spoke to Elijah.
“You hear that, Elijah? Darryl thinks you’re lounging at Starbucks.”
Laughter came through immediately. Behind Elijah’s voice, the frantic hospital announcements echoed—at odds with his relaxed tone.
“Darryl, how’d you know? I was just about to fire Jack.”
Swiveling in his chair, Darryl smiled as he looked at his monitor.
“Let’s hope Justin doesn’t end up on your table.”
Jack cut in, ending the banter.
“Everyone, go time. Justin’s here. Follow the plan. I’m counting on you.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Scene: Red Hook 1
Amir and Rafi
Red Hook stood apart, even within Brooklyn.
Shielded by the shadows of high-rises, its wind-worn red-brick warehouses and rusted harbor cranes groaned in the breeze. The scent of saltwater layered upon itself with every tide, raising red corrosion on the iron doors.
Beyond a fence with a broken lock, a warehouse door—unused for years—slowly creaked open.
Amir stepped inside, letting his eyes adjust to the lightless space. The smell of oil soaked into the concrete hit his nose.
“Let’s start from here.”
At those words, Rafi gave a silent nod.
Their first visit to this place had been five winters ago.
After losing everything in Gaza to the Israeli military, they fled legally from Egypt through Turkey, reaching Tapachula in southern Mexico. There, they contacted a coyote, a smuggler of undocumented migrants.
Rafi paid $12,000 per person to the trafficker.
The entire sum was paid in cryptocurrency hacked via North Korean channels. The money came from coins stolen through a hacking group linked to North Korea. Amir had written the code himself and erased all traces. They crossed borders not with blood, but with numbers.
Later, they slipped under the border fence at night and entered the U.S. by land.
The Texas night sky was a blue-black deeper than anything they had ever seen. Its low, crystalline blue gave them a flicker of hope—but the fire of hatred still burned brighter.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Set in New York City.
1
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54599616429/in/dateposted...
2
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54628511025/in/dateposted...
Note: I gave a brief explanation of this novel in the following video:
youtu.be/3w65lqUF-YI?si=yG7qy6TPeCL9xRJV
iTunes Playlist Link::
music.apple.com/jp/playlist/b/pl.u-47DJGhopxMD
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Notes
1. "Bombay Blood Type (hh type)"
•Characteristics: A rare blood type that lacks the usual ABO antigens — cannot be classified as A, B, or O.
•Discovery: First identified in 1952 in Mumbai, India (formerly Bombay).
•Prevalence: Roughly 1 in 10,000 people in India; globally, about 1 in 2.5 million.
•Transfusion Compatibility: Only compatible with blood from other Bombay type donors.
2. 2024 Harvard University Valedictorian Speech – The Power of Not Knowing
youtu.be/SOUH8iVqSOI?si=Ju-Y728irtcWR71K
3. Shots Fired at Trump Rally
youtu.be/1ejfAkzjEhk?si=ASqJwEmkY-2rW_hT
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
僕の新しい小説。
B♭ （ビーフラット）
僕は、もう公開しないと断言しましたが、さらに公開します。(^ ^)
まだ、決定ではありません。
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
場面 マディソンスクエアガーデン１
エレベーターに乗ったジャックは、手にしたドーナツの箱を持ち替えると、地下三階へのボタンを押した。冷房の効いたエレベーター内で下っていくランプを見上げたまま、額の汗を拭った。熱した地上からの温度差で多少視界が滲んでいた。
降りて、右手に行くと、すぐ左側に扉があり、よれたスーツを着たセキュリティーの男性がジャックに挨拶した。
「みなさん、もうお待ちですよ」
セキュリティーカードを通してから、ジャックは、口元を緩めていった。
「ドーナツ買ってきたよ。あとでみんなで食べてくれ」
セキュリティーの男性は、白い歯を見せ、サングラス越しに微笑んだ。
厚い防音扉を越えると、薄暗い空間に32面のモニターが青白く光っていた。スタッフが機器の合間を縫って、言葉少なに忙しなく行き交っていく。室内には低く唸るサーバーの音と、時折アラート音だけが響いている。部屋の中央には指揮官席、その周囲に円を描くように並んだワークステーション。壁面いっぱいの巨大スクリーンには、アリーナ内400台以上のカメラがライブ映像を忙しなく切り替え、流し続けている。客席、ロビー、通路、VIPラウンジ、搬入口、ステージ裏、電気設備室、地下通路….
もしも地下通路にねずみが一匹現れたら、下水溝まで追跡できるはずだ。
ジャックは指揮官席に腰を下ろし、前方に据え付けられたグースネックマイクのスイッチを押した。しなる首元がわずかに揺れ、赤いインジケーターが点灯した。
「みんな、ドーナツを買ってきた。残念ながらグレーズドは売り切れだった。ボストンクリーム、チョコフロステッド、ストロベリーフロステッド、オールドファッション、以上だ。コーヒーもないからな。勝手に飲むように」
「ジャック、俺はオールドファッションな」
搬入口にいるベンが、耳に伸びたセキュリティイヤピースの透明なチューブを整えながら、襟元に指を添え、モニター越しに呟いた。
ジャックは軽く微笑み返してから、声を整え、目の前のマイクに向かって、真剣に伝えた。
「まもなく、大統領候補がやってくる。ベンのいる搬入口から入り、３分でVIPルームへ。１５分の打ち合わせ後、アリーナへ登壇する。もう一度確認するが、今夜は大統領候補の指名が正式に確定する全国党大会だ。共和党は、２０年以上振りにここで開催するらしい。それから、フィアンセのエリノア・ブレイクもいっしょだ。容姿端麗な才女だ。見惚れるなよ。お前らが見惚れていいのは筋肉隆々の荒くれものだけだ。さらに副大統領候補のコール・ハリソンもいっしょだ。口の悪いジャスティンのお目付役だ。何を言われても決して殴り返すな。俺があとで殴られるからな」
ジャックは腕時計を見た。
「あと１分で到着だ。ジャスティン一行が帰宅したら、ドーナツをたらふく食べてくれ。以上だ」
画面左側に映ったVIPラウンジに見入っていたダリルが、ジャックの背中にいった。
「ジャック、病院のイライジャにも確認したほうがいい。ちゃんと待機しているようにってね」
ジャックは背を向けたまま、腕を上げて返答するとイライジャに問いかけた。
「聞こえるか、イライジャ。お前がスタバでくつろいでると疑われてるぞ、ダリルに」
イライジャは、笑いながら即答した。背後に、ベルビュー病院内の忙しないアナウンスが走っている。のんびりしたイライジャの声とは正反対だ。
「ダリル、なんでばれた？ そろそろジャックの首を飛ばそうと思ってさ」
椅子を回転させたダリルは、右手のモニターに目を落としながら、イライジャに笑いながらいった。
「お前のところに、ジャスティンが運ばれないことを祈るよ」
ジャックは、二人の会話を遮った。
「全員、スタートだ。ジャスティンが到着した。打ち合わせどおりに。頼んだぞ」
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場面 レッドフック１ アミール、ラフィ
レッドフックは、ブルックリンの中でも異質だった。
高層ビルの影に守られ、風雨に洗われた赤レンガの倉庫と錆びた港湾クレーンが、風に軋んでいる街だ。やってくる潮の匂いが重なるたびに上塗りされ、倉庫の鉄の扉に赤錆を浮かせていく。
鍵の壊れたフェンスの向こう、何年も使われていなかった倉庫の扉が静かに開いた。
アミールは一歩踏み入れ、光のない空間に目を慣らした。コンクリートに染み込んだ油の臭いが鼻をついた。
「ここから始めよう」
その声に、ラフィが黙って頷いた。
ふたりが初めてここにやってきたのは５年前の冬だ。イスラエルによってガザ地区ですべてを失った二人は、合法的にエジプトからトルコを経由し、メキシコの南部タパチュラへ行き、コヨーテと呼ばれる密入国請負人と接触した。ラフィは密入国業者へ一人あたり１２，０００ドルを支払った。すべて、北朝鮮経由でハッキングした仮想通貨での支払いだ。金の出どころは、北朝鮮系ハッカー集団を通じて奪ったコインだった。アミールの手でコードが組まれ、記録は消された。彼らは、血を流さずに数字を流して国境を超えたのだ。その後、国境のフェンスを夜に潜り、陸路でアメリカに入った。
テキサスの夜空は、彼らが見たことのないほど青黒かった。低く、澄んだ深い青の美しさは、彼らの胸にいくらかの希望を与えていたが、それ以上に憎しみの強さが上回っていた。
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これまでのメモ
1
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54599616429/in/dateposted...
2
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54628511025/in/dateposted...
舞台はニューヨークです。
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54599616429/in/dateposted...
追記 この小説を多少説明しました。
youtu.be/3w65lqUF-YI?si=yG7qy6TPeCL9xRJV
iTunes Playlist Link::
music.apple.com/jp/playlist/b/pl.u-47DJGhopxMD
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メモ
1
「Bombay型（ボンベイ型、hh型）」
•特徴：通常のABO血液型を持たない（A、B、Oに分類されない）特殊な型。
•発見地：1952年、インド・ムンバイ（旧ボンベイ）で初めて確認。
•発生頻度：インドでは1万人に1人程度だが、世界的には約250万人に1人とも。
•輸血制限：同じBombay型しか輸血できない。
2
2024年ハーバード大学首席の卒業式スピーチ『知らないことの力』
youtu.be/SOUH8iVqSOI?si=Ju-Y728irtcWR71K
3
Shots fired at Trump rally
youtu.be/1ejfAkzjEhk?si=ASqJwEmkY-2rW_hT
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Uploaded as much for the period detail as the bus, which was a Weymann-bodied AEC Regent Mk V belonging to South Wales Transport. The photograph was taken in Swansea on New Year's Eve (a Friday) 1976, with the traffic at a standstill and the streets thronged with bargain-hunters homeward-bound from the post-Christmas sales.
I'd forgotten all about Sakura film. My campaign to catalogue the Bentosfoto negative archive has reminded me that I used quite a bit of it at around this time. Kodacolor X had been discontinued in 1975 and I had finally come to the conclusion that I didn't like its replacement, Kodacolor II. I can now trace the course of developments, as I shopped around for various "lesser known" brands and gave them a try-out. There was some Fuji stuff and a number of films with no manufacturer's name, just frame numbers, marked along the edge ...probably "own brand" films from Boots, or Dixons, or somewhere. The Sakura, now that I see it in the mass ...not spread out over months between other films... was jolly nice stuff. It took a number of my better shots and seemed to behave well, as here, in the lightless days of midwinter. Even NBC poppy red didn't come out too bad. Eventually I made Kodak Vericolor my colour print film of choice, where available. You wouldn't find it in Boots and usually had to go to a camera shop.
… And here am I, budding
among the ruins
with only sorrow to bite on,
as if weeping were a seed and I
the earth’s only furrow.
–Pablo Neruda,
Clay Sculpture created by Prajeesh Ad
Ruddy Turnstones (Arenaria interpres)
I spent a wonderful weekend down in the New Forest. Walked out past Sturt Pond towards Hurst Castle from Milford-on-Sea on a rather grey and lightless Sunday afternoon. Tide was out so the waders were in. Ruddy turnstones were busy patrolling just above the waterline and leaving no stone unturned. They are used to seeing people in this area and seemed happy to come in close.
My New Novel
B♭ (B Flat)
I once declared I would never publish again.
But here I am, publishing even more. (^ ^)
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Scene: Madison Square Garden 1
Jack stepped into the elevator, shifted the box of donuts in his hand, and pressed the button for Basement Level 3.
As the lit panel above him slowly ticked downward, he wiped the sweat from his forehead. The chill inside the air-conditioned elevator blurred his vision slightly from the heat contrast with the outside world.
Once the elevator doors opened, he turned right. A door appeared immediately on his left. A security guard in a rumpled suit greeted him.
“They’re all waiting for you.”
Jack swiped his security card and smiled faintly.
“Brought donuts. Share them with everyone later.”
The guard grinned, his white teeth flashing behind his sunglasses.
Beyond the thick soundproof door, a dimly lit room opened up—thirty-two monitors glowed pale blue in the dark. Staff moved quickly between equipment, speaking little, focused on their tasks.
The low hum of servers and the occasional alert tone filled the space. In the center stood the command seat, surrounded in a circle by workstations. Along the far wall, a massive screen switched rapidly through live feeds from over 400 cameras placed throughout the arena: audience seats, lobbies, hallways, VIP lounges, loading docks, backstage, electrical rooms, underground passages…
If a single rat showed up in the basement, they could trace it all the way to the sewers.
Jack sat in the command chair and flipped the switch on the gooseneck microphone in front of him. The flexible neck gave a small twitch, and the red indicator light lit up.
“Everyone, I got donuts. Sadly, the glazed ones were sold out. I’ve got Boston Cream, Chocolate Frosted, Strawberry Frosted, and Old-Fashioned. No coffee either. Help yourselves.”
“Jack, I’ll take the Old-Fashioned.”
That was Ben at the loading dock, adjusting the transparent earpiece tubing that coiled into his collar. He muttered through the mic, eyes on the monitor.
Jack gave a faint smile in return, then straightened his voice and spoke seriously into the mic before him.
“The presidential candidate is arriving soon. He’ll enter through Ben’s dock, then head to the VIP room in three minutes. After a 15-minute meeting, he’ll take the stage. Let me be clear—tonight is the national convention where the official nomination will be finalized. The Republican Party hasn’t held it here in over twenty years. And he’s bringing his fiancée, Eleanor Blake. A brilliant and stunning woman. Do not get mesmerized. The only ones you're allowed to admire are the ripped, muscle-bound lunatics. Also, Vice Presidential candidate Cole Harrison will be with them. He’s the watchdog for Justin and his foul mouth. No matter what he says, do not punch him. I’m the one who’ll get punched afterward.”
Jack glanced at his watch.
“They arrive in one minute. Once Justin’s team leaves, enjoy the donuts to your heart’s content. That’s all.”
Darryl, who had been staring at the VIP lounge feed on the left screen, called to Jack from behind.
“Jack, better check in with Elijah at the hospital. Make sure he’s on standby.”
Still facing forward, Jack raised a hand in reply and spoke to Elijah.
“You hear that, Elijah? Darryl thinks you’re lounging at Starbucks.”
Laughter came through immediately. Behind Elijah’s voice, the frantic hospital announcements echoed—at odds with his relaxed tone.
“Darryl, how’d you know? I was just about to fire Jack.”
Swiveling in his chair, Darryl smiled as he looked at his monitor.
“Let’s hope Justin doesn’t end up on your table.”
Jack cut in, ending the banter.
“Everyone, go time. Justin’s here. Follow the plan. I’m counting on you.”
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Scene: Red Hook 1
Amir and Rafi
Red Hook stood apart, even within Brooklyn.
Shielded by the shadows of high-rises, its wind-worn red-brick warehouses and rusted harbor cranes groaned in the breeze. The scent of saltwater layered upon itself with every tide, raising red corrosion on the iron doors.
Beyond a fence with a broken lock, a warehouse door—unused for years—slowly creaked open.
Amir stepped inside, letting his eyes adjust to the lightless space. The smell of oil soaked into the concrete hit his nose.
“Let’s start from here.”
At those words, Rafi gave a silent nod.
Their first visit to this place had been five winters ago.
After losing everything in Gaza to the Israeli military, they fled legally from Egypt through Turkey, reaching Tapachula in southern Mexico. There, they contacted a coyote, a smuggler of undocumented migrants.
Rafi paid $12,000 per person to the trafficker.
The entire sum was paid in cryptocurrency hacked via North Korean channels. The money came from coins stolen through a hacking group linked to North Korea. Amir had written the code himself and erased all traces. They crossed borders not with blood, but with numbers.
Later, they slipped under the border fence at night and entered the U.S. by land.
The Texas night sky was a blue-black deeper than anything they had ever seen. Its low, crystalline blue gave them a flicker of hope—but the fire of hatred still burned brighter.
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Set in New York City.
1
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54599616429/in/dateposted...
2
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54628511025/in/dateposted...
Note: I gave a brief explanation of this novel in the following video:
youtu.be/3w65lqUF-YI?si=yG7qy6TPeCL9xRJV
iTunes Playlist Link::
music.apple.com/jp/playlist/b/pl.u-47DJGhopxMD
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Notes
1. "Bombay Blood Type (hh type)"
•Characteristics: A rare blood type that lacks the usual ABO antigens — cannot be classified as A, B, or O.
•Discovery: First identified in 1952 in Mumbai, India (formerly Bombay).
•Prevalence: Roughly 1 in 10,000 people in India; globally, about 1 in 2.5 million.
•Transfusion Compatibility: Only compatible with blood from other Bombay type donors.
2. 2024 Harvard University Valedictorian Speech – The Power of Not Knowing
youtu.be/SOUH8iVqSOI?si=Ju-Y728irtcWR71K
3. Shots Fired at Trump Rally
youtu.be/1ejfAkzjEhk?si=ASqJwEmkY-2rW_hT
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僕の新しい小説。
B♭ （ビーフラット）
僕は、もう公開しないと断言しましたが、さらに公開します。(^ ^)
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場面 マディソンスクエアガーデン１
エレベーターに乗ったジャックは、手にしたドーナツの箱を持ち替えると、地下三階へのボタンを押した。冷房の効いたエレベーター内で下っていくランプを見上げたまま、額の汗を拭った。熱した地上からの温度差で多少視界が滲んでいた。
降りて、右手に行くと、すぐ左側に扉があり、よれたスーツを着たセキュリティーの男性がジャックに挨拶した。
「みなさん、もうお待ちですよ」
セキュリティーカードを通してから、ジャックは、口元を緩めていった。
「ドーナツ買ってきたよ。あとでみんなで食べてくれ」
セキュリティーの男性は、白い歯を見せ、サングラス越しに微笑んだ。
厚い防音扉を越えると、薄暗い空間に32面のモニターが青白く光っていた。スタッフが機器の合間を縫って、言葉少なに忙しなく行き交っていく。室内には低く唸るサーバーの音と、時折アラート音だけが響いている。部屋の中央には指揮官席、その周囲に円を描くように並んだワークステーション。壁面いっぱいの巨大スクリーンには、アリーナ内400台以上のカメラがライブ映像を忙しなく切り替え、流し続けている。客席、ロビー、通路、VIPラウンジ、搬入口、ステージ裏、電気設備室、地下通路….
もしも地下通路にねずみが一匹現れたら、下水溝まで追跡できるはずだ。
ジャックは指揮官席に腰を下ろし、前方に据え付けられたグースネックマイクのスイッチを押した。しなる首元がわずかに揺れ、赤いインジケーターが点灯した。
「みんな、ドーナツを買ってきた。残念ながらグレーズドは売り切れだった。ボストンクリーム、チョコフロステッド、ストロベリーフロステッド、オールドファッション、以上だ。コーヒーもないからな。勝手に飲むように」
「ジャック、俺はオールドファッションな」
搬入口にいるベンが、耳に伸びたセキュリティイヤピースの透明なチューブを整えながら、襟元に指を添え、モニター越しに呟いた。
ジャックは軽く微笑み返してから、声を整え、目の前のマイクに向かって、真剣に伝えた。
「まもなく、大統領候補がやってくる。ベンのいる搬入口から入り、３分でVIPルームへ。１５分の打ち合わせ後、アリーナへ登壇する。もう一度確認するが、今夜は大統領候補の指名が正式に確定する全国党大会だ。共和党は、２０年以上振りにここで開催するらしい。それから、フィアンセのエリノア・ブレイクもいっしょだ。容姿端麗な才女だ。見惚れるなよ。お前らが見惚れていいのは筋肉隆々の荒くれものだけだ。さらに副大統領候補のコール・ハリソンもいっしょだ。口の悪いジャスティンのお目付役だ。何を言われても決して殴り返すな。俺があとで殴られるからな」
ジャックは腕時計を見た。
「あと１分で到着だ。ジャスティン一行が帰宅したら、ドーナツをたらふく食べてくれ。以上だ」
画面左側に映ったVIPラウンジに見入っていたダリルが、ジャックの背中にいった。
「ジャック、病院のイライジャにも確認したほうがいい。ちゃんと待機しているようにってね」
ジャックは背を向けたまま、腕を上げて返答するとイライジャに問いかけた。
「聞こえるか、イライジャ。お前がスタバでくつろいでると疑われてるぞ、ダリルに」
イライジャは、笑いながら即答した。背後に、ベルビュー病院内の忙しないアナウンスが走っている。のんびりしたイライジャの声とは正反対だ。
「ダリル、なんでばれた？ そろそろジャックの首を飛ばそうと思ってさ」
椅子を回転させたダリルは、右手のモニターに目を落としながら、イライジャに笑いながらいった。
「お前のところに、ジャスティンが運ばれないことを祈るよ」
ジャックは、二人の会話を遮った。
「全員、スタートだ。ジャスティンが到着した。打ち合わせどおりに。頼んだぞ」
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場面 レッドフック１ アミール、ラフィ
レッドフックは、ブルックリンの中でも異質だった。
高層ビルの影に守られ、風雨に洗われた赤レンガの倉庫と錆びた港湾クレーンが、風に軋んでいる街だ。やってくる潮の匂いが重なるたびに上塗りされ、倉庫の鉄の扉に赤錆を浮かせていく。
鍵の壊れたフェンスの向こう、何年も使われていなかった倉庫の扉が静かに開いた。
アミールは一歩踏み入れ、光のない空間に目を慣らした。コンクリートに染み込んだ油の臭いが鼻をついた。
「ここから始めよう」
その声に、ラフィが黙って頷いた。
ふたりが初めてここにやってきたのは５年前の冬だ。イスラエルによってガザ地区ですべてを失った二人は、合法的にエジプトからトルコを経由し、メキシコの南部タパチュラへ行き、コヨーテと呼ばれる密入国請負人と接触した。ラフィは密入国業者へ一人あたり１２，０００ドルを支払った。すべて、北朝鮮経由でハッキングした仮想通貨での支払いだ。金の出どころは、北朝鮮系ハッカー集団を通じて奪ったコインだった。アミールの手でコードが組まれ、記録は消された。彼らは、血を流さずに数字を流して国境を超えたのだ。その後、国境のフェンスを夜に潜り、陸路でアメリカに入った。
テキサスの夜空は、彼らが見たことのないほど青黒かった。低く、澄んだ深い青の美しさは、彼らの胸にいくらかの希望を与えていたが、それ以上に憎しみの強さが上回っていた。
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
これまでのメモ
1
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54599616429/in/dateposted...
2
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54628511025/in/dateposted...
舞台はニューヨークです。
www.flickr.com/photos/stealaway/54599616429/in/dateposted...
追記 この小説を多少説明しました。
youtu.be/3w65lqUF-YI?si=yG7qy6TPeCL9xRJV
iTunes Playlist Link::
music.apple.com/jp/playlist/b/pl.u-47DJGhopxMD
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
メモ
1
「Bombay型（ボンベイ型、hh型）」
•特徴：通常のABO血液型を持たない（A、B、Oに分類されない）特殊な型。
•発見地：1952年、インド・ムンバイ（旧ボンベイ）で初めて確認。
•発生頻度：インドでは1万人に1人程度だが、世界的には約250万人に1人とも。
•輸血制限：同じBombay型しか輸血できない。
2
2024年ハーバード大学首席の卒業式スピーチ『知らないことの力』
youtu.be/SOUH8iVqSOI?si=Ju-Y728irtcWR71K
3
Shots fired at Trump rally
youtu.be/1ejfAkzjEhk?si=ASqJwEmkY-2rW_hT
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Grand Central Terminal in NYC is a beautiful station. The waiting hall is iconic as it is practical. The thing that I found interesting is that the waiting hall and the platforms share a very different feeling. Once one leaves the illuminant, light-filled grand hall, one must pass through an entirely black, lightless passage before arriving at a rather dimly lit platform. America is, if anything, a country of contrast.
To Infinity and Beyond: This Is the Afterlife ~
Turning inside out, the young shaman falls though a long swirling tunnel formed of his inverted self, his unbodied mouth and eyes agape in a primal rush toward extinction.
He accelerates t
hrough a tightly wound vortex that shifts and bends to accommodate his course, always centred in the swirling tube which never touches his falling, disembodied perspective. The tunnel is made of light, and of his own bloodstream, and of all the memories and unremembered details of materiality and personality that made up his life – yet not merely ‘his’ life.
Every human, fish, bird, animal, insect, cell and blood corpuscle that has ever lived is there with him, all at once – the dying shaman can feel their bright fear and ecstasy pouring through him as they all rush toward an unseen destination around the curving, translucent bends of the primal vortex. Even though every being dies alone – no matter if a multitude of witnesses is present – the moment of death itself is one great screaming orgasm experienced simultaneously by every one, every single thing that has ever lived – all our eyes and mouths and ganglia agape at the same simultaneous culmination of our material existence.
The tunnel is an eternally vivid living record of past events and future dreams, all memories and visions embroidered into the seamless fabric of its swirl – and Ram’yana’s private past and the panoply of his personal memories are displayed most prominently to him, brightly livid episodes which emerge from the tubular walls as he passes. His strongest experiences – the most impressive ones, that imprinted themselves most brightly into the palimpsest of his being – leap out at him in high relief as he turns and twists and falls and flies, a singular eye of consciousness accelerating toward the endless end of the convoluted time tunnel that’s leading him home.
As the world we experience slips past us at the periphery of our sensoria, an ongoing tunnel vision moves with us at the extremity of our perceptions, whether dying, dead or alive. Journeying out of the physical plane, outside the material matrix of the world, Ram’yana is beyond time and the ken of time-bound beings; as he leaves four dimensional Timespace and approaches the speed of light everything twists into a tunnel which lengthens fore and aft.
He sees his grandfather and grandmother, Mickey Mouse and Pluto, all the dogs and cats and mice and goldfish that shared his boyhood years, the smells of his houses and the flavours of his lovers. He hears the laughter of his kindergarten friends, their bright faces visible all around him singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’, while pretty little Abigail jumps over a spinning rope twirled by Gina and Hannah, her long blonde pink-ribboned pigtails rotating around the sides of her head.
He holds his mother’s huge hand, grasping her finger through the wooden bars of his bassinet while she sings to him in the sultry evening air. He witnesses the expression of semi-resigned shock on his father’s face during the Cuban missile crisis and again when Kennedy was shot, sees the squashed remains of mosquitoes on the wall above his crib, watches the strange lights moving in the sky while all the neighbours point and speculate, sinks again with a collapsing sandbank on Bondi Beach, swept away with hundreds of panicking faces being pulled out to the deep sea along with him, while hundreds of man-eating sharks are driven off by the beating, splashing oars of desperate lifesavers.
He sees his mother’s eyes for the first time all over again and screams at the hard slap on his bottom as he hangs before Doctor Traub’s thick-lensed glasses in the bright, antiseptic birth theatre. His paternal grandmother smiles at him as she leans over and obscures his view of the magnificent giant yellow flowers of the magnolia tree while she wheels him in his pram; he can still smell the cloying fragrance of the flowers. His mother’s mother screams as he holds a dingo puppy up for her inspection and she tumbles over backward in her bedroom, breaking her hip while his eight year old eyes wash the scene away with tears that burn through the illusory years.
The Cat in the Hat and the Mighty Thor; the smell and Hungarian accent of alcoholic Uncle Tony, putting him off beer for years with his first taste of bitter ale at the age of six, and the bright laughing face of his babysitter Wendy by the blazing wood fire; the spray of blood when he cut his wrist falling onto a broken bottle at the age of three and the dizzying view from the emergency surgeon’s high private balcony; the first time he kissed a girl and the first time he dreamed of kissing a girl, all bound up together; flying through the sky in a propeller-driven passenger plane, watching circular rainbows following him in the clouds below.
White sulphur-crested cockatoos and sparrows circle his yard while kookaburras laugh in the gum trees; the first terrifying time his father holds him up high in the air to place him in the fork of a tree; his first night after he ran away from home, reclining on a beanbag in a Kings Cross commune reading Philip Jose Farmer’s pertinent To Your Scattered Bodies Go – everything is there, each scene and sensation embedded within and revealing a multitude of others. Everything. His dying mind seeks out everything he’s ever experienced, seeking a way back into the womb of living as he falls through something else entirely, riding a rollercoaster beyond the imagination of the most topologically tormented tycoon.
As Ram’yana falls he flashes before the eyes of his whole life – as others fall with him, many others, all others, sharing the time tunnel with his self-judging awareness. In the eternity of the Fall everything hidden or repressed is exposed in the Divine Light of clear sight and each being is their own Judge, emerging from the blindfold of their material existence to weigh their own soul on the ineradicable scales of justice and mercy. Conscience is the soul and the soul is immortally, inescapably honest with itself when released from the fetters of self-deceit and delusion.
Beyond time, at the singular moment of the great primal rush that is the birth and death canal leading from one world to the next, everyone experiences the same thingat the same time. We all come and go together in a mind-blowing orgasm; dreaming or screaming, laughing or crying, all emotion quails and pales before the rush of unstoppable motion that dwarfs any and every trivial concern.
No thought of gods or devils, life or death in the primal scream toward the Light at the end of the tunnel – the only thing that matters is holding onto your headless hat and the wordless regrets felt toward all the people, animals and conscious entities you ever knew deeply, or ever loved – and still love, deeply, tenderly, with a perspective of forgiveness, understanding and compassion never vouchsafed to your flesh-bound, in-coiled, emotion-embroiled mortal personality.
Ram is every human who ever lived and died, every fish ever caught in a current to swirl down into lightless depths beyond its control, every bird caught in a whirlwind that flings it to flinders, every animal diving for cover into cloaking vegetation from an inescapable predator, every individual blood corpuscle flinging itself on the way to the crushing pressure at the heart of its warm, pulsating cosmos. As he pours through the end of the world the tunnel twists and whirls, always hiding the point of it all, the point of no return, the heart of the matter, the source of every thing and being – and his mind expands to simultaneously see his spiraling course as a single thread in a vast interwoven image.
The tunnel is one thread among myriad drab and colourful strands in a great uncharitable tapestry, an inextricable part of its intricate pattern. The dying shaman follows the course of his life along its undulating strand and sees that his thread rises and falls above and beneath uncountable other interlocking threads, a spectrum of hues and textures in the enormously unfathomable tapestry. As his thread rises above another he is ‘conscious’, while the thread it occludes is ‘dreaming’; where his strand is covered by another thread, his mortal body sleeps and dreams while the other strand lives their waking life. Everyone and everything is there, all at once, simultaneously, lain out and displayed before him with no need for the flow of time to elucidate the infinite multiplicity of being.
Turn the tapestry around. The thought comes unbidden and the cloth reverses itself around him in a loopy topological twist; the implicately shared complementary nature of consciousness becomes apparent to his blown mind as he sees himself dreaming the lives of others, and others dreaming through his waking eyes and flesh. The intermingling pathways wind around the curving delineaments of their divine co-creation, which turns into itself like a Moebius strip until the beginning of one thread seamlessly winds into the end of another. The falcon is the hunter is the arrow is the feather is the truth. All is alive and whole; nothing is partial or frayed.
The tapestry is vast, but he’s able to follow his individuated thread through the colourful patterns and sees that the enormous conglomeration of dreams and lives is incomplete – not completed by the path of the single thread that is his experience of existence, rising from the tapestry to enter him as him. At the same timeless moment, Ram’yana approaches the plexus of light that is the destiny of all nations, women and men – the future and past of all that are born to fall along with him, minds blown in the blinding light of the immortal portal.
An immaculate blazing white-hot sun glows at the end of the tunnel. He can see it ever more clearly through the transparing walls of the vortex, thinning and fading in the face of the overwhelmingly brilliant source and core of existence. Ram sees the arcs of a trans-finite net spreading outward from the source, sees an infinitude of other vortices approaching its plexus from more angles than he can wrap his bodiless head around. They pass through each other in ways that defy and tease his mortal three-dimensionally entrained mind – but the arrangement makes subtle sense to a higher form of his being, trembling on the edge of an unchartable metamorphosis into something so much greater as to be intrinsically unimaginable. Simultaneously, on another level, the individual personality of the shaman approaches its ultimate rebirth and transformation in his flight toward the blinding light of the central sun.
The source of all is the hot, bright core and central axis of the centreless multiverse, the eternal end of every tunnel; the maw of a transdimensional creature about to swallow him up, the Infinite Light of God and his own silent heart gently glowing in timeless repose. He flies around a final bend in the dissolving tunnel, surging toward the arcane net that veils the core – which flares into him as the tunnel widens, opening into the final straight.
Ram’yana flashes toward the weave that’s flung to the ends of the cosmos, spreading himself to embrace the Light – and as he reaches it, he encounters the safety net. A web-like sieve is strung across the open maw of All, and as Ram’yana passes though it a great, resounding BOUMMB fills the boundless universe – the sound of one heartbeat, as loud as the boom that eternally creates the unborn, ever-living universe; the sound of Shiva’s eye opening and of one hand clapping.
Before your time, he hears and feels, not ready, not yet – unfinished – and he feels himself shrinking toward an infinitesimally small spot in the multitude of multiverses – back into the weave, where plan net X marks the spot where all things meet in his current-bound primate life.
Boumb… Boom…. Boom!
That’s why I’m here, writing this to you ‘now’ – the same ‘now’ that you are reading it in, really. I and eye remember it all vividly, not as something to slowly forget or avoid in the unfocused mind’s eye, but as an ongoing experience that is with me now, always, dynamically imprinted. It is with me as it is with you, when you close your eyes and open your memory to see truly through the waters of forgetfulness, to the infinite waters of eternal life.
Life and death, sensory wakefulness and supersensory dreaming are the same thing, appearing as the warp and weft of the reversible tapestry of existence. And everyone, each of us, is the whole tapestry, inextricably interwoven – everyone is everyone, and that’s about as close as this constraining corsetry of early third millennium Inglesh needs to get at this point in infinite time – xcept, perhaps, for the most important thing of all -
Every one you truly touch and are touched by, in every way, leaves the deepest and most prominent engravings in your heart, mind and soul. What we do unto others is what we do to ourselves – and other living beings are more than mere memory mirrors or handy usable tools. That’s what draws us back for more, and more again – the need to do better by our selves – over and over, until we do it right. Then we get another choice – or another chance to ride the carousel Wheel of Fortune again, if we so choose.
The multiple layers of ascendant consciousness are a self-filtering system of co-evolution – a system of slowly developing focus and perspective that leads our awareness to other dimensions, already inextricably interwoven with the relatively ‘familiar’ bounds of our largely unknown but ever-present reality. There’s no dim-witted hierarchy of order-givers or sword-wielding guardians barring the doors of higher perception – the gateway to Heaven on Earth. There’s just you – and me, and all of us, together. We all have our time to shine, and that time is always now.
Yet Death is not Dying. In the Bardo spaces between thy flowering carnations of existence, all the bright religious hopes and turgid superstitious terrors await the untrained monkey mind in its ongoing fall toward dissolution or reintegration. The Bardo Realms are entire worlds or pocket universes as apparently solid as the full-blown reality ye imagine around thee, right where thou art sitting, right now. How do ye know thou art alive, not dreaming this experience, right here and now? Do ye think that’s air you’re breathing?
A true story
By Ram Ayana @ hermetic.blog.com/2012/03/13/to-infinity-and-beyond-this-...
It must have been getting dim. The front of the bus is sharp, but everything else is a little out of focus. I was probably on maximum aperture (f2.8 on the Domiplan lens) which, of course, entailed narrow depth-of-field. My Praktica LTL was so subject to camera-shake that to use a speed slower than a 250th was chancing it ...hence the wide-open ap.
It was Monday 6th February 1978 and, after a stop-off at Macclesfield on the way up, a chum and I were now in Stockport, whose noted viaduct you will have already recognised. The bus was an ex North Western Bristol RELL6G with Alexander body. Much of the melancholy beauty of this scene is to do with paving. The flagstones, in whose depressions puddles of oily water collect, each smoothed and bedded into a slightly different plane from its neighbours by generations of local feet, reflect the lightless gleam of a rainy Cheshire sky. The shapes of setts show through a skimming of bitumen worn thin and patchy, and ...no, just bear with me a minute, I'm enjoying myself... yonder Atlantean has just avoided coming to rest with its rear nearside wheel in a sunken drain. I suppose it must all be smooth, vari-coloured asphalt, lane markings and yellow lines now.
On 14 August 1982 the Southern Electric Group ran their "Mary-Go-Round" 4SUB railtour from London to Ashford (Kent) for a Chart Leacon Depot Open Day. Owing to the age pf the stock and the higher current used for the Kent 1950/60s electrification, the train ran with heating fuses removed throughout and at Maidstone East the lighting fuses were also removed (being replaced later in the day). Here is the train, 4SUB 4749, heatless and lightless at Hollingbourne, east of Maidstone where a photo sop was made.
Entitled Black, Chinese and White laborers in a gold mine in South Africa [c1890-1923] F Carpenter [RESTORED]. The original, created from a copy negative, resides in the LOC under Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-40653. I did the usual spot removal, edge repair, contrast & tone adjustments and added a sepia tone.
This picture provides evidence of the early and steady immigration of Chinese labor, often to take on the toughest and dirtiest jobs, at seemingly the most remote places of the world. By the late 1800's to early 1900's, driven outward by famine and social upheaval within China, Chinese labor was literally found on all continents except for Antarctica. Not only did this phenomenon create a huge diaspora that thrives to this day, it was also the reason for the spread of what was then Asia's longest surviving, but barely known (outside of Asia) culture to the other parts of the world.
In early photography Chinese skin tones tended to be rendered so dark that it made them seem almost African in appearance, here's a great example of that and the historic mistakes that it can engender. It had to do with the inability of early film emulsions to fully record the red end of the spectrum. Since Asian skin tones, especially those that are well tanned, have ample red hues, the early films recorded them so darkly that they often appeared to be black. If one were to closely and carefully examine each face in the above photograph for its features, it becomes readily apparent that all of the supposedly black miners are really Asians (presumably Chinese) instead. Hence, the title of "Black, Chinese and White Laborers..." is obviously wrong.
But why would the title be mistaken? One has to ask oneself, that certainly the photographer must have known what he was photographing, right? There may be two separate explanations for this.
Possible Explanation 1. One has to remember that this was made from a copy negative. That is, there was an original print, and someone then took a picture of the original print, creating a copy negative. The original (with proper title) was lost; subsequent prints made from the copy negative without a proper title were then inappropriately given one by a busy technician. He or she probably didn't remember or did not know of the historic color sensitivity quirk of early films, and must have assumed that, surely some of those dark faces must have belonged to Africans (being that they're of mines in Africa). Ergo, the picture gained that mistaken title.
Possible Explanation 2. Take a look at that picture and imagine oneself back in the late 1800's to early 1900's, standing in a South African mine shaft; what would the physical situation have been like? How light or dark would it have been? That black Africans were plentiful and probably constituted the bulk of the mine's work force is a historic given, being as they were in Africa after all. It would be safe to assume that Frank Carpenter (the photographer), would have probably seen and encountered many Africans around the mines. However, would he have actually seen them while within a mine? The answer probably is no, not unless they were standing no more than two feet from the oil lamp that Carpenter was holding. The mines, being underground as they were, were also in pitch darkness, and portable light sources in those days were limited to primitive torches or storm lamps. Thus, it was likely very hard to see anything at all.
So how then was this picture taken? That the photo was made with a single light source is apparent, as there is only a single shadow. The shadow is also indistinct, that is, it has no solid edge. This means that the light itself was not a single pinpoint (like that of a tiny flash bulb) but rather a broadened source that would be more characteristic with a large board on which magnesium powder was laid. Hence, my belief is that this is probably a good example of Magnesium Flash Powder photography, in which a rapid burning combustible powder made from Magnesium filings mixed with gun powder produced a brief but extremely bright light source that aided photographers in dim or lightless situations. Carpenter himself could have thus misnamed the picture. He had probably assumed that some of the dark skinned people were Africans, as there were many in the mine the day that he took the picture. However, he probably never actually saw the scene or the people captured in it clearly enough when it happened; at least not until he processed his plates in his darkroom. Once the developed picture revealed dark faces, he too, may have fallen into the visual trap of mistaking some of them to be African, and so mislabeled the original photograph accordingly.
“Feeling at peace, however fragilely, made it easy to slip into the visionary end of the dark-sight. The rose shadows said that they loved the sun, but that they also loved the dark, where their roots grew through the lightless mystery of the earth. The roses said: You do not have to choose. ”
― Robin McKinley
From a spontaneous day of re-uniting with wonderful friends and photographing amongst roses on the side of a road, aswell as on a daisy filled roundabout, with people slowing down in their cars to see what we were up to. Was one to remember and exactly what I am meant to be doing! :D
Model: Danielle Justine Bradbury
Assistant: Ruth Thomas
www.lightoverwater.co.uk © Hamish Roots
Blog - Hamish Roots photoblog link
Dorset (I think?). After a fairy lightless morning - though nonetheless enjoyable in the company I shared it with - I started to head home, meandering along in no particular rush and just enjoying being out in fantastic surroundings. The sky started to clear, and then clear a lot...after an abortive attempt at one location by a lake it suddenly dawned on me a sunset might actually happen, just not there. So I plugged a few coordinates into the nav-computer and jumped to lightspeed (ok, just input a place in the satnav and headed on my merry way then...). It was apparent that down in the valleys the frost had all but disappeared but up on top of the hills there was still a fair wack of the stuff. Here's a tip: don't ever get stuck behind an OAP intent on doing 20mph everywhere...I appreciate and fully support their need to get around but suffice to say I was screaming my head off at them to move over as a line of traffic built up behind me and the beautiful light was changing incredibly rapidly in front(!). I spotted this through the side of my car window and slammed on the brakes (I was going legal speed 'onest!)... I eventually stopped after a comedy skid along a surprisingly icy road, hopped a fence and to catch this in the last moments of light. Handheld I'm afraid...the view and situation left me a little breathless but totally worth it, and it's sharp when peeping full size. Job done.
© Saira Bhatti
“Feeling at peace, however fragilely, made it easy to slip into the visionary end of the dark-sight. The rose shadows said that they loved the sun, but that they also loved the dark, where their roots grew through the lightless mystery of the earth. The roses said: You do not have to choose. ” ~Robin McKinley
Clouds covering the northern side while the city awaits the rain storm. My dad walk around the observation deck to take a view of the urbanscape whilst he kept warning me to leave early before the thick clouds hit the downtown. It was time to go for a good meal #Canon #Storm #Cloud
PLAY YOUR PLAYLIST*
1.List nhạc gồm ít nhất 30 bài.
2. Đặt máy nghe nhạc/chương trình nghe nhạc của bạn ở chế độ Ngẫu nhiên (shuffle/random).
3. Với mỗi câu hỏi, ấn next song để biết câu trả lời.
4. Bắt buộc phải viết tên bài hát dù nó ngu si như thế nào đi nữa so với câu hỏi.
5. Tag thêm 10 nạn nhân.
...
1.Nếu ai đó nhận xét rằng "Bạn rất ổn!" bạn sẽ nói:
Impossible
=>mặp xưa dờ =)))) khó giảm cân =))) ổn s nỗi =)))
2. Bạn sẽ tự giới thiệu như thế nào về bản thân?
Mystery
=> Ái chà ;)) Mình là 1 ng` bí ẩn =)))
3. Bạn thích điều gì ở 1 chàng trai/cô gái?
We R Who We R
=> Mình thíc họ bỡi chính tính cách của họ <3
4. Hôm nay bạn cảm thấy như thế nào?
Lightless
=> chẳng lẽ mình cảm thấy thíu ánh sáng s =)))
5. Mục đích sống của bạn?
F.U.N Song
=>Sống vì ~ ngừi mình iu thương :">>
6. Phương châm của bạn?
Knock out
=> Ko có dì là ko thể =]]]
7. Bạn bè nghĩ gì về bạn?
Idiot Friends
=> Mình bị chữi ngu qài à =))))
8. Bố mẹ bạn nghĩ gì về bạn?
Ngọt ngào
=)))) Hơi bị tự tin ấy nhà =))))
9. Dạo này bạn hay nghĩ đến chuyện gì?
Sexy Can I
=)))) Dnài đang giảm cân =))))
10. Câu chuyện cuộc đời bạn ?
Firework
=)))) Chả nhẽ cđời tôi là fáo pông à =))))
11. Khi lớn lên bạn muốn làm gì?
Beautiful Girl
=)))) ước mơ đấy mà =))))
12. Bạn nghĩ gì khi nhìn thấy người bạn thích ?
You Belong With Me
Ngừi đó sẽ thuộc dề tôi torng 1 ngày gần nhất :">>
13. Bạn sẽ hát bài gì trong đám cưới?
I Did Wrong
=)))) Hát chắc bị rượt qánh chếk =)))
14. Trong đám ma của bạn, người ta sẽ hát bài gì?
Gửi Ngàn Lời Yêu
Ý ;;) Z. là có qá chời ngừi iu mình =))))
15. Sở thích của bạn?
Eat You Up
=))) Chung tư tưởng vs mắm Lanh =)))
16. Bí mật lớn nhất của bạn?
Mình Em Lặng Thầm
NKH :X No table =)))
17. Nỗi sợ lớn nhất của bạn?
Tan
Mình ko muống bị tan biến khỏi TG này ! Imma angel :)))))
18. Điều bạn muốn ngay lúc này?
Take It Off
Tôi muống có 1 bo-dy cực chuẩn ! =)))
19. Bạn nghĩ gì về những người bạn của mình?
Just The Way You Are
:) Tôi <3 họ vì chính bản thân họ :X
20. Nếu bạn nuôi một con chó , tên nó sẽ là?
Tình Yêu Xanh Mượt
Cho dui thôi chứ chó tôi tên Lucky =)))
21. Bộ phim yêu thích?
Harry Potter
Tại nó có nhìu cái huyền ảo ;)) Mình thíc phép thuật <3
22. Hành động điên nhất vừa làm?
Who Let The Dog Out
=)))) Thả chó rượt chạy vòng vòng nhà =)))
23. Nhạc công sẽ chơi bài gì trong tang lễ của bạn?
Tell Me Goodbye
Muống nge nhạc cũa Big Bang trước khi yên ngĩ =)))
24. Điều gì khiến bạn cười?
Campfire Song Song
=))) Cái giọng đúng mắc cừi =)))) Nge qài hông chán
25. Điều gì khiến bạn khóc?
Nhớ Không Anh
Hồi ức ấy mà :d
26. Bạn đã kết hôn chưa?
Oh!
:">> Mình còn nhõ mà :">>
27. Điều gì làm bạn sợ nhất?
Change
Con ngừi ai cũng có lúc thay đỗi...
28. Có ai thích bạn không?
Lặng Yên
Hmm...Chắc là có ;)) Híhí=))
29. Nếu được quay ngược thời gian, bạn sẽ thay đổi điều gì?
Everything's Not What It Seems
Cũng ko biếc nữa :d
30. Ngay lúc này điều gì làm bạn tổn thương?
Lies
=> Sự dối trá ^^
Title: Unknown...
Artist: Ben Shahn
This item was in a thrift shop. I liked it but wanted to determine the artist before purchasing it. Mystery solved by comparing signatures after I realized it could be by Ben Shahn...
IMG_0660 - Version 3
_____________________
From Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shahn
Biography
Shahn was born in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, then occupied by the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel (Lieberman) Shahn. His father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and two younger siblings moved to Vilkomir (Ukmergė). In 1906, the family immigrated to the United States where they rejoined Hessel, who had fled Siberia. They settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, where two more siblings were born. His younger brother drowned at age 17.[1] Shahn began his path to becoming an artist in New York, where he was first trained as a lithographer. Shahn's early experiences with lithography and graphic design is apparent in his later prints and paintings which often include the combination of text and image. Shahn's primary medium was egg tempera, popular among social realists.
Although Shahn attended New York University as a biology student in 1919, he went on to pursue art at City College in 1921 and then at the National Academy of Design. After his marriage to Tillie Goldstein in 1924, the two traveled through North Africa and then to Europe, where he made "the traditional artist pilgrimage."[2] There he studied great European artists such as Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Georges Rouault, Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee. Contemporaries who would make a profound impact on Shahn's work and career include artists Walker Evans, Diego Rivera and Jean Charlot.[2]
Shahn was dissatisfied with the work inspired by his travels, claiming that the pieces were unoriginal.[2] Shahn eventually outgrew his pursuit of European modern art; he, instead, redirected his efforts toward a realist style which he used to contribute to social dialogue.[3]
The twenty-three gouache paintings of the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti communicated the political concerns of his time, rejecting academic prescriptions for subject matter. The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti was exhibited in 1932 and received acclaim from both the public and critics. This series gave Shahn the confidence to cultivate his personal style, regardless of society’s art standards.[4]
Work during the Great Depression
Photograph of a sailor taken by Shahn in Jackson Square, New Orleans, 1935.
Shahn's subsequent series of California labor leader Tom Mooney won him the recognition of Diego Rivera.[2] In May and June 1933, he served as an assistant to Diego Rivera while Rivera executed the Rockefeller Center mural. Shahn had a role in fanning the controversy, by circulating a petition among the workers. Also during this period, Shahn met photojournalist Bernarda Bryson, who would later become his second wife. Although this marriage was successful, the mural, his 1934 project for the Public Works of Art Projects and proposal for the Municipal Art Commission were all failures.[2] Fortunately, in 1935, Shahn was recommended by Walker Evans, a friend and former roommate, to Roy Stryker to join the photographic group at the Farm Security Administration (FSA). As a member of the FSA group, Shahn roamed and documented the American south together with his colleagues Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Like his earlier photography of New York City, Shahn’s FSA work can be viewed as social-documentary.[3] Similarly, Shahn’s New Deal art for the FSA and Resettlement Agency exposed American living and working conditions. He also worked for these agencies as a graphic artist and painter. Shahn’s fresco mural for the community center of Jersey Homesteads is among his most famous works, but the government also hired Shahn to execute the Bronx Central Annex Post Office and Social Security murals.[2] In 1939, Shahn and his wife produced a set of 13 murals inspired by Walt Whitman's poem I See America Working and installed at the United States Post Office-Bronx Central Annex.[5] Curator Susan Edwards recognizes the influence of this art on the public consciousness, writing, "The Roosevelt administration believed [such] images were useful for persuading not only voters but members of Congress to support federal relief and recovery programs… The art he made for the federal government affirms both his own legacy and that of the New Deal."[6]
World War II and beyond
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) poster (1946)
During the war years of 1942-43, Shahn worked for the Office of War Information (OWI), but his pieces lacked the preferred patriotism of the day and only two of his posters were published.[2] His art's anti-war sentiment found other forms of expression in a series of paintings from 1944–45, such as Death on the Beach, which depicts the desolation and loneliness of war.[7] In 1945 he painted Liberation about the Liberation of Paris which depicts children playing in the rubble[8] He also did a series, called Lucky Dragon, about the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (literally, Lucky Dragon No. 5), the Japanese fishing boat caught in the Bikini Atoll hydrogen bomb blast. As of 2012, an important part of this series is in the collections of Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art.[8]
From 1961 to 1967, Shahn worked on the stained glass at Temple Beth Zion, a Buffalo, NY synagogue designed by Harrison and Abramovitz.
Shahn also began to act as a commercial artist for CBS, Time, Fortune and Harper's. His well-known 1965 portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. appeared on the cover of Time.[7]
Despite Shahn's growing popularity, he only accepted commissions which he felt were of personal or social value.[4] By the mid-1950s, Shahn's accomplishments had reached such a height that he was sent, along with Willem de Kooning, to represent the United States at the 1954 Venice Biennale.[2] He was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Academia dell' Arte e del Disegno in Florence. The Art Directors Club Hall of Fame recognizes him as "one of the greatest masters of the twentieth century. Honors, books, and gallery retrospectives continue to rekindle interest in his work...years after his death."[9]
The artist was especially active as an academic in the last two decades of his life. He received honorary doctorates from Princeton University and Harvard University, and joined Harvard as a Charles Eliot Norton professor in 1956. His published writings, including The Biography of Painting (1956) and The Shape of Content (1960), became influential works in the art world.[2]
After his death, William Schuman composed "In Praise of Shahn", a modern canticle for orchestra, first performed January 29, 1970, by the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein conducting.[10]
Themes
Ben Shahn’s social-realist vision informed his approach to art. Shahn’s examination of the status quo inspired his creative process.[2] Although he often explored polemic themes of modern urban life, organized labor, immigration and injustice, he did so while maintaining a compassionate tone. Shahn identified himself as a communicative artist. He challenged the esoteric pretensions of art, which he believed disconnect artists and their work from the public.[11] As an alternative, he proposed an intimate and mutually beneficial relationship between artist and audience.
Shahn defended his choice to employ pictorial realities, rather than abstract forms. According to Shahn, known forms allow the artist "to discover new truths about man and to reaffirm that his life is significant."[11] References to allegory, the Jewish bible, humanistic content, childhood, science, music and the commonplace are other motifs Shahn draws upon to make the universal personal for his viewers.[12] Wit, candor and sentimentality give his images poignancy. By evoking dynamism, Shahn intended to inspire social change. Shahn stressed that in art, as in life, the combination of opposing orders is vital for progress.[2] His hope for a unity among the diverse peoples of the United States relates to his interest in fusing different visual vocabularies.
Style
Shahn mixed different genres of art. His body of art is distinctive for its lack of traditional landscapes, still lifes, and portraits.[4] Shahn used both expressive and precise visual languages, which he coalesced through the consistency of his authoritative line. His background in lithography contributed to his detail-oriented look [11] Shahn is also noted for his use of unique symbolism, which is often compared to the imagery in Paul Klee's drawings.[11] While Shahn's "love for exactitude"[13] is apparent in his graphics, so too is his creativity. In fact, many of his paintings are inventive adaptations of his photography.[13]
Evocative juxtapositions characterize his aesthetic. He intentionally paired contrasting scales, colors, and images together to create tension.[13] One signature example is seen in his play between industrial coolness and sympathetic portrayals.[11] Handball demonstrates his "use of architectural settings as both psychological foil to human figures and as expressive abstract pattern."[11]
His art is striking but also introspective. He often captured figures engrossed in their own worlds.[3] Many of his photographs were taken spontaneously, without the subject's notice. Although he used many mediums, his pieces are consistently thoughtful and playful.[4]
Jersey Homesteads Mural[edit]
Detail from "The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" (1967, mosaic), Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
The Farm Security Administration commissioned Ben Shahn to paint a mural for the community center of Jersey Homesteads (later renamed Roosevelt), a New Jersey town initially planned to be a community for Jewish garment workers. Shahn's move to the settlement demonstrates his dedication to the project as does his mural's compelling depiction of the town's founding.
Three panels compose the mural. According to art historian Diana L. Linden, the panels' sequence relates to that of the Haggadah, the Jewish Passover Seder text which follows a narrative of slavery, deliverance and redemption.[7] More specifically, Shahn’s mural depicts immigrants' struggle and advancement in the United States.
The first panel shows the antisemitic and xenophobic obstacles American immigrants faced. During the global Depression, citizens of the United States struggled for their livelihoods. Because foreigners represented competition for employment, they were especially unwelcome. National immigration quotas also reflected the strained foreign relations of the United States at a time when fascism, Nazism, and communism were on the rise. To illustrate the political and social adversary, Shahn incorporated loaded iconography: Nazi soldiers, anti-Jewish signs and the executed Italian anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti. Below, Shahn's mother and Albert Einstein lead immigrants on a gangplank situated by the Ellis Island registry center and the Statue of Liberty. This section demonstrates the immigrants' heroic emergence in the United States.
The middle panel describes the poor living conditions awaiting immigrants after their arrival. On the right, Shahn depicts the inhuman labor situation in the form of "lightless sweatshops...tedious and backbreaking work with outmoded tools."[13] The crowd in the center of the composition represents labor unions and workers' reform efforts. Here, a figure resembling labor leader John L. Lewis protests in front of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, where a devastating fire occurred and the movement for the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) began. The lower right passageway marked ILGWU symbolizes a new and hopeful path, in the United States, paved by unionized labor.[13]
In the last panel, the unions and the New Deal unite to create the blueprint for the town of the Jersey Homesteads. Various figures of social progress such as Sidney Hillman and Heywood Broun gather around the drafting table. Above them are images of the purposed cooperative farm and factory along with a campaign poster of Roosevelt, after whom the town was eventually named.
The arriccio, sinopia drawings of the fresco for Ben Shahn's Jersey Homesteads Mural, was removed from its original community center location in Roosevelt, NJ and is now permanently installed in a custom-designed gallery on the second floor of the US Post Office building at 401 Market St, Camden, NJ. This gallery adjoins the neighboring Mitchell H. Cohen Building and U.S. Courthouse (4th and Cooper Streets).
Shahn’s biographer Soby notes "the composition of the mural at Roosevelt follows the undulant principle Shahn had learned from Diego Rivera: deep recession of space alternating with human and architectural details projected forward."[13] Moreover, the montage effectively intimates the amalgamation of peoples and cultures populating the urban landscape in the early 20th century. Multiple layers and perspectives fuse together to portray a complex industrialized system. Still, the mural maintains a sense of humanity; Shahn gives his figures a monumental quality through volume and scale. The urban architecture does not dwarf the people; instead, they work with the surroundings to build their own structure. Shahn captured the urgency for activism and reform, by showing gestures and mid-steps and freezing all the subjects in motion. This pictorial incorporation of "athletic pose and evocative asymmetry of architectural detail" is a Shahn trademark.[13] While exemplifying his visual and social concerns, the mural characterizes the general issues of Shahn's milieu.
Artworks[edit]
Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco Their Guards,1932, Collection of Miss Patricia Healey Yale University
The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931–3, Whitney Museum
Untitled (Houston Street Playground, New York City), 1932, Fogg Art Museum
W.C.T.U Parade, 1933-4, Museum of the City of New York
Jersey Homesteads Mural, 1937-38, Community Center of the Federal Housing Development, Roosevelt, New Jersey
Still Music, 1938, Philips Collection, Washington DC
Handball, 1939, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Fund) [1]
The Meaning of Social Mural, 1940-2, Federal Security Building, Washington, DC
For Full Employment after the War, Register-Vote, 1944, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Allegory, 1948, Bill Bomar Collection at The Modern
Age of Anxiety, 1953, The Joseph H. Hirschhorn Foundation, Inc.
Exhibitions[edit]
"Ben Shahn: Paintings and Drawings," 1930, Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery in New York, New York
"57th Annual American Exhibition: Water Colors and Drawings," 1946, Tate Gallery in London, England
"Ben Shahn: A Retrospective," 1947, Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York
"Esposizione Biennale internationale D’Arte XXVII," 1954 in Venice, Italy
"Ben Shahn," 1962, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Belgium; Galleria Nazionale D'arte Moderna in Rome, Italy; and Albertina in Vienna, Austria.
"The Collected Prints of Ben Shahn," 1969, Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.
"Ben Shahn: A Retrospective Exhibition," 1969, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey.
"Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times," 2000-2001, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
this is a bit of lightpainting and an ORB thrown in. i love this affect so haunting
Adam and went to go down to brookwood cemetery. we drove for an hour parked up and walked to some interesting crypts, set up the camera went to take a shot when a bloke walked up. he said the owners were a bit funny about taking photos and we should go and talk to them to see what they say. we made our way to the office contacted a woman within who was a bit shocked about the late our. anyway turns out we walked past a big sign that says 'no photography or filming' it wasn't lit so we didn't see it!. we had to leave, on the way back we went to this old haunt. turned out a good night after all
le château de Bernstein, Alsace, France
un escalier étroit, raide et sans lumière permet d'accéder au sommet de la tour pour une superbe vue panoramique
~~~~
Bernstein Castle, Alsace, France
a narrow, steep, lightless staircase provides access to the top of the tower for a superb panoramic views
Where the Timetable has Forgotten: Hanson, Washington
The Art of Railroading | Field Notes from the Edge – Entry No. 004 (13Mar20)
It’s 0406 on March 13, 2020.
The clocks are silent, the timetables outlived. The only witness is the engineer—me—and three elder SD40-2s holding vigil in the cold fog, ghosts of Union Pacific, one carrying the faded lineage of Missouri Pacific like a hereditary scar.
We’re holding at Hanson but not tied down on the former Northern Pacific CW branch, 100 miles of agricultural umbilicus between Cheney and Coulee City. Washington Eastern Railroad now runs it under contract—proof that even in the age of logistics conglomerates, a rail line can survive by serving the humble, elemental need to move wheat from field to market.
Hanson isn’t a town. It’s a couple of grain elevators—one concrete, the other a corrugated covered wood crib—clinging to relevance where there is none outside of those who arrive and work the elevators for the wheat grower’s coop and us railroaders, a stub track scratched into the earth, and a name that lingers like the scent of old grain. No post office, no store. Only the clink of handbrake chain and the peeling metal of the elevator in the wind, the yawning hush of pre-dawn, and the belching black breath of waiting locomotives.
…and the old Burlington Northern “Hanson” station sign, clinging by a bent six-penny nail, as if even the name itself is struggling to remain remembered.
There used to be a house here, across the twisted road. I imagine its patriarch tending to the grain elevators in a time when harvest meant a constant rhythm of railcars, grain dust, and men working shoulder to shoulder with the land. The house is gone. But the memory still feels rooted—like the unplated ties buried just beneath dirt and traces of ballast.
Out by the Hanson track curve, an old Army truck leans into the lightless small hours of the day. It’s a G506—one of 154,204 1½-ton, 4x4 cargo/troop transports built by Chevy in Pontiac, Michigan during WWII. Whether it saw action in Europe, the Pacific, or nowhere at all is unclear. What’s certain is that the military dumped mountains of surplus post-V-Day, and this one found a second life here—serving its country not in combat, but in commerce, nudging railcars beneath the elevator spouts during wheat harvests. Though now, Rusting. Forgotten. A time capsule. An anachronistic sculpture. A relic with grit under its nails.
My conductor is still back in Almira finishing his paperwork where we just spotted a slug of empties. I have a few minutes to steal, and I shamelessly use it to make this image. No railfan would bother at this hour, and no sane man would loiter here for art’s sake. But sanity’s got nothing to do with railroading. Or memory.
The fog here hangs low, not unlike the veil between worlds—a hush laid gently over a land that remembers its dead. Somewhere beyond the elevators, through stubbled wheat fields and slumbering hummocks, lies an overgrown cemetery. Forgotten by most, but unforgotten by the land.
Its tombstones are weather-scoured, their names and epitaphs softened by wind, rain, and the silence of a hundred winters, inscribed in a language foreign to this prairie, but divine in its clarity to those who bore it across ocean and continent:
Araf deg mae mynd ymhell — Go slowly and go far.
There are fewer than a dozen stones left. One bears the name Richard John Hughes—Mabi, it says, baby of John and Jane—born and gone in 1898. Another marks Benjamin Williams, born in a place called “Blanplent,” Cardedanshire, South Wales—a place so obscure it escapes Google. These settlers were miners, mostly—coal-stained hands turned wheat-furrowed palms. They fled the soot of southern Wales to try their fate on the wind-bitten plains of Eastern Washington.
Before the cemetery came the church—Welsh Calvinist. Long since God-forsaken and razed. But in its time, it was a beacon of cultural continuity. Eisteddfodau. Gymanfa ganu. Gatherings that gave shape and voice to a people wrestling with assimilation yet rooted in their inheritance. They carved a chapel and their names into this soil with equal reverence.
And isn’t that what this branch line has done?
Not fast. Not flashy. But it has gone far—further than the corporations that once owned it, further than the men who laid its first rails with pick and dream.
Here, beneath the fog and the ballast, lie echoes. Not of steel and progress, but of fidelity, sacrifice, and quiet triumph. Pflichtbewusstsein, the Germans who co-settled here might have called it—a deep, marrow-born sense of duty.
And me? I was just there to move a train.
But now, this moment, this image—it’s a gravestone too.
Not for the dead, but for the nearly forgotten.
*****
[Photographer’s Note]
The unusual contour of this image is not a flaw—it is a signature. Made with a wide-angle lens in the unforgiving pre-dawn dark, the image was later corrected for distortion while preserving every sliver of the original frame. No corners trimmed. No edges sacrificed. The result: a freeform boundary of obtuse and acute angles, of curves and tension—echoing the unruly, organic nature of the moment itself. This deliberate process rejects the tyranny of conformity, honoring instead the full canvas of experience as it was seen, not merely how it is expected to appear.
Forma sequitur fidem.
“If it breaks the rules, perhaps the rules were brittle.”
"The rose shadows said that they loved the sun, but they also loved the dark where their roots grew through the lightless mystery of the earth. The roses said: You do not have to choose."
- Robin McKinley
There will be a total eclipse here in August. Eeek!
P\Here's part of Annie Dillard's fine essay 'Total Eclipse' penned after 1979's eclipse:
The sky’s blue was deepening, but there was no darkness. The sun was a wide crescent, like a segment of tangerine. The wind freshened and blew steadily over the hill. The eastern hill across the highway grew dusky and sharp. The towns and orchards in the valley to the south were dissolving into the blue light. Only the thin river held a trickle of sun.
Now the sky to the west deepened to indigo, a color never seen. A dark sky usually loses color. This was a saturated, deep indigo, up in the air. Stuck up into that unworldly sky was the cone of Mount Adams, and the alpenglow was upon it. The alpenglow is that red light of sunset which holds out on snowy mountain tops long after the valleys and tablelands are dimmed. “Look at Mount Adams,” I said, and that was the last sane moment I remember.
I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day.
All day and night, save winter, every weather,
Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,
The aspens at the cross-roads talk together
Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.
Out of the blacksmith's cavern comes the ringing
Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn
The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing—
The sounds that for these fifty years have been.
The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,
And over lightless pane and footless road,
Empty as sky, with every other sound
Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,
A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails
In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,
In tempest or the night of nightingales,
To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.
And it would be the same were no house near.
Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,
Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear
But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.
Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves
We cannot other than an aspen be
That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,
Or so men think who like a different tree.
The Paw Paw Tunnel is a 3,118-foot (950 m) long canal tunnel on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Allegany County, Maryland.[1] Located near Paw Paw, West Virginia, it was built to bypass the Paw-Paw Bends, a six-mile stretch of the Potomac River containing five horseshoe bends.
Construction on the tunnel began in 1836 but was not completed until 1850. Although it was originally planned to be completed in two years, there were many difficulties in the process of construction. The construction company seriously underestimated the difficulty of the job. Violence frequently broke out between various gangs of immigrant laborers of different ethnicities, and wages were often unpaid due to the company's financial problems.[2] The tunnel was finally completed with a cost overrun of 500%. Though surpassed by many tunnels today, it remains one of the world's longest canal tunnels and one of the greatest engineering feats of its day.
--Wikepedia
I drove up to Paw Paw WV the other weekend to ride the C&O Canal. I had seen this on the map and thought "This will be fun". Okay, aside from the extereme CREEP FACTOR, have you ever tried to walk through a almost mile long lightless, dark, musty old tunnel? By yourself?? I actually made it halfway, and had to pick up my bike to turn it around to get the heck out.
View large/on black to really see the depth of the image.
... printed on the front of a steel drum issued by the Office of Civil Defense during the Cold War, sometime around 1960.
On March 21, the New York Times printed an article about a cache of civil defense supplies that was recently discovered inside the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge. The Times wrote:
===================
City workers were conducting a regular structural inspection of the bridge last Wednesday when they came across the cold-war-era hoard of water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and calorie-packed crackers -- an estimated 352,000 of them, sealed in dozens of watertight metal canisters and, it seems, still edible.
To step inside the vault -- a dank and lightless room where the walls are lined with dusty boxes -- is to be vividly reminded of the anxieties that dominated American life during the military rivalry with the Soviet Union, an era when air-raid sirens and fallout shelters were standard elements of the grade-school curriculum.
[...]
The officials would not open any of the supplies because of safety concerns over germs, but Mr. Vaccaro said that one of the canisters had broken open, and inside it, workers found the crackers intact in wax-paper wrapping.
Nearby were several dozen boxes with sealed bottles of Dextran, made by Wyeth Laboratories in Philadelphia. More mysterious were about 50 metal drums, made by United States Steel in Camden, N.J. According to the label, each was intended to hold 17.5 gallons and to be converted, if necessary, for ''reuse as a commode.'' They are now empty.
===================
I had to laugh, because I have three of those cannisters, which originally came from a similar Civil Defense stockpile on the campus of Yale University. This is one of them.
The Civil Defense Museum has lots more detail and several historical photos of these storage drums here.
"Into its shadow dreams crowded, full of conceptions and stirrings of cold, as if icefloes were moving down a lightless channel of water. They were going in orderly slow procession, moving from darkness further into darkness, allowing no suggestion that their order should be broken, or that one day, however many years distant, the darkness would begin to give place to light.
Yet their passage was not saddening. Unsatisfied dreams rose and fell about them, crying out against the implacability, but in the end glad that such order, such destiny, existed. Against this knowledge, the heart, the will, and all that made for protest, could at least sleep."
- Philip Larkin, A Girl in Winter
To Infinity and Beyond: This Is the Afterlife ~
Turning inside out, the young shaman falls though a long swirling tunnel formed of his inverted self, his unbodied mouth and eyes agape in a primal rush toward extinction.
He accelerates t
hrough a tightly wound vortex that shifts and bends to accommodate his course, always centred in the swirling tube which never touches his falling, disembodied perspective. The tunnel is made of light, and of his own bloodstream, and of all the memories and unremembered details of materiality and personality that made up his life – yet not merely ‘his’ life.
Every human, fish, bird, animal, insect, cell and blood corpuscle that has ever lived is there with him, all at once – the dying shaman can feel their bright fear and ecstasy pouring through him as they all rush toward an unseen destination around the curving, translucent bends of the primal vortex. Even though every being dies alone – no matter if a multitude of witnesses is present – the moment of death itself is one great screaming orgasm experienced simultaneously by every one, every single thing that has ever lived – all our eyes and mouths and ganglia agape at the same simultaneous culmination of our material existence.
The tunnel is an eternally vivid living record of past events and future dreams, all memories and visions embroidered into the seamless fabric of its swirl – and Ram’yana’s private past and the panoply of his personal memories are displayed most prominently to him, brightly livid episodes which emerge from the tubular walls as he passes. His strongest experiences – the most impressive ones, that imprinted themselves most brightly into the palimpsest of his being – leap out at him in high relief as he turns and twists and falls and flies, a singular eye of consciousness accelerating toward the endless end of the convoluted time tunnel that’s leading him home.
As the world we experience slips past us at the periphery of our sensoria, an ongoing tunnel vision moves with us at the extremity of our perceptions, whether dying, dead or alive. Journeying out of the physical plane, outside the material matrix of the world, Ram’yana is beyond time and the ken of time-bound beings; as he leaves four dimensional Timespace and approaches the speed of light everything twists into a tunnel which lengthens fore and aft.
He sees his grandfather and grandmother, Mickey Mouse and Pluto, all the dogs and cats and mice and goldfish that shared his boyhood years, the smells of his houses and the flavours of his lovers. He hears the laughter of his kindergarten friends, their bright faces visible all around him singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’, while pretty little Abigail jumps over a spinning rope twirled by Gina and Hannah, her long blonde pink-ribboned pigtails rotating around the sides of her head.
He holds his mother’s huge hand, grasping her finger through the wooden bars of his bassinet while she sings to him in the sultry evening air. He witnesses the expression of semi-resigned shock on his father’s face during the Cuban missile crisis and again when Kennedy was shot, sees the squashed remains of mosquitoes on the wall above his crib, watches the strange lights moving in the sky while all the neighbours point and speculate, sinks again with a collapsing sandbank on Bondi Beach, swept away with hundreds of panicking faces being pulled out to the deep sea along with him, while hundreds of man-eating sharks are driven off by the beating, splashing oars of desperate lifesavers.
He sees his mother’s eyes for the first time all over again and screams at the hard slap on his bottom as he hangs before Doctor Traub’s thick-lensed glasses in the bright, antiseptic birth theatre. His paternal grandmother smiles at him as she leans over and obscures his view of the magnificent giant yellow flowers of the magnolia tree while she wheels him in his pram; he can still smell the cloying fragrance of the flowers. His mother’s mother screams as he holds a dingo puppy up for her inspection and she tumbles over backward in her bedroom, breaking her hip while his eight year old eyes wash the scene away with tears that burn through the illusory years.
The Cat in the Hat and the Mighty Thor; the smell and Hungarian accent of alcoholic Uncle Tony, putting him off beer for years with his first taste of bitter ale at the age of six, and the bright laughing face of his babysitter Wendy by the blazing wood fire; the spray of blood when he cut his wrist falling onto a broken bottle at the age of three and the dizzying view from the emergency surgeon’s high private balcony; the first time he kissed a girl and the first time he dreamed of kissing a girl, all bound up together; flying through the sky in a propeller-driven passenger plane, watching circular rainbows following him in the clouds below.
White sulphur-crested cockatoos and sparrows circle his yard while kookaburras laugh in the gum trees; the first terrifying time his father holds him up high in the air to place him in the fork of a tree; his first night after he ran away from home, reclining on a beanbag in a Kings Cross commune reading Philip Jose Farmer’s pertinent To Your Scattered Bodies Go – everything is there, each scene and sensation embedded within and revealing a multitude of others. Everything. His dying mind seeks out everything he’s ever experienced, seeking a way back into the womb of living as he falls through something else entirely, riding a rollercoaster beyond the imagination of the most topologically tormented tycoon.
As Ram’yana falls he flashes before the eyes of his whole life – as others fall with him, many others, all others, sharing the time tunnel with his self-judging awareness. In the eternity of the Fall everything hidden or repressed is exposed in the Divine Light of clear sight and each being is their own Judge, emerging from the blindfold of their material existence to weigh their own soul on the ineradicable scales of justice and mercy. Conscience is the soul and the soul is immortally, inescapably honest with itself when released from the fetters of self-deceit and delusion.
Beyond time, at the singular moment of the great primal rush that is the birth and death canal leading from one world to the next, everyone experiences the same thingat the same time. We all come and go together in a mind-blowing orgasm; dreaming or screaming, laughing or crying, all emotion quails and pales before the rush of unstoppable motion that dwarfs any and every trivial concern.
No thought of gods or devils, life or death in the primal scream toward the Light at the end of the tunnel – the only thing that matters is holding onto your headless hat and the wordless regrets felt toward all the people, animals and conscious entities you ever knew deeply, or ever loved – and still love, deeply, tenderly, with a perspective of forgiveness, understanding and compassion never vouchsafed to your flesh-bound, in-coiled, emotion-embroiled mortal personality.
Ram is every human who ever lived and died, every fish ever caught in a current to swirl down into lightless depths beyond its control, every bird caught in a whirlwind that flings it to flinders, every animal diving for cover into cloaking vegetation from an inescapable predator, every individual blood corpuscle flinging itself on the way to the crushing pressure at the heart of its warm, pulsating cosmos. As he pours through the end of the world the tunnel twists and whirls, always hiding the point of it all, the point of no return, the heart of the matter, the source of every thing and being – and his mind expands to simultaneously see his spiraling course as a single thread in a vast interwoven image.
The tunnel is one thread among myriad drab and colourful strands in a great uncharitable tapestry, an inextricable part of its intricate pattern. The dying shaman follows the course of his life along its undulating strand and sees that his thread rises and falls above and beneath uncountable other interlocking threads, a spectrum of hues and textures in the enormously unfathomable tapestry. As his thread rises above another he is ‘conscious’, while the thread it occludes is ‘dreaming’; where his strand is covered by another thread, his mortal body sleeps and dreams while the other strand lives their waking life. Everyone and everything is there, all at once, simultaneously, lain out and displayed before him with no need for the flow of time to elucidate the infinite multiplicity of being.
Turn the tapestry around. The thought comes unbidden and the cloth reverses itself around him in a loopy topological twist; the implicately shared complementary nature of consciousness becomes apparent to his blown mind as he sees himself dreaming the lives of others, and others dreaming through his waking eyes and flesh. The intermingling pathways wind around the curving delineaments of their divine co-creation, which turns into itself like a Moebius strip until the beginning of one thread seamlessly winds into the end of another. The falcon is the hunter is the arrow is the feather is the truth. All is alive and whole; nothing is partial or frayed.
The tapestry is vast, but he’s able to follow his individuated thread through the colourful patterns and sees that the enormous conglomeration of dreams and lives is incomplete – not completed by the path of the single thread that is his experience of existence, rising from the tapestry to enter him as him. At the same timeless moment, Ram’yana approaches the plexus of light that is the destiny of all nations, women and men – the future and past of all that are born to fall along with him, minds blown in the blinding light of the immortal portal.
An immaculate blazing white-hot sun glows at the end of the tunnel. He can see it ever more clearly through the transparing walls of the vortex, thinning and fading in the face of the overwhelmingly brilliant source and core of existence. Ram sees the arcs of a trans-finite net spreading outward from the source, sees an infinitude of other vortices approaching its plexus from more angles than he can wrap his bodiless head around. They pass through each other in ways that defy and tease his mortal three-dimensionally entrained mind – but the arrangement makes subtle sense to a higher form of his being, trembling on the edge of an unchartable metamorphosis into something so much greater as to be intrinsically unimaginable. Simultaneously, on another level, the individual personality of the shaman approaches its ultimate rebirth and transformation in his flight toward the blinding light of the central sun.
The source of all is the hot, bright core and central axis of the centreless multiverse, the eternal end of every tunnel; the maw of a transdimensional creature about to swallow him up, the Infinite Light of God and his own silent heart gently glowing in timeless repose. He flies around a final bend in the dissolving tunnel, surging toward the arcane net that veils the core – which flares into him as the tunnel widens, opening into the final straight.
Ram’yana flashes toward the weave that’s flung to the ends of the cosmos, spreading himself to embrace the Light – and as he reaches it, he encounters the safety net. A web-like sieve is strung across the open maw of All, and as Ram’yana passes though it a great, resounding BOUMMB fills the boundless universe – the sound of one heartbeat, as loud as the boom that eternally creates the unborn, ever-living universe; the sound of Shiva’s eye opening and of one hand clapping.
Before your time, he hears and feels, not ready, not yet – unfinished – and he feels himself shrinking toward an infinitesimally small spot in the multitude of multiverses – back into the weave, where plan net X marks the spot where all things meet in his current-bound primate life.
Boumb… Boom…. Boom!
That’s why I’m here, writing this to you ‘now’ – the same ‘now’ that you are reading it in, really. I and eye remember it all vividly, not as something to slowly forget or avoid in the unfocused mind’s eye, but as an ongoing experience that is with me now, always, dynamically imprinted. It is with me as it is with you, when you close your eyes and open your memory to see truly through the waters of forgetfulness, to the infinite waters of eternal life.
Life and death, sensory wakefulness and supersensory dreaming are the same thing, appearing as the warp and weft of the reversible tapestry of existence. And everyone, each of us, is the whole tapestry, inextricably interwoven – everyone is everyone, and that’s about as close as this constraining corsetry of early third millennium Inglesh needs to get at this point in infinite time – xcept, perhaps, for the most important thing of all -
Every one you truly touch and are touched by, in every way, leaves the deepest and most prominent engravings in your heart, mind and soul. What we do unto others is what we do to ourselves – and other living beings are more than mere memory mirrors or handy usable tools. That’s what draws us back for more, and more again – the need to do better by our selves – over and over, until we do it right. Then we get another choice – or another chance to ride the carousel Wheel of Fortune again, if we so choose.
The multiple layers of ascendant consciousness are a self-filtering system of co-evolution – a system of slowly developing focus and perspective that leads our awareness to other dimensions, already inextricably interwoven with the relatively ‘familiar’ bounds of our largely unknown but ever-present reality. There’s no dim-witted hierarchy of order-givers or sword-wielding guardians barring the doors of higher perception – the gateway to Heaven on Earth. There’s just you – and me, and all of us, together. We all have our time to shine, and that time is always now.
Yet Death is not Dying. In the Bardo spaces between thy flowering carnations of existence, all the bright religious hopes and turgid superstitious terrors await the untrained monkey mind in its ongoing fall toward dissolution or reintegration. The Bardo Realms are entire worlds or pocket universes as apparently solid as the full-blown reality ye imagine around thee, right where thou art sitting, right now. How do ye know thou art alive, not dreaming this experience, right here and now? Do ye think that’s air you’re breathing?
A true story
By Ram Ayana @ hermetic.blog.com/2012/03/13/to-infinity-and-beyond-this-...
I went in search of an offering, a picture wanting to be caught. I walked along, whistling a tune in my head, pretending i was not seeking enlightenment or a moment perfect for freezing time's forward rush. If asked the question, "what are you doing?" i would have been all innocence, admitting nothing for fear of scattering the muses, sending them to run for cover.
No one asked. No one even noticed me, the woman in black, walking up and down the urban sidewalks, east to west, then north to south. Not even a glance from the tennis players wearing mufflers and mittens as i cut through the wooded park, looking left, looking right.
The mid-day's sky was a flattened grey, appearing lightless, bland, practically one dimensional. The thought passed over that it might have been a better day spent indoors exploring a palette of sea blue-greens with brush and ink on Arches than a day spent trudging about be-gloved and bundled to the teeth.
It seemed there were to be no pictures today. None at all were lying in wait for me to come upon them with my camera. I heard not a single image call me out of my grumpy daze with a whispered or even shouted greeting "here i am! i have been waiting for you to see me!". It really was time to go home. It started to sprinkle and the sun seemed to be trapped behind the veil of that mood-less grey sky.
I turned the corner heading back to the car. I was mid-stride when i looked to my left and heard the call, "come to me..." I stopped then and saw a seemingly endless corridor of trees arching across the sidewalk as if to shelter the stone itself. It was really just an ordinary winter drab scene of harshly pruned trees, a cracked sidewalk, a black iron fence and a couple stepping out from the park.
But what i saw in my mind was something quite extraordinarily different. It was the tunnel of love, the road less travelled, the door to narnia, wonderland or the final call to heaven. I took exactly one photograph, knowing beyond doubt that it was my gift, my reward for not going after the picture but allowing it to find me. It was an altered dimension. It materialized out of nothing, constructed itself in a bright flash of light. It was nature's architectural art and I felt touched by grace and humility. I smiled and bowed my head in thanks, moving off and home for the day. Believe me. It happened in exactly this way.
Love, Robin
One of my personal favourites, fixed and tweaked.
Very dark night, in a lightless alley armed with only a spotlight/torch.
Well over 3 minutes at F8, ISO200
Barnard 252 – The Cosmic Seahorse in the Dark
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At first glance, it may look like an empty patch of space… but look again. Slithering across a rich field of stars lies Barnard 252, a dark nebula in Scorpius, sculpted by dense clouds of interstellar dust that block the starlight behind it. Also nicknamed the "Seahorse Nebula" for its shape, this silhouette reveals the raw, cold material from which stars are eventually born.
Invisible to the naked eye and completely devoid of visible glow, Barnard 252 is revealed only through long exposures that expose the contrast between darkness and stellar light. These dark nebulae are essential pieces of our galactic puzzle—harboring secrets of stellar formation in their silent, lightless embrace.
Coordinates: RA 17h 51m, Dec -30° 20′
Constellation: Scorpius
Type: Dark Nebula
A subtle, yet poetic reminder: not all beauty in the cosmos comes from light. Sometimes, it’s the shadows that tell the story.
Lights: 80x600" (LRGB)
Telescope: Planewave CDK24
Camera: FLI ProLine PL9000
Filters: LRGB Astrodon
Processed: Pixinsight
Date: 23/03/2021
Sara Bichão (b. 1986) - From the installation Lightless (2024). Shown at the Serralves Foundation- Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, June-November 2024.
To Infinity and Beyond: This Is the Afterlife ~
Turning inside out, the young shaman falls though a long swirling tunnel formed of his inverted self, his unbodied mouth and eyes agape in a primal rush toward extinction.
He accelerates t
hrough a tightly wound vortex that shifts and bends to accommodate his course, always centred in the swirling tube which never touches his falling, disembodied perspective. The tunnel is made of light, and of his own bloodstream, and of all the memories and unremembered details of materiality and personality that made up his life – yet not merely ‘his’ life.
Every human, fish, bird, animal, insect, cell and blood corpuscle that has ever lived is there with him, all at once – the dying shaman can feel their bright fear and ecstasy pouring through him as they all rush toward an unseen destination around the curving, translucent bends of the primal vortex. Even though every being dies alone – no matter if a multitude of witnesses is present – the moment of death itself is one great screaming orgasm experienced simultaneously by every one, every single thing that has ever lived – all our eyes and mouths and ganglia agape at the same simultaneous culmination of our material existence.
The tunnel is an eternally vivid living record of past events and future dreams, all memories and visions embroidered into the seamless fabric of its swirl – and Ram’yana’s private past and the panoply of his personal memories are displayed most prominently to him, brightly livid episodes which emerge from the tubular walls as he passes. His strongest experiences – the most impressive ones, that imprinted themselves most brightly into the palimpsest of his being – leap out at him in high relief as he turns and twists and falls and flies, a singular eye of consciousness accelerating toward the endless end of the convoluted time tunnel that’s leading him home.
As the world we experience slips past us at the periphery of our sensoria, an ongoing tunnel vision moves with us at the extremity of our perceptions, whether dying, dead or alive. Journeying out of the physical plane, outside the material matrix of the world, Ram’yana is beyond time and the ken of time-bound beings; as he leaves four dimensional Timespace and approaches the speed of light everything twists into a tunnel which lengthens fore and aft.
He sees his grandfather and grandmother, Mickey Mouse and Pluto, all the dogs and cats and mice and goldfish that shared his boyhood years, the smells of his houses and the flavours of his lovers. He hears the laughter of his kindergarten friends, their bright faces visible all around him singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’, while pretty little Abigail jumps over a spinning rope twirled by Gina and Hannah, her long blonde pink-ribboned pigtails rotating around the sides of her head.
He holds his mother’s huge hand, grasping her finger through the wooden bars of his bassinet while she sings to him in the sultry evening air. He witnesses the expression of semi-resigned shock on his father’s face during the Cuban missile crisis and again when Kennedy was shot, sees the squashed remains of mosquitoes on the wall above his crib, watches the strange lights moving in the sky while all the neighbours point and speculate, sinks again with a collapsing sandbank on Bondi Beach, swept away with hundreds of panicking faces being pulled out to the deep sea along with him, while hundreds of man-eating sharks are driven off by the beating, splashing oars of desperate lifesavers.
He sees his mother’s eyes for the first time all over again and screams at the hard slap on his bottom as he hangs before Doctor Traub’s thick-lensed glasses in the bright, antiseptic birth theatre. His paternal grandmother smiles at him as she leans over and obscures his view of the magnificent giant yellow flowers of the magnolia tree while she wheels him in his pram; he can still smell the cloying fragrance of the flowers. His mother’s mother screams as he holds a dingo puppy up for her inspection and she tumbles over backward in her bedroom, breaking her hip while his eight year old eyes wash the scene away with tears that burn through the illusory years.
The Cat in the Hat and the Mighty Thor; the smell and Hungarian accent of alcoholic Uncle Tony, putting him off beer for years with his first taste of bitter ale at the age of six, and the bright laughing face of his babysitter Wendy by the blazing wood fire; the spray of blood when he cut his wrist falling onto a broken bottle at the age of three and the dizzying view from the emergency surgeon’s high private balcony; the first time he kissed a girl and the first time he dreamed of kissing a girl, all bound up together; flying through the sky in a propeller-driven passenger plane, watching circular rainbows following him in the clouds below.
White sulphur-crested cockatoos and sparrows circle his yard while kookaburras laugh in the gum trees; the first terrifying time his father holds him up high in the air to place him in the fork of a tree; his first night after he ran away from home, reclining on a beanbag in a Kings Cross commune reading Philip Jose Farmer’s pertinent To Your Scattered Bodies Go – everything is there, each scene and sensation embedded within and revealing a multitude of others. Everything. His dying mind seeks out everything he’s ever experienced, seeking a way back into the womb of living as he falls through something else entirely, riding a rollercoaster beyond the imagination of the most topologically tormented tycoon.
As Ram’yana falls he flashes before the eyes of his whole life – as others fall with him, many others, all others, sharing the time tunnel with his self-judging awareness. In the eternity of the Fall everything hidden or repressed is exposed in the Divine Light of clear sight and each being is their own Judge, emerging from the blindfold of their material existence to weigh their own soul on the ineradicable scales of justice and mercy. Conscience is the soul and the soul is immortally, inescapably honest with itself when released from the fetters of self-deceit and delusion.
Beyond time, at the singular moment of the great primal rush that is the birth and death canal leading from one world to the next, everyone experiences the same thingat the same time. We all come and go together in a mind-blowing orgasm; dreaming or screaming, laughing or crying, all emotion quails and pales before the rush of unstoppable motion that dwarfs any and every trivial concern.
No thought of gods or devils, life or death in the primal scream toward the Light at the end of the tunnel – the only thing that matters is holding onto your headless hat and the wordless regrets felt toward all the people, animals and conscious entities you ever knew deeply, or ever loved – and still love, deeply, tenderly, with a perspective of forgiveness, understanding and compassion never vouchsafed to your flesh-bound, in-coiled, emotion-embroiled mortal personality.
Ram is every human who ever lived and died, every fish ever caught in a current to swirl down into lightless depths beyond its control, every bird caught in a whirlwind that flings it to flinders, every animal diving for cover into cloaking vegetation from an inescapable predator, every individual blood corpuscle flinging itself on the way to the crushing pressure at the heart of its warm, pulsating cosmos. As he pours through the end of the world the tunnel twists and whirls, always hiding the point of it all, the point of no return, the heart of the matter, the source of every thing and being – and his mind expands to simultaneously see his spiraling course as a single thread in a vast interwoven image.
The tunnel is one thread among myriad drab and colourful strands in a great uncharitable tapestry, an inextricable part of its intricate pattern. The dying shaman follows the course of his life along its undulating strand and sees that his thread rises and falls above and beneath uncountable other interlocking threads, a spectrum of hues and textures in the enormously unfathomable tapestry. As his thread rises above another he is ‘conscious’, while the thread it occludes is ‘dreaming’; where his strand is covered by another thread, his mortal body sleeps and dreams while the other strand lives their waking life. Everyone and everything is there, all at once, simultaneously, lain out and displayed before him with no need for the flow of time to elucidate the infinite multiplicity of being.
Turn the tapestry around. The thought comes unbidden and the cloth reverses itself around him in a loopy topological twist; the implicately shared complementary nature of consciousness becomes apparent to his blown mind as he sees himself dreaming the lives of others, and others dreaming through his waking eyes and flesh. The intermingling pathways wind around the curving delineaments of their divine co-creation, which turns into itself like a Moebius strip until the beginning of one thread seamlessly winds into the end of another. The falcon is the hunter is the arrow is the feather is the truth. All is alive and whole; nothing is partial or frayed.
The tapestry is vast, but he’s able to follow his individuated thread through the colourful patterns and sees that the enormous conglomeration of dreams and lives is incomplete – not completed by the path of the single thread that is his experience of existence, rising from the tapestry to enter him as him. At the same timeless moment, Ram’yana approaches the plexus of light that is the destiny of all nations, women and men – the future and past of all that are born to fall along with him, minds blown in the blinding light of the immortal portal.
An immaculate blazing white-hot sun glows at the end of the tunnel. He can see it ever more clearly through the transparing walls of the vortex, thinning and fading in the face of the overwhelmingly brilliant source and core of existence. Ram sees the arcs of a trans-finite net spreading outward from the source, sees an infinitude of other vortices approaching its plexus from more angles than he can wrap his bodiless head around. They pass through each other in ways that defy and tease his mortal three-dimensionally entrained mind – but the arrangement makes subtle sense to a higher form of his being, trembling on the edge of an unchartable metamorphosis into something so much greater as to be intrinsically unimaginable. Simultaneously, on another level, the individual personality of the shaman approaches its ultimate rebirth and transformation in his flight toward the blinding light of the central sun.
The source of all is the hot, bright core and central axis of the centreless multiverse, the eternal end of every tunnel; the maw of a transdimensional creature about to swallow him up, the Infinite Light of God and his own silent heart gently glowing in timeless repose. He flies around a final bend in the dissolving tunnel, surging toward the arcane net that veils the core – which flares into him as the tunnel widens, opening into the final straight.
Ram’yana flashes toward the weave that’s flung to the ends of the cosmos, spreading himself to embrace the Light – and as he reaches it, he encounters the safety net. A web-like sieve is strung across the open maw of All, and as Ram’yana passes though it a great, resounding BOUMMB fills the boundless universe – the sound of one heartbeat, as loud as the boom that eternally creates the unborn, ever-living universe; the sound of Shiva’s eye opening and of one hand clapping.
Before your time, he hears and feels, not ready, not yet – unfinished – and he feels himself shrinking toward an infinitesimally small spot in the multitude of multiverses – back into the weave, where plan net X marks the spot where all things meet in his current-bound primate life.
Boumb… Boom…. Boom!
That’s why I’m here, writing this to you ‘now’ – the same ‘now’ that you are reading it in, really. I and eye remember it all vividly, not as something to slowly forget or avoid in the unfocused mind’s eye, but as an ongoing experience that is with me now, always, dynamically imprinted. It is with me as it is with you, when you close your eyes and open your memory to see truly through the waters of forgetfulness, to the infinite waters of eternal life.
Life and death, sensory wakefulness and supersensory dreaming are the same thing, appearing as the warp and weft of the reversible tapestry of existence. And everyone, each of us, is the whole tapestry, inextricably interwoven – everyone is everyone, and that’s about as close as this constraining corsetry of early third millennium Inglesh needs to get at this point in infinite time – xcept, perhaps, for the most important thing of all -
Every one you truly touch and are touched by, in every way, leaves the deepest and most prominent engravings in your heart, mind and soul. What we do unto others is what we do to ourselves – and other living beings are more than mere memory mirrors or handy usable tools. That’s what draws us back for more, and more again – the need to do better by our selves – over and over, until we do it right. Then we get another choice – or another chance to ride the carousel Wheel of Fortune again, if we so choose.
The multiple layers of ascendant consciousness are a self-filtering system of co-evolution – a system of slowly developing focus and perspective that leads our awareness to other dimensions, already inextricably interwoven with the relatively ‘familiar’ bounds of our largely unknown but ever-present reality. There’s no dim-witted hierarchy of order-givers or sword-wielding guardians barring the doors of higher perception – the gateway to Heaven on Earth. There’s just you – and me, and all of us, together. We all have our time to shine, and that time is always now.
Yet Death is not Dying. In the Bardo spaces between thy flowering carnations of existence, all the bright religious hopes and turgid superstitious terrors await the untrained monkey mind in its ongoing fall toward dissolution or reintegration. The Bardo Realms are entire worlds or pocket universes as apparently solid as the full-blown reality ye imagine around thee, right where thou art sitting, right now. How do ye know thou art alive, not dreaming this experience, right here and now? Do ye think that’s air you’re breathing?
A true story
By Ram Ayana @ hermetic.blog.com/2012/03/13/to-infinity-and-beyond-this-...
Ra album r nghen :x hay dã man :x.
Mới ra thôi mà thống trị các BXH chỉ trong 1 giờ thôi nha :x =p~
Cái bài Fiction vừa nhảy vừa hát live chắc hộc máo qá =))
Mình có cảm giác bài Lightless như có nhiệm vụ ru ngủ con nít =))
-Ủn cắt cái đầu mới nhìn giống Bò qá :x
-Còn cái đầu của cha Sên thì khỏi nói nha :)) tắt đèm tối thui còn thấy nữa =)) nổi qá mà =))
-Ki trong MV Fiction nhìn dữ qá :-s nhưng vẫn đẹp chai như thuờng =))
-Xốp, Bò, Đô vẫn đẹp ngày nào :x
YoseobJunhyungDoojoonDongwoonKikwangHyunseung --- FIGHTING!!! :x
For The Anniversary Of My Death
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what
- W.S. Merwin