View allAll Photos Tagged Understanding
I hung out with Professor Bikenstein last night in Wicker Park.
We had a cool conversation as we watched the craziness of the world roll by on a Saturday evening.
Bikenstein thought I was foolish to get the surgery on my finger for that spider bite.
He said it would have healed on its own and that I let fear be the thing that made me decide to have the surgery.
The Professor doesn't have much faith in the medical system.
He's got some health problems that he doesn't think the doctors are treating properly.
I dig where the dude comes from.
I mean... he's got some crazy theories... but I can understand why.
We disagree on a lot of things.
But that's cool because I always respect his viewpoint.
Bikenstien's become one of those 'constants' in my life.
Almost a reference point on the journey.
I really appreciate the conversations we share.
Rock on Professor Bikenstein!
Martin Creed
Work No. 2630 UNDERSTANDING, 2016
Red Neon, Steel
Approx dims: 21 3/5 x 50 x 2 1/8 ft / 658.6 x 1524 x 66 cm. Base 25 x 25 feet at top / 33 x 33 feet at bottom
Presented by Public Art Fund, May 4 – October 23, 2016 at Pier 6, Brooklyn Bridge Park
Courtesy the artist, Gavin Brown’s enterprise New York/Rome, and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Jason Wyche, Courtesy Public Art Fund, NY
© Martin Creed 2016
I'd guess this pair is from the late 60s. A plain jane pair of nylon panties with a bit of pizzazz. Speaking of which, the origin of the word pizzazz dates back to 1913, far before these vintage panties were made.
Thing is, panties in 1913 truly lacked any sense of pizzazz. They may have had a sense of pizzas, since my understanding is Italian women often used stale pizza to make undergarments.
But real pizzazz would have to wait another 50 years before it made the lingerie scene.
Understanding the size of pot sizes and cultural preferences is critical to the development of a successful cookstove and fuel intervention.
Communication is very important. Obviously without it we're isolated individuals without an outlet to be heard or to comprehend what we hear. Communication exists regardless of how we intent it to be received. Verbal or visual, we all communicate. Just some of us are more clear about it.
I have a problem with words. Not necessarily with what words to use, but more with the frequency and amount of words to use. I go out of my way to be understood — probably to the annoyance and frustration of everyone around me. There's nothing worse than leaving the scarcity of your communication "open" to interpretation. This is how marriages fail. Friendships disintegrate. And the premise of every "Three's Company" episode for seven years. The problem isn't that I communicate too much, but that others anticipate that you will automatically have the same understanding of what they mean as they do. Sadly, this is hardly ever the case.
Language and communication are hard enough from region to region within the United States. Sack/Bag. Pop/Soda. It varies from family to family, business to business, school to school. Man to woman. We all have a vernacular (I know, I'm already breaking the rules of my own argument! If you don't know what it means, I can't assume that you do, you can find the definition here) that we fully adopt into our everyday palett of words; and expect everyone else to know their meaning.
Right now I'm stuck in the middle of 40 years of poor communication. Of implied meaning. Inferred intent. The end outcome is bitterness. Dishonor. Hurt. Confusion. Anger. When one said "That's ok" they meant "I don't like this but I'll suffer through it because I don't want to get into an argument about it". Ultimately we can't avoid conflict and we can't assume understanding. It's to the determent of everyone to take short cuts with words — and can end quite literally in a disaster.
The Luxury of being yourself
We have selected pictures on our website, but can always add more depending on the requests we do get and the current trend in the world of luxury fine art:
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We tend to celebrate light in our pictures. Understanding how light interacts with the camera is paramount to the work we do. The temperature, intensity and source of light can wield different photography effect on the same subject or scene; add ISO, aperture and speed, the camera, the lens type, focal length and filters…the combination is varied ad multi-layered and if you know how to use them all, you will come to appreciate that all lights are useful, even those surrounded by a lot of darkness.
We are guided by three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, our longing to capture in print, that which is beautiful, the constant search for the one picture, and constant barrage of new equipment and style of photography. These passions, like great winds, have blown us across the globe in search of the one and we do understand the one we do look for might be this picture right here for someone else out there.
“A concise poem about our work as stated elow
A place without being
a thought without thinking
creatively, two dimensions
suspended animation
possibly a perfect imitation
of what was then to see.
A frozen memory in synthetic colour
or black and white instead,
fantasy dreams in magazines
become imbedded inside my head.
Artistic views
surrealistic hues,
a photographer’s instinctive eye:
for he does as he pleases
up to that point he releases,
then develops a visual high.
- M R Abrahams
Some of the gear we use at William Stone Fine Art are listed here:
Some of our latest work & more!
Embedded galleries within a gallery on various aspects of Photography:
There are other aspects closely related to photography that we do embark on:
All prints though us is put through a rigorous set of quality control standards long before we ever ship it to your front door. We only create gallery-quality images, and you'll receive your print in perfect condition with a lifetime guarantee.
All images on Flickr have been specifically published in a lower grade quality to amber our copyright being infringed. We have 4096x pixel full sized quality on all our photos and any of them could be ordered in high grade museum quality grade and a discount applied if the voucher WS-100 is used. Please contact us:
We do plan future trips and do catalogue our past ones, if you believe there is a beautiful place we have missed, and we are sure there must be many, please do let us know and we will investigate.
In our galleries you will find some amazing fine art photography for sale as limited edition and open edition, gallery quality prints. Only the finest materials and archival methods are used to produce these stunning photographic works of art.
We want to thank you for your interest in our work and thanks for visiting our work on Flickr, we do appreciate you and the contributions you make in furthering our interest in photography and on social media in general, we are mostly out in the field or at an event making people feel luxurious about themselves.
WS-185-131255761-51914746-6838999-472021051346
A series of AI-generated pictures of a bronze statue of a Scandinavian woman in different art styles.
To be continued.
Pictures made with Midjourney.
I'm always happy to accept invites to groups as long as I can see their content. Should I see "this group is not available to you", my pictures won't be made available to that group. Thanks for your understanding.
So one of the challenges I have with my medium format is understanding how accurate the metering is, I realize I have to use a -1 exposure compensation. It's fun trying to figure it because I find myself taking notes on my set-up. In this case it was shot #9 with a -1 exposure compensation..
Einstein 640 camera front and behind from Ryan in 7" reflector with 30 degree grid. AImed at background
Einstein 640 boomed up from Ryan in beauty dish with sock.
Einstein 640 way behind be in large octabox and it's only purpose was for the catch light.
Mamiya 645E
1/250 @F/16
ISO 400
Mamiya Sekor 70mm 2.8 (Leaf Shutter Lens)
Kodak Tri-X 400
Pocket Wizards II
The High Desert Museum is located near Bend, Oregon, United States. Opened in 1982, it brings regional wildlife, culture, art and natural resources together to promote an understanding of natural and cultural heritage of North America’s high desert country. The museum uses indoor and outdoor exhibits, wildlife in natural-like habitats, and living history demonstrations to help people discover and appreciate the high desert environment. www.highdesertmuseum.org
台南市神農街 - 老街新意 / 紅色讓人有歡樂的感覺 - 飛龍在天世事了然眼前
Tainan Shen Nong street - Street novelty / The red let everyone feel joy - The dragon in the sky everythings are clear understanding of the immediate
Calle de Tainan Shen Nong - La novedad Calle / El rojo de todo el mundo vamos a sentir la alegría - El dragón en el cielo son los everythings comprensión clara de lo inmediato
台南市の神農の街 - 古い街の新意 / 赤色は人に楽しい感じがあらせます - 空を飛ぶ竜はあります日の世事のはっきりわかる目の前
Straße Tainan-Shen Nong - Neuheit Straße / Der rote Gelassen jeder Freude empfinden - Der Drache in den Himmel everythings sind ein klares Verständnis des unmittelbaren
Rue de Tainan Shen Nong - La nouveauté, rue / La joie rouge let sensation tout le monde - Le dragon dans les everythings ciel sont la compréhension claire de l'immédiat
Tainan Taiwan / Tainan Taiwán / 台灣台南
飛龍劍士(法國號前奏) / SEGA Panzer Dragon(French horn prelude)
{空を飛ぶ竜の剣士/The fencer with a dragon}
{View large size on fluidr / 觀看大圖}
{My Blog / 管樂小集精彩演出-觸動你的心}
{My Blog / Great Music The splendid performance touches your heart}
{My Blog / 管楽小集すばらしい公演-はあなたの心を心を打ちます}
{Mi blog / La gran música el funcionamiento espléndido toca su corazón}
{Mein Blog / Große Musik die herrliche Leistung berührt Ihr Herz}
{Mon blog / La grande musique l'exécution splendide touche votre coeur}
家住安南鹽溪邊
The family lives in nearby the Annan salt river
隔壁就是聽雨軒
The next door listens to the rain porch
一旦落日照大員
The sunset Shineing to the Taiwan at once
左岸青龍飛九天
The left bank white dragon flying in the sky
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.”
― Khalil Gibran
At Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 37, the United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket with NASA's Parker Solar Probe, lifts off at 3:31 a.m. EDT on Sunday, Aug. 12, 2018. The spacecraft was built by Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland. The mission will perform the closest-ever observations of a star when it travels through the Sun's atmosphere, called the corona. The probe will rely on measurements and imaging to revolutionize our understanding of the corona and the Sun-Earth connection. Photo credit: NASA/Tony Gray and Tim Powers
© DM Parody 2017 (www.dotcom.gi/photos) These images are protected by copyright. You CANNOT copy or republish any of these photos without written consent of the photographer even if you retain the watermark (if present) and/or credit the photographer. You cannot use on any media including social media either. You CAN post a link to the page where the image appears without reference to the photographer. Copyright infringements will be followed up, legally if necessary. Thank you for your understanding.
And be sure to check by my other acount: www.flickr.com/photos_user.gne?path=&nsid=77145939%40..., to see what else I saw recently!!
Yes I'm back again.
However due to my main computer on which I edit my work being struck down with a big bad virus, this picture and all the others I am uploading, were Unedited but have now been replaced with Edited versions. So enjoy and Thanks for your patience and understanding.
I do still hate everything about this shit that is new Flickr and always will, but an inability to find another outlet for my work that is as easy for me to use as the Old BETTER Flickr was, has forced me back to Flickr, even though it goes against everything I believe in.
I don't generally have an opinion on my own work, I prefer to leave that to other people and so based on the positive responses to my work from the various friends I had made on Flickr prior to the changes I have decided to upload some more of my work as an experiment and to see what happens.
So make the most of me before they delete my acount: www.flickr.com/photos/69558134@N05/?details=1, to stop me complaining!!
IF
An apparition, I reverently bow.
Should one hide in paradise?
Doves hover on a gentle breeze,
And I gaze upward.
A divine altar, I secretly whisper.
Should one hide in paradise?
Beyond understanding, faith arrives
And peace circles me.
Expression seen, will color appear.
Should one hide in paradise?
What (if) thought beyond a word can be shared,
And I can only smile!
-rc
One waits for Sophia....
London Passenger Transport Board
The Bombings of 1940 forced a reappraisal of deep-shelter policy and at the end of October the Government decided to construct a system of deep shelters linked to existing tube stations. London Transport was consulted about the sites and required to build the tunnels at the public expense with the understanding that they were to have the option of taking them over for railway use after the war. With the latter point in mind, positions were chosen on routes of possible north-south and east-west express tube railways. It was decided that each shelter would comprise two parallel tubes 16 foot 6 inches internal diameter and 1,600 feet long and would be placed below existing station tunnels at Clapham South, Clapham Common, Clapham North, Stockwell, Oval, Goodge Street, Camden Town, Belsize Park, Chancery Lane and St. Pauls...Each tube would have two decks, fully equipped with bunks, medical posts, kitchens and sanitation and each installation would accommodate 9,600 people...All the deep level shelters were sub-divided into sleeping areas. Each tunnel was divided into 4 sections with connecting doors between them. Each section was given a name. At Clapham South they were all naval commanders. The northern entrance sections (i.e. those accessed directly from the northern lift without crossing to the other side) were named: Freemantle, Beatty, Evans, Anson, Nelson, Jellicoe, Madden and Inglefield while those accessed from the southern entrance were: Grenville, Hardy, Drake, Oldham, Keppel, Parry and Ley. Each section had bunks fitted longitudinally along the outer wall, a single at the top, a double in the middle and a single at the bottom. Along the inner wall bunks were fitted across the passage forming bays. There were 7.952 bunks in total and each bunk was allocated to a named person. If they didn't turn up one night the bunk remained unused...Although work on them began in November 1940 there were difficulties in obtaining sufficient labour and materials so the first one was only ready in March 1942 and the other seven were finished later that year. Access to them was by ticket in order to help control numbers and prevent disruption to the underground network. There was considerable pressure to open the shelters to relieve the strain on London’s tube stations from people sheltering from the bombing, but the authorities were concerned about the cost of maintaining the shelters once opened and preferred to keep them in reserve in case the bombing intensified. Clapham South was used as weekend troop accommodation from 1943. The start of the attacks on London by V1 flying bombs (commonly known as ‘doodlebugs’) in June 1944, followed by the V2 rocket campaign in September that year, caused many of the deep shelters to be made fully available to the public; Clapham South opened on 19 July 1944. The south entrance, next door to what was the Odeon cinema, was in a small compound that housed administrative offices and ticket printing presses for all eight deep shelters. The shelters were used for their original purpose for less than a year. The north section closed on 21 October 1944 and the shelter was transferred from the Ministry of Home Security to the Ministry of Works on 1 October 1945. Clapham South closed completely on 7 May 1945 and from June 1945 it found a new use as a military leave hostel and for one month in June 1946 it acted as an armed-forces troop billet. At the end of the war, London had a severe labour shortage and the Colonial Office sought to recruit a labour force from Britain’s colonies. At that time there were no immigration restrictions for citizens from one part of the British Empire moving to another part. An advertisement appeared in Jamaica's Daily Gleaner on 13 April 1948 offering transport to the UK for a fare of £28.10s (£28.50) for anyone who wanted to work in the UK. As a result the ship MV Empire Windrush arrived in Tilbury later in 1948 carrying 492 worker migrants from Jamaica. However, as there was no accommodation for the new arrivals the Colonial Office decided to house them in the deep-level shelter at Clapham South.
The nearest labour exchange to Clapham South was on Coldharbour Lane in Brixton so the men sought jobs there. As a result Brixton became a focus for West Indian settlers from that point onwards with successive arrivals making their way to the developing
community. The actual time the deep-level shelter was occupied by new arrivals was relatively short as the men all quickly found jobs and accommodation, and successfully integrated into many parts of south London.
[Subterranea Britannica]
These Seven Principles of Human Learning taken from the National Academies Press free ebook Learning and Understanding (2002).
"During the last four decades, scientists have engaged in research that has increased our understanding of human cognition, providing greater insight into how knowledge is organized, how experience shapes understanding, how people monitor their own understanding, how learners differ from one another, and how people acquire expertise. From this emerging body of research, scientists and others have been able to synthesize a number of underlying principles of human learning. This growing understanding of how people learn has the potential to influence significantly the nature of education and its outcomes."
Image licensed under Creative Commons by happeningfish: www.flickr.com/photos/happeningfish/3007746661/
New Perspectives.
An important contribution to the understanding of the uses of Diethylstilbestrol DES by pregnant women and the risks associated with this use. It is the only book on this subject that provides a scientifically objective overview and should be read by all who are involved in the debate over the effects of in utero DES exposure, including those men and women who were unfortunately exposed to the drug.'
American Medical Writers Association, July 1987.
More information
* DES Resources: Cancer, Breast Cancer, CCA, Vaginal Cancer.
* DES Resources: Fertility, Pregnancies and Various Studies.
* DES Resources: In-Utero Exposure to DES and DES Side Effects.
* Watch videos, read our posts tagged DES and the DES-exposed.
On the final morning of the course I showed the students how to start doing the drawing they had sketched and measured in the field. In the early stages this meant flitting from each drawing board and group of four students. I had help from two other tutors but one of these also lacked experience of drawing by hand. The final session was a summing up of the building they had studied. I sketched this part.
Psalm 112:1 assures us: “Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments!” “Greatly delights” translates Hebrew words that can be literally rendered, “takes the highest degree of pleasure.”
Hebrew parallelism uses the first line to explain the second. Thus, the person who fears and reverences God is the person who “greatly delights” in his will and word. Such a person is “blessed” by our Lord.
Obedience to God is the necessary precondition to understanding the ways of God. Oswald Chambers: “All God’s revelations are sealed until they are opened to us by obedience. You will never get them open by philosophy or thinking. Immediately you obey, a flash of light comes.”
Obedience does not earn God’s revelation–it positions us to receive it. That’s because faith in God, like any relationship, requires a commitment that transcends the evidence and becomes self-validating.
It is illogical to insist on proof for that which can only be experienced. You cannot prove you should attend a particular college or take a particular job until you do. You cannot prove you should get married until you get married. Some categories of truth are relational by definition. They cannot be understood until they are experienced.
If we view Scripture as advice we can accept or reject rather than divine commands we must follow, we will never comprehend its depths. But if we decide to obey God’s word, we will then understand his word.
Do you expect to meet God today?
Consider another factor: Perhaps the religious leaders failed to hear new revelation from God because they did not expect new revelation from God. It had been so long since they’d heard a true prophet that they limited God’s truth to what they already knew.
We can make the same mistake.
If we read the Bible but our lives are no different, we have not truly heard from God. If we pray and remain the same, we have not truly prayed. We cannot encounter the living Lord of the universe and be unchanged.
A young pastor once complained to Charles Spurgeon that few people were responding to his sermons.
The “Prince of Preachers” asked him, “You don’t expect people to respond every time you preach, do you?”
The young man assured him that he did not.
“That’s why they don’t,” Spurgeon replied.
Do you expect to meet God today in his word and worship? Do you expect him to answer your prayers and to move in power? Do you expect him to do in our world what he did in the biblical world?
“The three most terrible truths of our existence”
Hurricane Michael shows us that we need more of God than most of us have experienced. To experience all of God there is, we must understand his ways and know his provision.
Here’s the good news: To the degree that we obey his word, we can fully understand his ways. To the degree that we expect him to provide, we can truly know his provision.
Last week, we had no idea the hurricane would be so devastating. What don’t we know about next week?
Anne Lamott: “If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.”
When we face circumstances beyond our control, we have three options: We can continue to fight as though we are in control, give up and accept what comes, or work alongside the One who is in control. Only one brings true peace.
Choose wisely.
-Jim Denison
Leica-M6 TTL 0,72 Elmarit-M 1:2.8/21 mm ASPH.
Nikon super Coolscan 5000ed.
Ilford Delta 400asa. Kodak developer HC 110 1+31 (B)
🔴Leica my point of view.
Wetzlar, Deutschland.
Leica-CL 1974 Rangefinder
Leica-M 6 TTL 0.72 1998 Rangefinder
Leica-M6 TTL 0.85 2001 Rangefinder(Millenium versie)
Leica-M6 TTL 0,85 Elmarit-M 1;2.8/90mm
Nikon super Coolscan 5000ed.
Ilford Delta 100asa developer Kodak HC 110 1+31 (B)
Melaan Mechelen België.
🔴Leica my point of view.
Wetzlar, Deutschland.
Leica-CL 1974 Rangefinder
Leica-M 6 TTL 0.72 1998 Rangefinder
Leica-M6 TTL 0.85 2001 Rangefinder
A series of AI-generated pictures of a 1958 Plymouth Fury at the end of its life cycle.
To be continued.
Pictures made with Midjourney.
I'm always happy to accept invites to groups as long as I can see their content. Should I see "this group is not available to you", my pictures won't be made available to that group. Thanks for your understanding.
As a child I loved looking at the covers and the illustrations within my dad's old science magazines. I didn't actually read any, just looked at the pictures. It's still absolutely inspirational stuff.
Leica-M6 TTL 0.85. Summicron-C 1:2.0/40mm.
T-Max 100asa, developer T-Max 1+4 20º.
Nikon super Coolscan 5000 ED.
Harbourage (schuilplaats) Tony Andreas.
🔴Leica my point of view.
Wetzlar, Deutschland.
Leica-CL 1974 Rangefinder
Leica-M 6 TTL 0.72 1998 Rangefinder
Leica-M6 TTL 0.85 2001 Rangefinder
Het tweeledige gezicht van de hemel.
The dual face of heaven.
Somewhat stranded, not taking anything for granted, reminding itself to try not to panic...This bird just realized something hair-raising; finally understanding what it's facing...
I'm not understanding this at all. IIL3722 comes up as a 1993 Volvo 2849cc. This is obviously an early 80s 760 GLE.
[Today is Pocahontas and Vincent's first year wedding anniversary!!! As the two of them are getting ready for their dinner Vincent can't stop thinking about Silvia calling back yesterday night telling him how lucky and understanding Christian is to give him their reservations. He has to remember to call Christian and thank him.
While Vincent is putting on his suit jacket Pocahontas is applying her making and gushing about how excited she is.]
P: I still can't believe you got us a table at The Empress House! That restaurant is known to attract celebrities! [gasp] Do you think we'll see Brad Pitt?! I love him...in movies of course!
V: Ha, I'm not sure. Besides with how good you look people might confuse you for a celebrity.
P: Oh stop! Anyway, I can't believe it's already been a whole year for us. Seems like we were only married last week.
V: Time flies when you're with someone you love.
P: Haha, that's so cheesy.
V: But it's true. Are you just about ready? It's almost time for us to leave.
P: Yeah, I just need to grab my purse and put on my shoes.
V: Well, I'm going to start up the car.
[While Vincent is starting the car he gives Christian a quick call. He thanks him for everything he's done and invites him to hang out in the future. As soon as Vincent ends the call he sees Pocahontas locking up the house and walking towards the car. In chivalry fashion he gets out of the car and opens the car door for his wife. They give each other a quick kiss and drive off to the restaurant.]
~ Peace, tolerance, understanding, enlightenment, acceptance, inclusion should be our universal bywords in order to build and sustain us all in this difficult world. This is what all the great religions teach. And our only salvation.
"I hope, and I'm sure, like Londoners, Bombayites are resilient, brave and will withstand this onslaught on the city" - British businessman Sir Gulam Noon, who was forced to barricade himself and several colleagues into a room at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel
during the terror attacks in India.
All thoughts towards Mumbai, and anywhere there is chaos and violence against innocents...
THE ALTAR OF INTERFERENCE
Rack: Ruin, Sorry to have been unresponsive. I fell off the digital planet upstate and found it delightful. Back in the city. All is well except for that gnawing post-holiday anxiety. Hope you're good and the writing goes along.
Ruin: I have been enjoying some crisis time here. Stuff to do with the sexual abuse, the neglect, and the, to be expected, self-loathing generated there. It happens every now and then, and it can be overpowering. The stuff we have been looking at, or at least that stuff I have been writing about, would more or less cause that to happen, I guess. Anyway, I have been taking a step back to look at it, the PTSD generated through abuse of all stripes. It’s sort of overarching. I want to look at it, and the idea of patterns, that ‘Wild Goose’ thing, of flight rather than fight, that permanent adrenaline rush of looking for a constant ‘elsewhere’, of heading out, or creating situations where one has to head out (like the silly 'London situation' that catapulted me to Amsterdam), that forcing oneself into constant panic-mode, left over from childhood survival tactics.
Then there is the generation of a cuckoo gene relative to all that too, that looking for parents, stealing them, even, nesting strategies that could be considered ‘shameful’, or at least might generate shame to add to the self-loathing, bolstering it up. Then there’s the slow suicide of looking for HIV, that cowardly way of doing oneself in. Anyway, these are a few of the things I am going to look at unflinchingly, going forward. I am in a sort of bracing mode, girding one’s overused, and sagging, loins for a full-frontal assault.
Once more unto that breach, and all that palaver, a cuckooed 'Wild Goose' negotiating a swansong, even.
It's difficult to write these things about oneself, and see them reflected back by you, your acknowledgment of them, suggesting that you have more than an 'understanding'. We are both aware of what we reflect back to each other, something we have done for 35 years now, that there is mutuality there. I know why you struggle with it, I do too. I suspect this might be what makes it worthwhile.
Rack: Ruin, I had a similar moment recently. It has taken this long for me to be able to recognize what is happening when I want to flee, when I feel that the sky falling on my head is imminent, when I just can't function. It is hard to acknowledge how many areas of life its tendrils have drilled their way into. I have read that Ketamine infusions can help, and I've been toying with the idea for a long time, though it is horribly expensive. Not drinking has been a huge help lately and I realize that booze just makes me more anxious, ultimately. It's alarming to think how one's life has been sculpted by such childhood events. I can't even identify what it is that happened. I can remember very little of childhood. I wonder was there additional abuse to the stuff I can remember. I suppose it's not that important to remember the details. That whole notion of healing and moving on seems like a daft impossibility to me. If anything, the symptoms of PTSD have become worse for me as I age, as if they will out, regardless. Sometimes I just feel like I'm not functioning. Anyway, I know where you are and it is a difficult and painful place to sit through. Maybe that's how you get past it. By looking it in the eye and not freezing. Maybe the writing of it will be a huge relief for you, not in the way of some perfect redemption, but a squaring of things. I am sending you much love.
Ruin: I don’t know if I scared myself to a stop or not, I don’t think I did, I think I am still writing. I am writing around it, around the theme. There were, of course, triggers. It’s difficult to get to that point of full exposure, but that’s where I think I have to go, and I have enough evidence of questionable behaviour generated in response, perhaps, both in my art and in what I have been writing all these years. Strangely, I realised that there were others in my family generating patterns, according to how they reacted to our negligent parents. The sister, Phil, who gloated over the tearing up, and burning, of that book (‘A Stone for Danny Fisher’) is the same sister who consigned my Doctoral work to the Dublin City dump. It was the same action, a refined echo, but 50 years later. I have been looking at, and thinking about, how we continue to unknowingly repeat these patterns. I assumed my victim role, and ran away, yet again. I would rather fly than fight, that classic ‘wild goose’ pattern. There is nothing there I want to fight for anyway, the place is even more sordid than I am, but I want to be aware of these patterns, and all of my siblings adapted a different variation, one that would make their lives livable. But my parents in their turn generated their patterns in reaction to their abandonment, so there’s no blame there at all. I guess the idea isn’t to blame, even not to blame my abusive uncle, I love the word ‘avuncular’, his was learnt behaviour. Of this I am sure, given that I know that at least two of his older brothers are child abusers (and priests).
So, the drive is not to ‘forgive’ and lovingly embrace family. It’s simply, through writing, to understand these patterns, and hopefully in doing so, to short-circuit the whole shebang. But I don’t want to write an abuse ‘memoir’. Anyway, there’s the challenge, and it’s still called ‘Rack and Ruin’.
Rack: Yes. I heartily agree. It’s “just” trying to understand and thereby to release oneself of ever re-enacting the same circular route. Maybe not possible. Maybe is.
Ruin: Well, I wouldn’t want to prefigure, or disallow for, any deathbed exegesis, that flash of realisation, that might, or might not, be on the cards. If it was all figured out before then it might make that climax anti-climactic. As for the rest, the writing, the art, the life, you get as far as you get, and then it all unravels anyway, and before you know it, you’re dust. There’s a cheerful morning thought. I suspect we both have them. Then there is that intervening time, and the filling of the same. Mine is very much about restoring self-worth, and I am actually glad that I am still at that. It would have been much easier just to give up and dissipate towards that void (Oh, the drama!). I wrote sissipate, accidentally. I like that, that rolling the ball endlessly up that hill, and finding it at the bottom of the hill in the morning. Just like this morning, and away we go again. Bless that dung beetle. I like that we, instinctively, continue to do this, each rolling (along the self-same route) being completely different from the one before. That release happens in its own time, or rather it’s happening constantly, until it’s spent. I like this, and have no interest in it other than the doing itself. I like putting words and images up on Flickr. I love that this represents a type of slightly cracked-open window, that one's experience, and understanding, is not completely shut off, even if there is no evidence of any response. It is enough in itself. It reminds me of that medieval Anchorite sitting by her window, carbuncled onto a remote church, entombed even. The goal is no longer to show, or publish, the goal is to make, with a small window left open, just in case. I love that 'Just in case'.
“Maybe not possible. Maybe is.” I love the ‘maybe’, like I love ‘perhaps’, ‘even’, ‘possibly’, and other words conveying lack of surety. That’s where I would love to be found sitting for whatever posterity there might be, or not. Either way, it doesn’t matter. I also love that idea of it not mattering. I saw it in a ketamine exegesis (that word again), and I know it to be true. I know, ‘dumb ass’, but I don’t care.
Rack: Yes to "restoring self-worth". Oh, that there were a short cut, but it seems there is not, probably not even Ketamine. Up and down that bloody hill, sissipating like the dung beetles that we are. We are, once again, at the juncture of ‘Labor Day’, that convenient long weekend that bookends the summer with its predecessor, ‘Memorial Day’. My panic continues as my partner sits reading with a small flashlight hanging out of his mouth, because he can no longer see without the additional light. Who does the panicking in your house? I feel like it is somebody's job in a household. A small engine of worry. Anyway, I am going to try and park it somewhere and enjoy the relatively empty city and the weather with the worst of the heat gone out of it. Could really do with a good long screaming walk with you.
Ruin: I am the worrier. I find myself wonderfully entombed with the buggering Buddha, as far as that is concerned. It’s a glorious place to be. Our Pyramid is wondrous. Time is at its undoing, and I love it all shoddying the edges. That doesn’t seem to staunch that flow of worrying, regardless. The insecurities, or the source, perhaps, of that deluge, is somewhat easily traced back.
The Mater had a type of mantra, it was in a way the pride of her arsenal, and I remember it being put to use on many an occasion. It went something like this: “You do know that you can never pay us back, don’t you? If you worked all your life and gave us every penny you ever earned, it wouldn’t even come near to what you owe us”. I have it in parentheses, but it is not really a quote. It wouldn’t have been proffered so lucidly, it would have been spat and mangled, screeched out, perhaps between thuds and flailing fists. It was harridan-like. The thuds and flailings would, more or less, always miss their marks and land on a battered table, or on the back of a broken chair. They weren’t the problem. All the chairs in the house were broken. I remember going back to help celebrate one Christmas, travelling from London, 40 years later, and sitting on a chair which immediately collapsed from under me. I roared at the power of the Mater’s mantra asserting itself, as I sat on the floor hysterically laughing whilst remembering.
So, it was set in stone. I would have to go working at the age of thirteen, in the aforementioned ‘The Laurels’ to “earn my keep” and pay into the coffers for the upkeep of the brood, all of whom had “no idea how much they owed”. At some point, during one of these incidents, I made the connection between sex and pleasure, probably around the concurrent abuse cycle with my uncle, and perhaps managed to scream out that they chose to have sex, that they shouldn’t have had children at all. My mother informed me that “sex is for men”, which only further confused me relative to her putting her brother in my bed.
Other than what my bull-uncle was teaching me, this was the only sex education that I had.
When we came to ‘Human reproduction’ in biology class, the ‘chaste’ Christian Brother announced, “We will skip this section for now, it won’t come up in exams anyway”. I was already, perhaps, a year into my anthropological avuncular education.
Avuncular
/əˈvʌŋkjʊlə/
Learn to pronounce
adjective
adjective: avuncular
1.
kind and friendly towards a younger or less experienced person.
"he was avuncular, reassuring, and trustworthy"
2.
ANTHROPOLOGY
relating to the relationship between men and the children of their siblings.
It was strangely confusing, this attention from my uncle. Nobody had paid any attention to me before.
[9:58 am, 02/09/2022] Ruin: A screaming walk would be wonderful. It would have to be a slow one though, and not too far, with rest stops along the way. The screaming wouldn't have to be slow, we could let that go from the get go. A relapse into hysteria with you would be wondrous indeed.
[9:58 am, 02/09/2022] Ruin: But we can also always do that here.
Let's sissipate side by side.
Rack: I don't think I've ever heard these stories, at least so graphically. You are approaching the very kernel here. Her fury is so furious and so energetic. I can almost relate. I can't help but think about her putting her brother in your bed, or you in his. It strikes me as some weird sacrifice she was making. Offering her brightest up to the altar of interference. Knowing and not knowing. And I suppose sex was for men. My paternal grandmother said the same thing. A thing to be endured. Your mother was going to make you endure it too. Somehow share in that forced ritual. Why did she choose you? Was it an age thing? It's horrifying and fascinating. Sending you love, as always.
Ruin: Yes, Rack, this is the crux, the kernel, that molten core. It might be other than what we expect, but this is it. It is also why I don’t want to write an abuse ‘memoir’. It’s not that. It’s not about struggle, triumph over adversity, forgiveness, and a sort of accompanying redemption. It is about ‘drivers’. It’s about innocence too, universal innocence, even. The mater’s innocence, the sibling’s innocence, the abuser’s innocence, and ultimately the self’s innocence. It encompasses the murderer’s, and mass-murderer’s, innocence. It would even include the innocence of those God botherers, those mass-manipulators who pushed their divisive theories of the divine on our susceptible forebears, those so-called priests and nuns. At a push, it might even include bank-managers and CEOs of Fortune-500 companies. Okay, I’ll go the whole hog, artists need to be forgiven too.
I would normally sit down, of a morning, and vomit out a spiel, and press the send button. I can’t do that this morning. I have to write this and be as clear as I can be, so there is no misunderstanding as to what I am trying to say.
I will just say, firstly, that my mother chose nothing. She was 100% reactive, desperately and fearfully reactive, even. She was, sadly, trapped in a pattern, rather like we all are, to a lesser or greater extent.
So, that’s where I am starting from. The rest is about getting as far as time permits.
I will answer those questions you brought up, as we go along.
Ruin: [10:44 am, 03/09/2022] It was never going to be easy, Crusty Lusty.
Rack (from sometime back in the mid-nineties, last century):
Funny you should mention staving off the SSRI pillies.†
Lately I have felt them to be an evil† necessity myself and frankly I am tired of them.†
I do need them ‘til I'm de-interfered with, but I think they† make one's character and brain sort of mushy until one reaches a state where you are oddly detached from your "self" and quite happy to be mired knee deep in your own raw sewage.†
It's not good.†
I feel impure in a way I can't quite explain, and I'm not prone to
feeling impure.†
Ultimately there is something terribly wrong about being incapable of living
without them.†
Why not just look for an honest distraction like alcoholism,
severe junkiedom, or whoredom?†
All this modern messing with chemistry.
Anyway, feeling like a reactionary regarding them and god bless you for going
cold turkey and long may it last.†
I'm sure one makes better work without them.
I'm† off to the scratcher with my oozing beaver:† ah the last gasps of estrogen as the old uterus pops an egg and screams for something to fill it up.†
Odd this biological baggage we women folk have; all this oozing and cycling and yet
no thought of acting on it.†
Modern, eh???
Much love,
Pox Bunny Beaver Rackety Crust
[10:49 am, 03/09/2022] Ruin: You were, and are, a wondrous poet.
I love your use of the crucifix. Strangely, the matrix put them there. Somewhere in the transferal from a Word document, or from an email, or whatever. They, the crucifixes just appeared. I like that their placing seems so random, though they do impose a sort of rhythm. This musky Matrix knows best, all praise our new Meta Gods on this soul-saving superhighway. I would not want to remove those religious signifiers put there by whoever is the powers that be.
The original ‘Castration Piece’ had a fourth panel. It read "I am Not an Open Beaver". I am putting the titles of art pieces in single parentheses, they refer to pieces made, and either shown at some point or other in Galleries and Museums, or on the WWW, on my only social media platform ‘Flickr’.
Rack: I always loved that piece.
Ruin: I liked placing it back at ‘The Mammy's Hearth’, that sacrosanct place of no safety.
Rack: And blurry you. How the hell do we ever individuate? I feel as if I’m still sissipating up that particular hill.
Ruin: We do it whilst sissipating, we are even doing it now. I love our new word.
Rack: Me too. Rhymes with dissipating, includes it, of course, but also suggests some progress, even if Sisyphean.
Ruin: I am still sitting with those last few questions you asked me, it's going to take time to answer them, but I will. I am worn out, off to the doctor to find out what is happening with my prostate, kidney pains, urinating every 15 minutes, exhaustion, sore groin lymph node (one sided).
Rack: Eugh, sounds nasty. No rush on answering those questions. I hope they weren’t “previous” of me to ask. But I am genuinely curious. It goes back to the innocence factor. Anyway, sorry your nether regions are bothering you. I hope it can be resolved in a simple way. All we can hope for our ailments now.
Ruin: No questions are "previous", ever. More like "about time", this doo-doo needs sorting out.
Rack: ♥️
Ruin: ♥️💩
As for the mater’s fury, he had some ideas relative to the source of that pain and anger. She was never overtly forthcoming with her sharing, regarding her ‘story’ that is, though she would on occasions over-share inappropriately. He recognized this tendency in himself, and in others he had known from the abused fraternity and sorority. This had a sort of uncontrollable Tourette’s-like quality, a certain convulsive vomiting, almost exorcism-like in its urgency to be expelled. He understood it now, but as a child this was confusing. She had been abused, she spoke a little of this later, another errant uncle working his avuncular magic, that undoing of innocence, that unwanted incursion. But she had been abandoned when she was six or seven years old, more or less left as the carer for her three younger siblings, after her mother had died, of TB, at a tender age, somewhere in her early thirties. Her father had left the four children, almost immediately, in the care of some older relatives, disappearing from their lives and remarrying a 17-year-old girl, with whom he had 13 more children. The mater did not see her father again until her own wedding day, when she was 23 years old. So, he surmised, we are talking about abandonment here, that form of neglect and abuse, before that other assault, referenced but never really spoken of. He remembered her cursing that uncle later on, but no details of what happened were ever shared. There was a gap there, another unfillable void.
Why the ‘his’? Why the ‘he’? It’s simple really, it gives a once remove, making it all a little easier. It might go back and forth, but who knows? There was also that once remove of the inadequacy of memory. Of course, he wasn’t even sure how much of this was true, even, what parts he remembered and what parts he had dreamed, or what part he had generated to find the wherewithal to forgive himself, and her. He was at a point where he couldn’t easily remember what day yesterday was, never mind familial gathering, sixty years ago, around that infinite family hole. His father’s crater was also there, inadequately filled with alcohol and anger, regrets, sadness, and neglect.
They sucked each other in, my parents, warring black holes in love, proffering impossible promises of security to each other, indifferent to everything else including their own children. Or so it seemed. But children can’t surmise all this, they can only pick up on the anger and disappointment, and the complete lack of any vestiges of stability. They each, both parents, made their oaths to be the other’s salvation, as they began quietly, at first, to fail. They stayed together for 60 years, so at least in some way they fulfilled their commitment to each other.
Meanwhile their children fell apart.
But this is not a story about aborted family dynasties, of triumph over adversity, or the opposite. It’s about another family of sorts, with nothing really to do with DNA extensions, and that striving to fit into some idea of continuity. It is about setting out, breaking away, the ‘Diaspora’, that homelessness, the ‘Wild Geese’, a certain ruthlessness, even. It is partially about recognizing the other as the same, or at least connecting with another where that sameness is sensed. It’s about the ‘Rack and Ruin’ of this fable, a chance encounter in the ‘New World’, and attempts at the rebuilding of ‘Trust’.
But the fury is somewhat easy to explain.
Downstairs was, a rented, one living room and a small kitchen behind a failing shop, the ‘Bon-Bon’ by name, another unfillable hole, as it would happen. Upstairs were two bedrooms and a box-room, shared by five children and two adults, with the addition of the new bull-interloper, a 20 or 21-year-old, testosterone-overflowing, encroacher.
Rack: Amazing stuff. Thank you for sending. I need to read again and assimilate before I respond more fully. So much here! Congratulations on facing it head on.
Ruin: I am feeling my way into it. This piece is the continuation of a conversation between you and I. Nothing is edited yet, I am not worrying about that for a while, or perhaps never, who knows? It's stuff I had written before, not in answer to your questions, but I do think it starts to address them. I will get there, though it does start to answer them, your questions I mean. I guess I am limbering up to answer, because yes, it is the kernel. But as I said, I don't want to write an abuse memoir. I want to write about 'drivers'.
Off to the doctor to have my prostate prodded. It's been about four years since there were any incursions in that region. I am not feeling great, but ho-hum, perhaps well enough to write some more. I wanted to sit still anyway.
Anyway, I am putting that text under the image of the cloud-filled sky from the window of an airplane, more or less adding to it daily. Nobody sees it, it's like a private space. It is further back in my photostream, on Flickr. Pundits tend to look at the newer images, so I can work there almost privately. I like to leave that window open a crack, as you know, just in case I am in the mood to hang my arse out of it. He said, nodding at mister Chaucer, was there no end to this man’s pretensions?
Rack: The only way to do it. Not that I would know. Hope the prostate thing is OK. It’s funny how the bits that allow us to reproduce cause the most illness: breasts, prostates, and maybe we can list the heart there too. Feeling quite peculiar, but not in an entirely bad way.
Ruin: Maybe indeed, the heart I mean, perhaps it should be even listed first. I suspect that when we get our hearts broken as children, there’s, more or less, no fixing them. I don’t like being around children at all, they feel so ferociously delicate. I never have, my whole life, I mean. This was fortuitous, in that I recognise my own capacity to brutalise, even unintentionally. I am pleased to have never found these small creatures attractive, I know that abuse can sometimes generate that reaction. Thankfully, I was one of the lucky ones, it drove me forward, instead, desperately searching for a father.
But back to the mater, back to that bed companion, back to a small room with two beds, shared by four people, 3 brothers and one uncle.
He didn’t remember much about the room other than it was small and usually cold. There was no central heating in the house, and no insulation to speak of.
Ruin: I am chasing that cuckoo theme or, at least, working my way towards it.
Rack: Worth chasing. I have lost my enthusiasm for a lot of things. But have also lost my taste for destroying myself. As if the shortening years are drumming sense into me at last.
Ruin: Queen Elizabeth is dead.
Rack: I actually have a tear in my eye.
Ruin: I understand that. It's a little unreal. She's always been there, I mean from the beginning of our lives.
Rack: My mother was enamored of her. They shared an age, both members of the forces during WWII.
Ruin: I think my mother was the same age too, at least she claimed to be. She liked her too, but it sort of went against her republicanism
Rack: I knew she was a goner when I saw her greeting Liz Truss. Looked feeble for the first time.
Ruin: Yes, her hands were all bruised. She had obviously been having transfusions.
Rack: Poor love. She really was remarkable.
Ruin: Yes, to your "As if the shortening years are drumming sense into me at last ". I am there too
Rack: It feels good (the at last). I feel as if I’m negotiating the supermarket aisles with little concern for my fellow shoppers.
Ruin: I have been writing to you, still working it out, will write it soon (as an email). I will send it soon rather, when I get a little further
Rack: I look forward. And backward.
Ruin: I appear to be writing about everything, and making images too
Rack: Happy that you are.
Ruin: anyway, I will write it out, you will see. Hey, guess what, you are writing it out here too, and I will use it all.
Rack: Hah! Work away. Might be the only way I can do it. Obliquely.
Ruin: I'll hand it over to you eventually, if you outlive me, as I said before.
Rack: One of us has to go first. YIKES.
Ruin: Yep, that's how it goes. Yikes, indeed! Unless, of course, we all go together, courtesy of Mr. Putin, or whatever. I am on a new drug for my prostate, apparently it was squeezing my urethra, making my piss flow very difficult, no pressure, slowed down, and it meant I had to pee every 15 mins. One of the side effects is possible priapism, a permanent erection, even. I can feel a series of photos coming on, that 'how to negotiate being a spent old tosser' series.
But back to that crowded bedroom, with ice on the inside of the windows and the horsehair overspilling from the mattress, that altar.
To the bloody Dickins with the whole shebang.
Rack: What a fate your mother had! No wonder she was angry. What a fate you suffered! It’s as if she had to make you endure something similar, that by effecting its repetition she was freeing herself, sacrificing you. Kill the thing you love. It is compelling to read Billy; onward! It never occurred to me that the abuse you endured happened in a crowded room. That your brothers were there. It must have added to everything.
I hope the prostate submits to the new drug and things get more comfortable.
There seems to be so much to this falling apart, and the attempts to stave it off with an array of pharmaceuticals. The latest one seems particularly unpleasant, and a balance might have to be found, some sort of compromise with the condition, where it is determined which is more livable with, the affliction or the ‘cure’. The pill-box is now full, or the complement of slots is full, those 4 notches for each day, spacing out the pills, that morning, midday, evening, and night array. This reminded Ruin of Rack’s “ramming 28 horse-pills down my throat every day”, of one of her first emails, some 25 years previously. This also reminded him that four pills a day was not that much of an infringement on his time and effort if he was going to get this ‘epic’ written. He guffawed inwardly at this notion of an epic, whilst recognizing the unwieldiness of it all, that sprawl. It could easily get out of hand, he knew this. Actually, it was already ‘out of hand’ more or less, but he felt that he just had to let this be what it was, for now.
Eventually decisions would have to be made. Again, this sounds suspiciously like ‘choices’ would be presenting themselves, but, in reality, there is no choice at all. It is simply about being able to continue, a survival strategy, an instinct. Ruin had been reduced before to a soporific state by ‘life-savers’. For five years he had been on a drug which more or less curtailed all creativity, writing, making art, or even reading. He was determined not to let this happen again. Unfortunately, the medical powers that be, the doctors he encountered, did not appear to be very good at listening, which led to five years of what felt like an anaethesised life, a time felt as though it was spent wading through a particularly dense fog, a treacle even. Eventually, after that unnecessarily extended sluggish exile, Ruin managed to convince the doctor to change the medications, and hey presto, as if by magic, the curtains rose. There’s a lesson to be learnt there, relative to doctors, drugs, and private interests in the Pharma industry, but allowing for the possible duration of a lifespan, one has to choose one’s battles. For this very reason, Ruin was thrilled to see the sterling work by Laura Poitras and Nan Goldin being acknowledged by the Venice Film Festival this week.
This is all normal stuff, we all face it at some point, it is part and parcel of growing older, and of particularly having the privilege to do that whilst enjoying last centuries, eclipsed, ‘maladie du jour’. It appears that this new century can, and will, generate its own, and it is somewhat wondrous to see, already, the machinations of science in its attempts to protect us.
Ruin believed in science; he did not believe in God. He had watched science work its preserving ‘magic’ both on Rack for 35 years, and on himself for 20 of those shared years. What was not to believe? If some billionaire or other had wanted to tag him with an electronic bugging device, he would have been well tagged already; he had given science total access years ago. He had read, digested, and discarded Duesberg's HIV conspiracy theories way back in the mid-eighties, propagated somewhat by ‘The Village Voice’, as he attempted to support Rack, and as they tried to help each other, through the early tsunamis generated by the same virus. Ruin had all he could stomach of anti-science conspiracy theories three decades before Covid eclipsed everything else in the collective imagination of the general public. Then in the eighties and nineties, Dr. Fauci was the enemy too, and we demonstrated against him and the tardiness of the CDC. We formed ‘Act Up’ and marched, demonstrated, and had ‘die-ins’ in Grand Central Station. Dr. Fauci listened, and eventually acted, proving to be a stalwart comrade in arms.
Recently Rack wrote to me (Enter those 1st person pronouns, both singular and plural):
Rack: I think we all have a lot of fear about how our behaviour is being policed. Are we racist? Are we transphobic? Are we elitist? Are we mansplaining? As you say, it’s not helpful and it doesn’t actually assist any of the issues it purports to protect. I fear we are in a very dark corner. Some days I find this very liberating. Not all days. Reading about the US government’s attitude to climate change is frightening. Also, Republican’s attitudes towards Anthony Fauci. Horrifying. He has just resigned. Bless.
Ruin: Yes, bless indeed, both Science and Doctor Fauci.
I am most pleased that we can still write to each other after 35 years of dealing with this disease. No, I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in miracles, and as far as I can see, most of those are, now, generated by Science.
A progenitorial alternative might be:
"Three drinks of water (holy) taken on three consecutive occasions from The Bishops Skull. This skull is believed to belong to one of three bishops who were murdered for their faith in Penal times. This particular skull is in a very extraordinary state of preservation and is kept at a house named Rielly (sic), near to the village of Mahera in Co. Cavan.
The skull is requisitioned from all parts of Ireland and the cure is well recognised."
The Schools Collection volume 0721 page 212.
www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5009031/4979138
Rack: Not too much. I am always fascinated to read, but will admit that there is a part of me that wonders why I am so stuck while your gates are wide open and functioning with such wild and wonderful abandon. It is a form of jealousy, but not just that because I am truly happy you are doing it. So, keep sending and forgive me if my replies are a little constipated. Thinking about your latest missive, the medicated falling apart. Much love.
Ruin: I rewrote and added there a bit. I am just shit-scared of not having time left to finish what I have started, so pushing. You are very much there too.
As luck would have it, I don’t seem to be able to tolerate these prostate pills. They cause intense palpitations at the slightest exertion. So, I will just have to get on with it, the swollen prostate and all that. It’s not cancer, just swollen, but that causes enough problems anyway, which will just have to be embraced. Yes, to what you were saying about those parts of the body to do with pleasure causing the worst, or most common, problems. It does slightly put me in mind of that red ‘Castration Piece’ I made in the eighties, that fantasy I had, for years, about being neutered. That ‘I fantasized about castrating myself feeling this could free me from the guilt and shame (and pleasure)’. I could now, with those added 35 years on top, add ‘and doctor’s appointments’ to that title. But the response has to be, and is, Yes, a resounding ‘Yes’. Yes to growing older I mean. It remains the best, and the thing I am most grateful for. (Waving at Molly Bloom here, of course).
I have never had what are called ‘Panic attacks’ before, the first one I had was in my early sixties when I was on those terrible stultifying TAF including drugs for our shared lurgy. I then started to have them occasionally, plus a host of other exhausting complaints, and that aforementioned pea soup brain-fog. These, more or less, cleared up when I changed drugs. Now, with this new prostate pill they are back with a vengeance, two in three days. These are not panic attacks; they are drug induced palpitations. They are listed as possible side effects. We are, of course, guinea pigs for these wonderful HIV drugs, and I know we are both eternally grateful for that opportunity.
Let’s live somewhat longer, let’s describe it, let’s write.
But Ruin did have to get back to his mother, and that misunderstanding, that space where some ‘intent’ might be suggested. He needed to somehow exonerate her, to say that it wasn’t her fault, or rather to prove to himself that it wasn’t. He recognized this as being virtually impossible, given his history, their ‘story’, and the reverberations through six decades, but he was going to try anyway. Her history, back story even, can’t really be delved into. There is not enough evidence there, just those initial tales of abandonment, her father, early grieving, her mother, and abuse, her uncle. Ruin could hardly remember his own story, never mind attempting to reconstruct that of the mater, but the pattern was obvious, and the repeat motifs presented themselves unashamedly. Ruin was used to looking for patterns, probably generated by a lifetime making visual art. There were also patterns in the mater’s behaviors, mirrored in his own. These he could see and understand. These were the drivers he wanted to expose. He wanted to explain these to Rack. Rack had been, for over three decades, a type of ‘sounding board’ for him, utterly non-judgmental, hyper vigilant even, with an uncanny ability to proffer solace. He had the idea that this was also mirrored back. They were, somehow, equally scabrous, wanton, lewd, call it what you will, and could laugh uproariously at each other’s coping mechanisms. This was probably central to their ‘screaming walks’ through the canyons of Manhattan in those early days of their beloved plague. Rack was very much the ‘screamer’ then, and Ruin was in awe of her ability to let one rip on a crowded avenue or cross-street, whilst quietly hoping he might be mistaken for her companion-carer. He so loved that embarrassment. He also suspected that she loved watching him attempt to deal with it.
Those walks should become legend.
Yes, it all happened in a crowded room, a dark one to boot. There were two not quite double beds. Ruin didn’t know what size they were, they weren’t standard anything. He guessed they were more single size; two double beds would not have fit in that room. But this was years before he was aware of those designated sizes, queen, king, whatever. They were old metal frames, with exposed springs, on which the horsehair mattresses scrappily floated. His two younger brothers shared one, he had the other. It was their room, the boy’s room. His parents slept in the small box-room, so his sisters could share the other bedroom, furnished with two single beds. The youngest of the brothers, Johnny, was about 4 years old at the time. He was a troubled child, if his self-rocking was anything to go by. This self-soothing swaying back and forth relentlessly would infuriate his ten-year-old brother, Tony, until Johnny managed to soothe himself to sleep each night. Tony would then become comatose, at last, having endured that rocking until exhaustion intervened. Johnny also slept with his invisible friend ‘Ibi’, so their bed was somewhat overcrowded.
Ruin, the oldest, had a bed to himself, a sign of seniority, an acknowledgement of his waxing ‘teenhood’, until that interloper arrived.
Here, let me (that personal pronoun again) interject, by way of adding a warning. It’s simple really, and I am directing it towards all parents, of all persuasions and ilks, gender preferences, and identities. It’s blindingly elementary, an iteration I know. Please, never put a mature male in bed with an immature child, no matter how much you trust this male, no matter how close the family relationship might be. But I guess if I was being both fair and honest, I would have to extend this to include all maturated individuals regardless of gender or self-identification. My, perhaps unfair, focus on the male abuser here is because this was the case, both as far as my mother and myself were concerned, those wayward uncles. But then this isn’t about me, so I apologise for any presumptions made.
Ruin did not want to share his bed.
Yes, Ruin was doing okay. He knew it wasn’t Rack’s job to take the sadness away. How could it be? Anyway, he was doing exactly that himself, and it was about time, in every possible meaning of that phrase. It was about time itself, indeed, nothing more, nothing less. So not counting on any, a godly and honest state if ever there was one, he would get on with it until he no longer could. There’s a definition of fulfilment there, that recognition of oneself as that veritable elephant surfing on the fabled edge of that infinite black hole, and writing this out made him happy, elated even. For what it’s worth, it records itself anyway, endlessly, and anything the universal you or I might choose to add is simply non-essential extra, that ‘Froth on a Daydream’ which Boris Vian liked to write about. It is written for the self, a gift. He was looking at Vian again for a reason, or at least was planning to, it having once been important to him. A new copy sat on his emptying shelves, quietly reverberating. Hum diddley hum. This hum was once beautifully described as ‘the music of the spheres’.
There is there, there.
Anyway, back to those words of advice, my abridged handbook for would-be parents.
Do not circumvent the grooming, do not make it unnecessary by placing a potential predator and a victim in a dark, and silent, bed together. Whilst I am not going to dissect what happened on that mattress, I am going to look at why a child might have erroneously projected that grooming onto his mother for almost 60 years. There’s the crux, Rack, that mistake, that almost lifelong, retarding, projection that might have turned a 68-year-old child into a storyteller.
It was almost impossible for that son to describe that mother, to find the words, I mean. But he was going to try. There was no malice there, and she wasn’t stupid. Being stupid and ignorant are not the same thing. But then the whole story is also tinged with her innocence, something which can often be confused with ignorance, but here they were intertwined, and she had no way to pick them apart. These traits were very much part of her Gordian Knot, that imponderable she had inadvertently played forward.
To go further he knew he was going to have to do it alone. He was going to have to, temporarily hopefully, let Rack go as well. He knew that it was going too far, and could even be triggering, to use a woke expression, for her. It was almost going too far for himself, even. It felt like an essential step, so he would take it. This would constitute a huge, and frightening, departure, a rupturing, after 25 years of corresponding. He was going to go back alone. She knew where he was, he knew where she was, that would have to be enough for now.
There is always that cracked open window here, letting some air in, and stench out.
That will be enough in this interim, he guffawed quietly to himself, recklessly Rackless, perhaps, but enough for now.
Rack: Have been thinking. And just tell me to fuck off if you disagree or don’t care, but I feel you should be writing in the first person.
Ruin: I will work that out, now, or soon. I write in the third person when it becomes too difficult to write about, to get some distance. I now sort of know I can write it, so I better get on with it. The first person might be more immediate, I guess, but I was trying, to a degree, to avoid writing a straight-forward memoir. Anyway, this does need sorting out before I really sit down to it. I think I have the bare bones together now, and need to work on the form it's going to take. I am feeling like withdrawing more to do it, but that frightens me too.
Rack: I absolutely get that. And the fear of withdrawing to do it too. Onward. I get so stuck on the small stuff that I cannot proceed at all, so it would be safe to ignore me. Sending love.
Ruin: I am not at all sure yet which direction it is going in, in so much as I don't really want to write a 'novel' or a 'memoir'. I am thinking of it as more of connected 'essays', than anything else. Essays on a theme, personal essays, even, perhaps lyrical essays, I am not sure. For now it's just writing. It will include these, Immediate messages, emails, stories, confused memories, and ramblings about ideas, 'drivers', and whatever. There will even be images. The person they are written in can change. I realised that in the writing to you, it should always be in the first person, directly written to you, that personal. But in my enthusiasm found myself sending you some of the 'Ruin (he) had a good wank and fell asleep' stuff. I put all that on Flickr anyway, so you know where it is. I still revolve around images, so I will continue to work there. It is my way, as unorthodox as that might be, and it's more or less private there anyway. I like that promiscuousness, that slightly ajar window, so something can creep out or in, and catch me unawares. It is my only 'Meta' space.
I say you know where it is there, but it is now quite hidden. I am working under certain images, add text most days, but these are older images. Only newly added images get attention so these more or less go unseen, as the text develops. I leave little clues but one would have to be quite intrepid to find them.
The title, 'A Less Comforting Narrative', refers to the image, and not to the exchange under it.
Rack: It’s always an act of faith and you are writing, that’s what counts. The idea of writing essays might be very freeing.
But Rack, there is another crux there too, another layer I need to look at, and that is the idea of the self as a ‘groomer’. I am not at all sure why I attack these ideas head on, but it seems I do, or have to (am driven to), at least. OK, perhaps I make cack-handed efforts at this, perhaps there is delusion there, but this is something I have to do, if I am going to be as honest as I can be. This is grooming, this writing I mean, it is enticing, and almost demanding, responses. It appears I might feed off responses, and this is somewhat alarming. As usual, confrontation seems the only way forward, not just to recognize something but to actively attempt to disempower it. This might demand another step, a sort of extension of that quarantine which I have already noted as possibly a way forward. It feels like I should write to you, and not send what I write. In short, I don’t know my own motivations, let alone trust them. I don’t even know if they are mine. I recognize a group of possibly powerful drivers, besides the common or garden ones of background, abuse and general upbringing. All these are more or less universal, perhaps the abuse aspect was more extreme. Then there are the added influences of a sexually generated plague, this we share, and the drugs needed to control that scourge/gift. There is also residual anger, perhaps, at being a ‘failed’ artist, at the aborted attempts I made to try to communicate. This is also more often the case as not, considering the overabundance of ‘Artists’ floatingly enjoying poverty and rejection globally. To attempt to turn that into a ‘La Vie Bohème’, at the age of 68, would border on the farcical, though that in itself might be funny enough to create a page-turner.
In July, Thalia wrote to me:
“Yes, It's always interesting when communication happens, but it is also alright with me when it doesn't, for any reason. Nobody can be a perfect Victorian-style correspondent now, even I can't.”
Thalia, by another name, is one of those 4 women you commented on, relative to this idea of re-building myself, those ‘good mothers’, those substitutes I have been busily generating all my life. I see that now as a type of grooming, not conscious in the doing of it, but decipherable in retrospect, that looking back I seem to be up to.
Of course, you sit there, the ‘Mother Superior’. Next question, are you getting anything out of this? If not, tell me. I will stop writing to you, in fact I won’t. I will write to you in private, but not send it, I mean. I would continue to post the writing where I habitually post it, my afore-mentioned public/private Meta space, that chink of an open-window. This would mean that if you were ever curious you could find it there.
I know how relentless I can be, and I also know how exhausting this can be. I am acknowledging this, at last. Let me know what you think so we can begin this next phase in a way that would ensure that there was no grooming in the doing of it.
Rack: I need to concentrate on my own work. As is my habit, I get too involved in other people’s stuff in order to avoid my own. It would be awful to never hear from you, maybe there is somewhere in between.
Ruin: Yes, I couldn't stand not being in contact. I just need to rein in, to control my need to share, to get approval, awful 'boy stuff'.
Rack: god we might be growing up!!!!
Ruin: you know I hang on your every word, and can generate 1,000 words from ten from you. But yes, I can do it alone. But it's better with you. But I want you to do your work, not hinder you.
It's time to grow fucking up, for me anyway, you decide when it's your time. 68, little boy lost hasn't got the same appeal. I can't help but think I can do this quicker; I have all the raw material.
‘Don't Confront Me With My Failures’.
I am so pleased to have gotten here, this plateau of seemingly controllable desire. This burgeoning hormonal hiatus, brought on by years, disease, and the medications for the same ‘affliction’. Even surviving thus far seems somewhat miraculous, from that point of childhood abuse to this unexpected seniority, an adulthood of sorts. It was almost arrived at through no obvious intervention of my own, but there may be some evidence there that could suggest differently. It would seem that all energies were set in self-destruct mode. There was so much luck involved in generating that continuance, but there were also interventions, practical ones, like the leaps and bounds made by science in this age we live in, but also the intervention of loved ones, not family, but those rather who recognized an aspect of 'self' in the 'other' along the way, and stopped long enough to develop mutual caring.
These writings are dedicated to two of these paragons. Rack, the titular, and ‘Hem Binnen’, the Dutch ‘Him Indoors’ who saved my life.
As to my failings, I know them intimately and will expose them in all their tawdriness as I continue.
"There was an old man named Michael Finnegan
He had whiskers on his chinnegan
The wind came along and blew them in again
Poor old Michael Finnegan"
Begin Again.
Fail again, Fail Better, as our fellow countryman, that other writer in Paris, would have it.
But then beginning again is just moving forward.
Ruin, Ruin, Ruin, what in god’s name were you up to? Neither of us believe in that geezer with the grey hair, on a cloud, but my exasperation needs letting out, so there he sits omnipotent. Just so you know, I was watching all those 68 years, and I can clearly see the stories you have been telling yourself. It’s almost as if I had nothing better to do than watch over you. But, I guess, someone had to, and that judgmental geezer with his tablet of ten regulations wasn’t really up to that job, now or then, was he? So, I hung around watching, and more or less saw it all, except for those times I might have been comatose in a Ketamine or alcohol haze, beside you. You may have gotten up to some shenanigans at those junctures when I wasn’t exactly compos mentis. My apologies if I missed out on any of your multitudinous ‘calls for help’. None of us are perfect, as you well know. Before we start, get going that is, I should also say that I intend hanging around, watching over you, until your sticky, or otherwise, end. I wouldn’t miss that unravelling for all the gilt bronzes in Tibet. I am in it for the long run, as they say, whoever 'they' might be. I know you are having those memory holes, those vast and growing ever-expanding black holes, but don’t worry there, Ruin. I think I can help out with this, even. You see, I kept a written record, I know, sneaky, but it’s the nature of the graphomaniacal beast, one of my own little foibles that might actually aid and abet your storytelling. I believe we might have shared that letter writing mania, that drive to communicate through correspondence, but we have never really written to each other, have we? I suspect that is about to change. I hope so anyway.
Rack, Sorcha and Thalia inspired you to write, I can see that, mostly by being able to tolerate you, it would appear. Perhaps you brought out a mothering aspect in their natures when they saw you in some considerable distress relative to that early abuse. Perhaps it was something else too, some mutual need. There were others too, mostly female others, those correspondents, with the exception of Jonathan, who would be deserving of a separate story, perhaps. Rack spoke of them as the ‘Good Mothers’, those interventional women, those lifesavers.
Which more or less takes us to the ‘invisible man’, that centre of those black, expanding, holes, those memory lapses, the ‘Good Father’, or any father at all for that matter. He was purportedly there, constantly in the background, and often used as a threat, but he was there. I seem to remember you even put some photographs of him up on your antiquated Meta site, Flickr. I do see that there might be an absence there, a vacuum, and I have seen all the extremes you have gone to fill that infinite hole. So here I am, a Nelson Eddy to your Jeanette MacDonald (I know, camp and hopelessly dated, I am sorry about that), a top to your bottom, as Jonathan would have it.
Write to me, I will write back. Just don’t call me ‘Daddy’, that’s just one step too far, and I know, and understand, your tendency to always overstep those boundaries. I am willing to play at being the ‘Good Father’, until you learn to do that for yourself. I really wouldn't do this for anyone else in this whole wide world, so hopefully this will help you begin to feel better about yourself.
Onwards and upwards as the aforementioned 'they' like to say, tomorrow being the first day of the rest of your life and all that cliched palaver. I will do my very best to rein all that corn in as we proceed, a struggle I know. I do believe we might have a job to do, and It's way beyond time to get on with it.
I've got your back, for what it's worth.
Best Regards,
Top
25 September 2022
Dearest Top,
Embracing the fear of possibly going full Ham, Shem and Japheth, I am going to have to name you. I can’t call you 'Top' for the duration of our correspondence, disregarding the reality that the Top/Bottom synergy thing doesn’t even hold anymore, now that one is post-gay, post-sex, and approaching post-everything, what with oblivion waving tantalisingly, as it is, from the border of that widening gyre (tips hat towards W.B.) of our beloved ‘event horizon’. I think I have even found a name for you. Its partially catholic, even, from that miasma of childhood memories, that “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church, and I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom”.
Okay Rock, I am giving you the keys. You, for a while anyway, can be the designated driver, Petrus, that's you, that dependable rock, rock of the walk, even, rock of ages, my Tio Pepe port in a storm, my fellow geriatric mariner. Lash me to your, larger than average, mast, we're off.
Welcome to Rack & Ruin, and Rock! It does have a certain alliterative ring, n'est-ce pas? (TYFTC). Fasten your seatbelts, we might be in for somewhat of a bumpy ride.
Deliriously yours,
Queerqueg von Lederhosen
PS: Are you sure this device works for blocked sinuses?
PPS: Relative to the acronym used in this photoplay, please see photo below, entitled: L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.H.I.V+O.A.P
It ain’t heavy, it’s my acronym.
Dearest Wuufus Wainscotting,
Sorry to her about your troat. Don’t they be at the doing of the blessing of that same gorge anymore, at all, at all? Probably not, I would guess. Perhaps the only church what did it is now boarded up, or turned into a leisure centre where they give Irish dancing lessons to all those young, eager, coiled-springy girls, with the revolving legs and primary-colour gúnas (Gaelic for frocks), in plastic ringlets. You know the ones; they make those Dallas Cowboy’s cheerleaders girls look like vestal virgins, pushed on by their mammies, hello Bernadette Peters, to excel in all that leaping and jiggery-pokery, moving downstage like one of those roman phalanxses, putting the fear of God in every daecent catolick. Anyway, I diverge.
Talking of Catholics, no, you ain’t Rock. Rock’s his name, not Peter, or Petrus, or any of those Roman shenanigans, just clear old plain, and sturdy, ‘Rock’, as in that island lodged between the East River, and the Hudson (where I met my beloved Rack), if you get my drift, and the rock of me birth, that emerald-green one you are presently lodged up the backside of. I will admit he is partial to the odd glass of Theo Pepys, and has been known to take an occasional dash along the boreens of the Adirondacks brandishing that emblematic, blue-striped axe. That Daniel Dye Sluice could play him in a moving picture extravaganza, ‘The Last of the Tops’, or somesuch, Oscar fodder no doubt, probably to be found, eventually, in the ‘Science Fiction’ section of our favourite ‘Blokebuster’, down that windy old boreen of a bog road.
And what does every poor Irish boy need, dare I say, what does every boy need? I answer here and now, without much hesitation, other than the time it takes to take a gulp of coffee, with a slice of me iced-duck, so that I can take me slew of morning pilules; every boy needs a Rock. You can see that I am substituting, intermittently, the ‘me’ for ‘my’. I do believe I might be enjoying heading for a little regression, and sure why not, on this fine rainy Amsterdam morning? There’s neery a rock here, on this damp sponge of a low-lying place, so a lad would have to be going about inventing his own boulder to support him. And that is simply what I do be doing, as Frank S. used to like to sing.
Do be, do be, do, what were the chances?
But I regress. Where was I?
I remember. I was in Amsterdam about to take me ‘Daddy’s little helpers’, those much-loved lifesavers (said pilules). All praise science and all that palaver. I sit here pin-cushioned, enjoying the wonderful side-effects of the Monkeypox vaccine, and looking forward to when I can enjoy the same from the latest Covid update. Unfortunately, I have to wait a month for that second one, a recommended period of time between that first and second vaccine to ensure they don’t conjoin in some diabolical conspiracy to turn me into a 4G antenna, or something similar.
Pillar of salt, Lot’s wife’s lot, and how’s your mother?
I don’t think for a minute that that naughty Mr. Gates is out to chip me. As I said, pincushion here, and if he felt a yearning to chip yours truly, he could have had me eons ago. Have at it, Bill. Take me, I was, formerly, anybody’s anyway, writing bad cheques willy-nilly.
And breathe.
‘Comhbhrú na cruinne ina carraig, agus rolladh i dtreo ceist ró-mhór í’, (trans: Compress the universe into a rock and roll it towards a bloody huge question) as the plagarised ancient Irish bard might have warbled, and more than likely did.
No, it isn’t that Rack is non-responsive, it’s more that I am giving her a break from all my 'raiméis' (Gaelic for general doo-doo, shite for want of a better word). It's all been 'ri ra agus ruaile buaile', (gaelic for a gas craic) as far as I am concerned. We have chewed the cud now for 35 long, wonderful, and somewhat excruciating years. That’s not altogether true. We lived on that same rock of Manhattan for 11 years, then wrote to each other for 24 years after that. There are probably a million words lurking there. I think that you recognize that I love letter writing, or it’s modern equivalent anyway, the email. The problem is that the unwieldy words are there, and they are just a part of what lurks on my hard-drive, and I suspect it’s going to take my ‘Rock’ to sort them out. Rock has a pithy character, he takes no prisoners, that tough-love stuff, that ability to tell you when you are being an eejit. Ruin needs Rock more than I do, possibly (oops, reality check there). Anyway, Rack and Ruin could chew the cud relentlessly forever, they could easily become that universal methane generator, much feared of by the powers that do be sitting there Canute-like, holding the tide back, in Brussels.
Carraig is the Irish word for Rock, just so you know. Would that not be a great ‘secret’ name, one to make any mammy proud? “Come on over here, darling Carraig, and let me wipe your nose wit me sleeve, you’re snottin all over de kip”. It doesn’t get much better than that in my book. Did you know that kip is the Dutch for chicken?- just saying.
I used to love, back on that old Manhattan Rock, when Rack used to croon "It's not your frock my dear", then look at me as if wisdom had been imparted. Rack knew how to make Ruin laugh, it was sort of a mutual thing. It was some 'Hibernafold', sweep me into your fold my dear, understanding stranded between laughing and screaming, that wondrous type of hysteria, infectious, scary, and lovely (Oxford comma usage there, blimey). Pronouns be damned, we know who we are. A pox on all your pronouns, here's to universal interchangeability!
Mise Lemas,
Ruin O’ Carraig (Gaelic for Ruin, son of Rock)
It’s time to get back to that ‘crux’ as Rack called it. It will be slightly different this time, as I won’t be telling it to her, I will be telling it to myself, and to Rock, perhaps. Perhaps this part needs looking at, not only from Ruin’s viewpoint, but from that slightly cynical over-arching perspective that he might be able to bring to this dissection, this evisceration, this vomiting up. I guess it isn’t really about what happened anyway, I mean the details of what happened, these I won’t be telling, but rather the reactions to these stimuli on that rather delicate entity that the child, Ruin, was. He was a stammering wreck of a neglected child, and this was the first time anyone had ever paid any attention to him There was nothing in his arsenal to deal with the repercussions, and no one available who might proffer some help or even a suggestion of an explanation. It happened in cold darkness, and in silence. It happened in his gut.
It was most definitely where it happened, there, in the pit of his stomach. He still remembers that feeling, vividly. Yes, that’s present tense, remembers, not remembered. That stays forever, at least for the forever that describes the length of a life, but it can also be projected into a future, through these words, beyond that ‘life’s sentence’. Technically apparently, the hippocampus shrinks, and entombs the memory, creates an imprint that asserts itself for a life’s duration. That’s the sentence, that’s the imprisonment. And why would you want to project that into the future, that delicately butterflied stomach, the answer would be simply to give it a description, to, perhaps, proffer that absent help, or a suggestion of an explanation.
He/I/we/they needed Rock there to help explain it to him. He loved that grab-bag of pronouns, a new freedom generated by contemporary politics, which would allow him to seamlessly segue from one to another. Rock could provide the ‘You’, that objective overview, perhaps. He always loved that wonderfully funny narcissistic joke: I am getting sick and tired of relentlessly talking about myself, can you take over and talk about me for a while?
Okay Rock, do you want to take over, to give a kid a break?
Come on “Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee”
1 Oct 2022, 3.08PM CEST
Thalia,
Strange this idea of letter-writing. I do see it has been excessive, something I have always done too much of, finding some validation there, I would guess. In a way, I want to turn that around. Perhaps I have been inflicting my ‘graphomania’ on others for two long now and it’s time to take responsibility for that myself. I know it’s too easy a diagnosis, one of those that was bandied about some years ago, another over-arching description that, perhaps, doesn’t mean much. That’s something I learnt from you, the need to circumvent easy characterisations.
Your: “Yes, It's always interesting when communication happens, but it is also alright with me when it doesn't, for any reason. Nobody can be a perfect Victorian-style correspondent now, even I can't.”
That was somewhat of a turning point for me in this, that note, it worked for me. It set me of on some realisation of what I might have been getting up to, over the last few years, and how this might have been somewhat unfair. You probably saw that acknowledged already under ‘A Less Comforting Narrative, (Turku, Finland)’, as I know what a sleuth you can be, acknowledging your “I saw!”. I must admit that I like that you saw.
Yes, I guess at some point there might be editing, heavy editing, I imagine, but I am not feeling at all, at the moment, that this is my job. I feel like I am still working through it and into it, getting the substance of it all together. I am currently at that ‘abuse phase’, I have been trying to explain to Rack that my mother is not to blame, and neither was my father, they were just carrying on what they knew, their abuse and abandonment. The more I move on the more I realise I have to talk about universal ‘innocence’, and when I say universal, I mean exactly that, a forgiveness that pardons Jeffrey Dahmer and Adolf Hitler, even, those unspeakable outrages against decency and humanity. This ‘innocence’ doesn’t negate the need for absolute quarantine in cases such as these. For what it’s worth I hold no truck with death sentences, no matter how extreme the actions of the perpetrator of the outrage. It’s a strange journey, that getting around to forgiving everyone so you can forgive yourself, but that does seem to be what I am up to, so I will take it as far as I can. It feels like a good, a necessary, journey.
I have been spending the last week releasing Rack, letting go, trusting. Then lo and behold, along came Roc
🔴Leica-M6 TTL 0,72 Elmarit-M 1:2.8/21mm ASPH
Nikon super Coolscan 5000ed.
Ilford Delta 100asa. Kodak developer HC 110 1+31 (B) 6min 20º.
Heerlen City Centre (Murals) Graffiti.
🔴Leica my point of view.
Wetzlar, Deutschland.
Leica-CL 1974 Rangefinder,Serial Number 1395533
Leica-M 6 TTL 0.72 1998 Rangefinder Serial Number 2466527
Leica-M6 TTL 0.85 2001 Rangefinder Serial Number 2755204.
The Unisphere, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, NY
Built for the World's Fair in 1964
Stands 140ft (43m) tall and has a diameter of 120ft (36.5m).
Constructed to commemorate the beginning of the spaceage. The three orbit rings represent the tracks of Yuri Gagarin; the first man in space, John Glenn; the first American to orbit the Earth, and Telstar; the first active communications satellite.
More info on the sphere: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisphere
More info & images from me:
x
CINEMA DIGITAL
A Study of 4D Julia sets
Baraka / Baraka from DVD to 4K / Baraka with the monkey
Beatbox360
Enquanto a noite não chega (While we wait for the night â?" first Brazilian film in 4K)/(primeiro filme brasileiro em 4k)
Era la Notte
Flight to the Center of the Milky Way
Growth by aggregation 2
Jet Instabilities in a stratified fluid flow
Keio University Concert
Manny Farber (Tribute to)
Scalable City
The Nonlinear Evolution of the Universe
The Prague train
FILE INOVAÇÃO / FILE INNOVATION
Interface Cérebro-Computador – Eduardo Miranda
Sistema comercial de Reconhecimento Automático - Genius Instituto de Tecnologia
Robô de visão omnidirecional – Jun Okamoto
Loo Table: mesa interativa - André V. Perrotta, Erico Cheung e Luis Stateri dos Santos, da empresa Loodik
Simulador de Ondas e Simulador de Turbilhão - Steger produção de efeitos especiais ltda.
GAMES INSTALAÇÕES / INSTALLATIONS GAMES
Giles Askham – Aquaplayne
Jonah Warren & Steven Sanborn – Transpose
Jonah Warren & Steven Sanborn – Full Body Games
Fabiano Onça e Coméia – Tantalus Quest
Julian Oliver - levelHead
GAMES
Andreas Zecher – Understanding Games
Andrei R. Thomaz – Cubos de Cor
Arvi Teikari – Once In Space
Fabrício Fava – Futebolando
Golf Question Mark – Golf
Introversion.co.uk – Darwinia
Jens Andersson and Ida Rödén – Rorschach
Jonatan Söderström – CleanAsia!
Jonatan Söderström – AdNauseum2
Jorn Ebner – sans femme et sans avieteur
Josh Nimoy – BallDroppings
Josiah Pisciotta – Gish
Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg – Thinking Machine 7
Mariana Rillo – Desmanche
Mark Essen - Punishment: The punishing
Mark Essen - RANDY BALMA: MUNICIPAL ABORTIONIST
Playtime – SFZero
QUBO GAS: Jef Ablézot, Morgan Dimnet & Laura Henno - WATERCOULEUR PARK
QueasyGames - Jonathan Mak – Everyday Shooter
R-S-G: Radical Software Group - Kriegspiel - Guy Debord's Game of War
Shalin Shodhan (www.experimentalgameplay.com) – On a Rainy Day
Shalin Shodhan (www.experimentalgameplay.com) – Cytoplasm
Shalin Shodhan (www.experimentalgameplay.com) – Particle Rain
Tales of Tales: Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn - The Graveyard
Tanja Vujinovic – Osciloo
ThatGameCompany – Jenova Chen – Clouds
ThatGameCompany – Jenova Chen - flOw
JOGOS BR
JOGOS BR 1
Ayri - Uma Lenda Amazônica - Sylker Teles da Silva / Outline Interactive
Capoeira Experience - Andre Ivankio Hauer Ploszaj / Okio Serviços de Comunicação Multimídia Ltda.
Cim-itério - Wagner Gomes Carvalho / Green Land Studios
Incorporated (Emprego Maluco) - Tiago Pinheiro Teixeira / Interama Jogos Eletrônicos
Iracema Aventura – Odair Gaspar / Perceptum Software Ltda.
Nevrose: Sangue e Loucura Sob o Sol do Sertão - Rodrigo Queiroz de Oliveira
/ Gamion Realidade Virtual & Games
Raízes do Mal – Marcos Cruz Alves / Ignis Entretenimento e Informática Ltda.
JOGOS BR 2 – Jogos Completos
Cave Days - Winston George A. Petty / Insolita Studios
Peixis!
(JOGO EM DESENVOLVIMENTO) - Wallace Santos Lages / Ilusis Interactive Graphics
JOGOS BR 2 – Demos Jogáveis
Brasilia Tropicalis - Thiago Salgado Aiache de Moraes / Olympya Games
Conspiração Dumont - Guilherme Mattos Coutinho
Flora - Francisco Oliveira de Queiroz
Fórmula Galaxy – Artur Corrêa / Vencer Consultoria e Projetos Ltda.
Inferno - Alexandre Vrubel / Continuum Entertainment Ltda
Lex Venture - Tiago Pinheiro Teixeira / Interama Jogos Eletrônicos
Trem de Doido (DEMO EM DESENVOLVIMENTO) - Marcos André Penna Coutinho
Zumbi, o rei dos Palmeiras - Nicholas Lima de Souza
HIPERSÔNICA / HIPERSONICA
Hipersônica Performance
Andrei Thomaz, Francisco Serpa, Lílian Campesato e Vitor Kisil – Sonocromática
Bernhard Gal – Gal Live
+Zero: Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri, Jonattas Marcel Poltronieri, Raphael Dall'Anese - +Zero do Brasil
Luiz duVa - Concerto para duo de laptops
Henrique Roscoe (a.k.a. 1mpar) – HOL
Jose Ignacio Hinestrosa e Testsu Kondo – Fricciones
Alexandre Fenerich e Giuliano Obici – Nmenos1
Orqstra de Laptops de São Paulo - EvEnTo 3 Movimentos para Orquestra
Hipersônica Participantes
Agricola de Cologne - soundSTORY - sound as a tool for storytelling
Jen-Kuan Chang – Drishti II
Jen-Kuan Chang – Discordance
Jen-Kuan Chang – Nekkhamma
Jen-Kuan Chang - She, Flush, Vegetable, Lo Mein, and Intolerable Happiness
Jerome Soudan – Mimetic
Matt Lewis e Jeremy Keenan – Animate Objects
Robert Dow - Precipitation within sight
Tetsu Kondo – Dendraw
Tomas Phillips – Drink_Deep
INSTALAÇÕES / INSTALLATIONS
Anaisa Franco – Connected Memories
Andrei Thomaz & Sílvia Laurentiz – 1º Subsolo
Graffiti Research Lab – Various
Hisako K. Yamakawa – Kodama
r3nder.net+i2off.org – is.3s
Jarbas Jacome – Crepúsculo dos Ídolos
Julio Obelleiro & Alberto García – Magnéticos
Julio Obelleiro & Alberto García – The Magic Torch
Mariana Manhães – Liquescer (Jarrinho)
Mariana Manhães – Liquescer (Jarrinho Azul)
Rejane Cantoni e Leonardo Crescenti – PISO
Sheldon Brown – Scalable City
Soraya Braz e Fábio FON – Roaming
Takahiro Matsuo – Phantasm
Ursula Hentschlaeger – Outer Space IP
Ursula Hentschlaeger – Phantasma
Ursula Hentschlaeger – Binary Art Site
SYMPOSIUM
Agnus Valente
Anaisa Franco
Andre Thomaz e Silvia Laurentiz
Christin Bolewski
Giles Askham
Graffiti Research Lab: James Powderly
Hidenori Watanave
Ivan Ivanoff e Jose Jimenez
Jarbas Jácome
João Fernando Igansi Nunes
Marcos Moraes
Mediengruppe Bitnik; Carmen Weisskopf, Domagoj Smoljo, Silvan Leuthold, Sven König [SWI]
Mesa Redonda (LABO) - Cicero Silva, Lev Manovich (teleconferencia) e Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Mesa Redonda [BRA] – (Hipersônica) Renata La Rocca, Gabriela Pereira Carneiro, Ana Paula Nogueira de Carvalho, Clarissa Ribeiro Pereira de Almeida. Mediação: Vivian Caccuri
Mesa Redonda [BRA] - [Ministro da Cultura: Gilberto Gil | Secretário do Audiovisual do Ministério da Cultura: Sílvio Da-Rin | Secretário de Políticas Culturais do Ministério da Cultura: Alfredo Manevy ]
Mesa Redonda [BRA] - Inovação - Lala Deheinzelin, Gian Zelada, Alessandro Dalla, Ivandro Sanches, Eduardo Giacomazzi. Mediação: Joana Ferraz
Mesa Redonda 4k - Jane de Almeida, Sheldon Brownn, Mike Toillion, Todd Margolis, Peter Otto
Nardo Germano
Nori Suzuki
Sandra Albuquerque Reis Fachinello
Satoru Tokuhisa
Sheldon Brown
Soraya Braz e Fabio FON
Suzete Venturelli, Mario Maciel e bolsistas do CNPq/UnB (Johnny Souza, Breno Rocha, João Rosa e Samuel Castro [BRA]
Ursula Hentschlaeger
Valzeli Sampaio
Cinema Documenta FILE São Paulo 2008
Antonello Matarazzo – Interferenze – Itália / Italy
Bruno Natal - Dub Echoes – Brasil / Brazil
Carlo Sansolo - Panoramika Eletronika - Brasil / Brazil
Kevin Logan – Recitation – Londres / London
Kodiak Bachine e Apollo 9 – Nuncupate – Brasil / Brazil
Linda Hilfing Nielsen - Participation 0.0 – Dinamarca
Maren Sextro e Holger Wick - Slices, Pioneers of Electronic Music – Vol.1 – Richie Hawtin Documentary – Alemanha / Germany
Matthew Bate - What The Future Sounded Like – Austrália
Thomas Ziegler, Jason Gross e Russell Charmo - OHM+ the early gurus of electronic music – Eua / USA
Mídia Arte FILE São Paulo 2008
[ fladry + jones ] Robb Fladry and Barry Jones - The War is Over 2007 – EUA / USA
Agricola de Cologne - One Day on Mars – Alemanha / Germany
alan bigelow - "When I Was President" – EUA / USA
Alessandra Ribeiro Parente Paes
Daniel Fernandes Gamez
Glauber Kotaki Rodrigues
Igor Albuquerque Bertolino
Karina Yuko Haneda
Marcio Pedrosa Tirico da Silva Junior – Reativo – Brasil / Brazil
Alessandro Capozzo – Talea – Itália / Italy
Alex Hetherington - Untitled (sexyback, folly artist) – Reino Unido / United Kingdon
Alexandre Campos, Bruno Massara e Lucilene Soares Alves - Novos Olhares sobre a Mobilidade – Brasil / Brazil
Alexandre Cardoso Rodrigues Nunes
Bruno Coimbra Franco
Diego Filipe Braga R. Nascimento
Fábio Rinaldi Batistine
Yumi Dayane Shimada – Abra Sua Gaveta – Brasil / Brazil
ALL: ALCIONE DE GODOY, ADILSON NG, CAMILLO LOUVISE COQUEIRO, MARINA QUEIROZ MAIA, RODOLFO ROSSI JULIANI, VINÍCIUS NAKAMURA DE BRITO – Vita Ex Maxina – Brasil / Brazil
Andreas Zingerle - Extension of Human sight – Áustria
Andrei R. Thomaz - O Tabuleiro dos Jogos que se bifurcam - First Person Movements - Brasil / Brazil
Andrei R. Thomaz e Marina Camargo – Eclipses – Brasil / Brazil
Brit Bunkley – Spin – Spite – Nova Zelândia – New Zeland
calin man – appendXship / Romênia
Carlindo da Conceição Barbosa
Kauê de Oliveira Souza
Guilherme Tetsuo Takei
Renato Michalischen
Ricardo Rodrigues Martins
Tassia Deusdara Manso
Thalyta de Almeida Barbosa / Da Música ao Caos – Brasil / Brazil
Christoph Korn – waldstueck – Alemanha / Germany
Corpos Informáticos: Bia Medeiros, Carla Rocha, Diego Azambuja, Fernando Aquino, Kacau Rodrigues, Márcio Mota, Marta Mencarini, Wanderson França – UAI 69 – Brasil / Brazil
Duda. – do pixel ao pixel – Brasil / Brazil
Daniel Kobayashi
Felipe Crivelli Ayub
Fernando Boschetti
Luiz Felipe M. Coelho
Marcelo Knelsen
Mauro Falavigna
Rafael de A. Campos
Wellington K. Guimarães Bastos - A Casa Dentro da Porta – Brasil / Brazil
David Clark - 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein – Canadá
Thais Paola Galvez
Josias Silva
Diego Abrahão Modesto
Nilson Benis
Vinicius Augusto Naka de Vasconcelos
Wilson Ruano Junior
Marcela Moreira da Silva – Rogério caos – Brasil / Brazil
Diogo Fuhrmann Misiti, Guilherme Pilz, João Henrique - Caleidoscópio Felliniano: 8 ½ - Brasil / Brazil
Agence TOPO: Elene Tremblay, Marcio Lana-Lopez, Maryse Larivière, Marie-Josée Hardy, James Prior - Mes / My contacts – Canadá / Canada
Eliane Weizmann, Fernando Marinho e Leocádio Neto – Storry teller – Brasil / Brazil
Fabian Antunes - Pousada Recanto Abaetuba – Brasil / Brazil
Edgar Franco e Fabio FON - Freakpedia - A verdadeira enciclopédia livre – Brasil / Brazil
Fernando Aquino – UAI Justiça – Brasil / Brazil
Henry Gwiazda - claudia and Paul - a doll's house is...... - there's whispering...... – EUA / USA
Architecture in Metaverse: Hidenori Watanave - "Archidemo" - Architecture in Metaverse – Hapão / Japan
Yto Aranda – Cyber Birds Dance – Chile
Dana Sperry - Sketch for an Intermezzo for the Masses, no. 7 – EUA / USA
Jorn Ebner - (sans femme et sans aviateur) – Reino Unido / United Kingdon
Josephine Anstey, Dave Pape - Office Diva – EUA / USA
Josh Fishburn – Layers – Waiting – EUA / USA
Karla Brunet – Peculiaris – Brasil / Brazil
Kevin Evensen - Veils of Light – EUA / USA
lemeh42 (santini michele and paoloni lorenza) - Study on human form and humanity #01 – Itália / Italy
linda hilfling e erik borra - misspelling generator – Dinamarca / Denmark
Lisa Link - If I Worked for 493 years – EUA / USA
Marcelo Padre – Estro – Brasil / Brazil
Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel - Locative Painting - Brasil / Brazil
Martin John Callanan - I Wanted to See All of the News From Today – Reino Unido / United Kingdon
Mateus Knelsen, Ana Clara, Felipe Vasconcelos, Rafael Jacobsen, Ronaldo Silva - A pós-modernidade em recortes: Tide Hellmeister e as relações Design e cultura – Brasil / Brazil
Mateus Knelsen, Felipe Szulc, Mileine Assai Ishii, Pamela Cardoso, Tânia Taura - Homo ex machina – Brasil / Brazil
Michael Takeo Magruder - Sequence-n (labyrinth) - Sequence-n (horizon) – Reino Unido / United Kingdon
Michael Takeo Magruder + Drew Baker + David Steele - The Vitruvian World - Reino Unido / United Kingdon
Nina Simões - Rehearsing Reality ( An interactive non-linear docufragmentary) - Reino Unido / United Kingdon
Nurit Bar-Shai - Nothing Happens – EUA / USA
projectsinge: Blanquet Jerome - Monkey_Party – França / France
QUBO GAS - WATERCOULEUR PARK – França / France
rachelmauricio castro – 360 - R.G.B. – tybushwacka – Brasil / Brazil
Rafael Rozendaal - future physics – Netherlands
Regina Célia Pinto - Ninhos & Magia – Brasil / Brazil
Roni Ribeiro – Bípedes – Brasil / Brazil
Rubens Pássaro - ISTO NÃO É PARANÓIA – Brasil / Brazil
Rui Filipe Antunes – xTNZ – Brasil / Brazil
Selcuk ARTUT & Cem OCALAN – NewsPaperBox – Brazil
Tanja Vujinovic - "Without Title" – Switzerland
Hipersônica Screening – FILE São Paulo 2008
1mpar – hol – Brasil / Brazil
Art Zoyd - EYECATCHER 1 - EYECATCHER 2, Man with a movie camera - Movie-Concert for The Fall of the Usher House – França / France
Audiobeamers (FroZenSP and Klinid) - Paesaggi Liquidi II – Alemanha / Germany
Bernhard Loibner – Meltdown – Áustria
Bjørn Erik Haugen – Regress - Norway
Celia Eid e Sébastien Béranger – Gymel – França / France
Studio Brutus/Citrullo International - H2O – Itália / Italy
Daniel Carvalho - OUT_FLOW PART I – Brasil / Brazil
David Muth - You Are The Sony Of My Life – Reino Unido / United Kingdon
Dennis Summers - Phase Shift Vídeos – EUA / USA
Duprass - Liora Belford & Ido Govrin – Free Field – Pink / Noise – Israel
Fernando Velázquez – Nómada – Brasil / Brazil
Frames aka Flames - Performance audiovisual sincronizada: Sociedade pós-moderna, novas tecnologias e espaço urbano - Brasil / Brazil
Frederico Pessoa - butterbox – diving - Brasil / Brazil
Jay Needham - Narrative Half-life – EUA / USA
Soundsthatmatter – trotting – briji – Brasil / Brazil
x
Leipziger Buchmesse 2016 / Leipzig Book Fair 2016
2016-03-18 (Friday)
2016_017
2016#225
LelaLa (Felicia) 535336 as (own creation) from (own series)
Thank you for any group invites which I'd be glad to accept. However, if I can't check the content of such groups ("This group is not available to you") I'd rather not add any of my photos. Thanks for your understanding.
A series of AI-generated pictures of Julia R. in different art styles.
To be continued.
Pictures made with Midjourney.
I'm always happy to accept invites to groups as long as I can see their content. If I see "this group is not available to you", my photos won't be made available to that group. Thanks for your understanding.
Image licensed under Creative Commons by S!nky: http://www.flickr.com/photos/s1nky/3428388793
Quote source: Learning and Understanding (2002) Principle 6