Fantasy

Weekly Photo Challenge: Perspective

Over the years we age and change our perspective.
Through the looking glass.

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/photo-challenge-perspective/

Moon People on Mother’s Day

In honor of Mother’s Day in America — and for new friends and followers of my blog I want to take this opportunity to re-publish a piece of writing I did when I was 12 years old! 

I give thanks to my mother and father for giving me a room with a view in which to write to my heart’s content.

Moon People – Friday 25 February 1977

When moon people grow old, they do not die. They just vanish into thin air, like smoke – and talking of smoke, I must tell you about their diet, which is precisely the same for everyone. When they feel hungry, they light a fire and roast some frogs on it – for there are lots of these creatures flying around in the air. Then while the frogs are roasting, they draw up chairs around the fire, as if it were a sort of dining-room table, and gobble up the smoke.

That is all they ever eat. And to quench their thirst they just squeeze some air into a glass and drink that: the liquid produced is rather like dew.

Bald men are considered very handsome on the moon, and long hair is thought absolutely revolting. But on young stars like the comets, which have not yet lost their hair, it is just the other way round. Or so I was told by a comet-dweller who was having a holiday on the moon when I was there.

I forgot to mention that they wear their beards a little above the knee; and they have not any toenails, for the very good reason that they have not any toes. What they have got, however, is a large cabbage growing just above the buttocks like a tail. It is always in flower, and never gets broken, even if they fall on their backs.

When they blow their noses, what comes out is extremely sour honey, and when they have been working hard or taking strenuous exercise, they swear milk at every pore. Occasionally, they turn it into cheese, by adding a few drops of the honey. They also make olive oil out of onions, and the resulting fluid is extremely rich and has a very delicate perfume.

They have any number of vines, which produce not wine but water, for the grapes are made of ice; and there, in my view, you have the scientific explanation of hail storms, which occur whenever the wind is strong enough to blow the fruit off the vines.

They use their stomachs as handbags for carrying things around in, for they can open and shut them at will. If you look inside one, there is nothing to be seen in the way of digestive organs, but the whole interior is lined with fur so that it can also be used as a centrally-heated pram for babies in cold weather.

The upper class people wear clothes made of flexible glass, but the material is rather expensive, so most people have to be content with copper textiles. For there is any amount of copper in the soil, which becomes as soft as wool when soaked in water.

I hardly like to tell you about their eyes, for fear you should think I’m exaggerating, because it really does sound incredible. Still, I might as well risk it, so goes: their eyes are detachable!!

As for ears, they have to be satisfied with a couple of plane-tree leaves.

I must just mention one other thing I saw in the King’s Palace on the moon. It was a large mirror suspended over a fairly shallow tank. If you got into the tank you could hear everything that was being said on Earth, and if you looked in the mirror, you could see what was going on anywhere in the world, as clearly as if you were actually there yourself.

I had a look at all the people I knew at home, but whether they me saw me or not I cannot really say.

Anti-Drawing

The stranger dreamed that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater which was more or less the burnt temple; clouds of taciturn students filled the tiers of seats; the faces of the farthest ones hung at a distance of many centuries and as high as the stars, but their features were completely precise.

The man lectured his pupils on anatomy, cosmography, and magic: the faces listened anxiously and tried to answer understandingly, as if they guessed the importance of that examination which would redeem one of them from his condition of empty illusion and interpolate him into the real world.

Asleep or awake, the man thought over the answers of his phantoms, did not allow himself to be deceived by imposters, and in certain perplexities he sensed a growing intelligence. He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.  — “The Circular Ruins”  by Jorge Luis Borges.

What is anti-drawing? Is it: “the importance of that examination which would redeem one of them from his condition of empty illusion and interpolate him into the real world.”

Or is it as French philosopher Gilles Deleuze explains: “Those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance.”

Law of Attraction — Part One.

“We’re all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

http://icosta.see.me/

The Nomad Commentaries

Commentary No. 1

“Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil. – Frederick Douglass. 

Commentary No. 2

I wander away from the screen

Tear holes in the routine.

For a brief moment, I have time on my hands.

Where do I begin?

I will hold your eyes, see me.

You watch as I read the songlines on your palms, caress your forks in the road.

You can breathe in, but not out again

If you so choose.

Where is your heart’s compass? Where’s your heart’s Due North?

It can take time for messages to come ashore.

It can take time for the vowels to sail forth past the ego:

The consonants seem to take even longer. God knows

Why…

It takes injury for this mesmerist to rein in her consciousness:

To peel the old paint on her story.

Only through art can I languish and pretend not to exist.

Commentary No. 3

Writing brought by abstract painting to the paper.

Commentary No. 4

With a slow burning heart 
I drive to the pharmacy with my guitar all the hours of the 24.

Fame is a drug on prescription all the hours of the 24.

After a lifetime of searching I found my biological father on Facebook. My shadow self is battling to hold onto me. She’s cutting my clothes to smithereens.

Commentary No. 5

One day I will write about inner peace.

Growing in seedpods.

Nurtured in short bursts of poetry.

Seagulls hover over me

Waiting for yesterday’s bread.

Let the NOW be of use to you angel, seer, believer,

Friend, ally, I love you.

How do we reconcile our unconscious desires?

Our labyrinth.

How do we fly above ourselves to

highlight, to minimize, to free

ourselves from the loop of assumptions,

groove of greed.

Juice of injustice.

Commentary No. 6

An Englishman rolls down his car window to shout the word nigger at me.

A white colleague calls me a cross between a dog and a slave.

How do I reconcile this information?

Do I laugh it off? Do I take myself less seriously?

Transcend my pride

Ego

Injury

Humiliation

My feeling of total wipeout.

With unconditional love…

“I love you, please forgive me, I’m sorry, thank you.”

Commentary No. 7

Here I write in the house I was conceived in. If I am mistaken, I go about it quietly, fastidious as I am in matters of delicacy. My great great grand-mother Alice (the ancestor with the long tail) never tired of telling me that forgetfulness is for the mind with pinhole capacity.

“How are you my darling apparition?” I say giving Alice an impromptu kiss. A line coruscates her forehead. She waits. She frowns. She tumbles into the other world.

After an interval, Alice re-appears as a shimmering blur. Her blurred outline manifests a balance beam and she hops up onto the four-inch wide platform and strikes a pose in the dark recess of our wooden house: empowering the occupants to set sail to the New World.

Whether our family reaches its destination depends upon the wellbeing of our slaves.

Commentary No. 8

In Sierra Leone, West Africa, everything is broken 
in pieces strewn apart.

My ancestors’ medals 
that were pinned to their chests
 are now buried in the family archives.

Today in our Freetown neighborhood, it’s aching with rain. I’m waiting for my sister to finish up her meeting 
with the Director of Reparations.

In the ether her words comingle,

bare her soul like an abstract painting.

I wish I had the perfect umbrella for her; but I don’t.

In Sierra Leone we’re all in the waiting room.

Commentary No. 9

Limbo only meant to be temporary, not held in this position, in this way for all my life.

Commentary No. 10

The Nomad Commentaries — Artist’s Statement.

In attempting to document my personal experience, I found myself in an autobiographical dilemma. I was yet to become socially aware and still had to become politically conscious of the black diaspora which informed my artistic roots. But when I came to articulate this journey, I realized the Eurocentric linear narrative formula could never adequately explain what I was feeling, and I searched for an art form to combine the diaphanous threads of my lost indigenous peoples, my Eurocentric scholastic disciplines and my vivid childhood as a child of the punk era: a child of The Clash and The Sex Pistols and the clash of cultures.

My early training as a dancer gave me the courage to investigate and discover that it is vital to find a common universality, a non-linear language. The following years were immersed in transcribing what I felt to be messages from my ancient past: layers of identity blurring boundaries and stirring my cellular memory. It took several years before my instincts led to me to produce documentaries as a catalyst for positive social change.

Furthermore, by employing text, video and mixed media and floating together photographic, painted and digital images, I discovered how to connect the fragments of my mixed African-European identity and begin the journey of reaching outside of myself to communicate messages of faith, healing, oneness and love.

32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com

Recently fellow WordPress blogger Jonathan Becher posted “10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life” http://alignment.wordpress.com/

I read his post and was curious to discover what he thought IDEAS 11-20 might be?

His reply came back: “Thanks Michele. Predicting the future is a difficult business but the NY Times had ’32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow’ a few weeks ago.”

Here’s a rundown of what the futurists are predicting will change your tomorrow.

32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com