Melancholia and Practicals II

This has been a year for the ellipsis.

Melancholia and Practicals

A meaningless ramble at three in the morning, thinking of nothing on the last day of the year.

A year that came to be so much different than I'd anticipated. Rediscovered an old friend, and made a couple more through her. Rediscovered another, in an entirely unexpected way.

A flame I lost, somewhere, in heart or mind. Another I gained, with an ember besides.

Read many books, watched one too many videos...

Began the Great Cram, to find a place in the scramble for the great institutions of our country. Somehow though, I didn't like it, still don't.

I've changed...

Bourbaki

An axiomatic approach to a proof for all mathematics based on set theory.

The books are very hard to digest . Complex definitions and a weird habit of not stating why they do something until after they've done it. Still, very beneficial.

Sleep

The predominant dilemma of cognitive science.
Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta.
Patterns conserved, Patterns reset.
Cycles refreshed, cycles rerun

Dreams?
The disordered rest of a million synapses.
Forgetting to remember the world the next morning.
The consequence of entropy.

Drugged, Lucid,
Experiments with sensory deprivation.
A hippo on my chest.
Now my lover, singing a ballad.

A rockstar with a plastic guitar.
A golden scaled dragon,
stretching out into infinity.
running across the cataract.

Into Lesbos, screaming at Aristotle.
Into London, screaming at Bacon.
Into Cambridge, screaming at Newton.
Into Home, screaming at myself.

Sleep, child.

Blur

Everyone is Fallible.

All men make mistakes.


This is implicit, it is the presupposition behind every statement, every action, every idea of mankind.

Why do I take pictures?

To show something, make people feel, make me feel. For appreciation too, well, I did, at any rate. Not much of that for what I do now.

To be useful too, to some extent. Sometimes, friends want a good picture, nice to be able to do that.

I failed there. A friend I care about needs a picture done for some project, she'd rather ask some talentless idiot than me. Then again, I'm the talentless idiot here, given that there's plenty of evidence heavily against me.

All I seem to be able to get people to feel is pity for the 'intelligent' boy who's wasting his time...

I won't stop. What a fool.

Good?

I am overly critical of pictures. Most don't convey, don't show, don't mean anything. Especially the new, 'fine art' crowd, skilled? certainly. Beautiful printing, tonality managed just so, edge burns Ansel Adams would covet, Lovely subjects, enchanting expressions... They seem to have it all.

And yet, they suck. Sure, they represent the moment; represent love, beauty, hate, sadness, all of it.

And yet, they suck. Motifs, style, emotion? They've got that down pat too.

And yet, they suck.

So many MFA portfolios look like ads for fucking Canson.




Maybe I'm Jealous.

Impressions of an outsider: Shadow

Humans have shadows.

They go to the movies and get rid of them for a while; The lights dim and they cease to exist, the people vanish into unreality.

Stories unfold on the screen. Heroes, Villains; Love and War. 24 frames every second, each one revealing more of the plot, and its participants.

These characters never have any shadows; How could they? They exist only in a flat plane, the imaginings of light upon 0.14 millimetres of celluloid.

At the end, as the credits roll, The soft theater lights reveal dark, stumbling figures towards the bottom of the screen. Now, however, created by flesh, blood and bone... their movements gaining surety as the minds that control them, return to reality.

New Beginnings

The mess in my room continues to grow ever more convoluted; a reflection, perhaps,of its inhabitant. Studies, hobbies, habits and addictions share this place: The outside of the inside of my brain.