“He who does not grasp the inner principles of created beings fails to feast his intellect on the manifold wisdom of God.” ~ St Maximos the Confessor (Available as a print here.)
Monthly Archives: April 2010
this week on the avantguardian\/\/the foundation of every virtue is the realization of human weakness
“No, the world did not come into being of itself, because out of nothing, nothing is derived, and thus we have to reject as unfounded the idea of automatic or spontaneous genesis. … Nothing is zero, and zero has no force. But put an entity, a unit, in front of it and 0 becomes 10, and 00, 100; and 000, 1000 and so on. This unit, then, the Triune God, turned 0 into the world…” ~ Athanasios Frangopoulos “… nothing is better than to realize one’s weakness and ignorance, and nothing is worse than not to be aware of them.” ~ St Peter of Damascus “God made us so that we might become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1:4) and sharers in His eternity, and so that we might come to be like Him (cf. 1 John 3:2) through deification by grace. It is through deification that all things are reconstituted and achieve their permanence; and it is for its sake that what is not is brought into being and given existence.” ~ St Maximos the Confessor “The foundation of every virtue is the realization of human weakness.” ~ St Maximos the Confessor “The Lord gave clear evidence
sub-entry 4> episode 27.21\/\/on the destination of roads
Decatur Street. Some think that it starts amidst all the hotels and street cars of Canal Street, but this is just a clever deception of the street’s own doing, involving numbers and the way that the human mind is addicted to ordering them.
the trolley stop
Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, where the fountains come out of the sidewalk. Print available here (larger image). Alien autopsy: 1st layer, square crop from larger image, shot in RAW, increased saturation in RAW converter to leave more “room” to work in with regard to color channel mixer, 100% red, set to monochrome, mixed down with Hard Light blending mode, then selectively brushed out in a few areas color balance, set to “preserve luminosity”: shadows +15 Cyan/Red, -20 Yellow/Blue; midtones +13 Cyan/Red, +3 Magenta/Green, -37 Yellow/Blue; highlights +44 Yellow/Blue; mixed down using Linear Light blending mode, set layer mask to “hide all” then only selectively brushed back on in order increase contrast and saturation in “heads” of fountains color gradient, gunmetal blue at bottom to tan at top, brushed out in select areas, blended down with Pin Light (it’s the pin light mixing mode with this layer which gives the image it’s almost polaroidish feel in places; the same is generally true of a carefully-chosen solid color or gradient fill layer with almost any image) another color gradient, light tan to brown, then punched a hole in the center with a 250 pixel feather in order to create a vignette effect, set
sub-entry 3> episode 3.1415 \/\/ on the transitory nature of impermanence
<<Previously… “In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.” So said Leonardo da Vinci. Didn’t he invent helicopters or something?>> theme of the week: “You can’t step in the same river twice.” New Orleans, tomorrow night. What kind of day leaves someone like me standing on one of the stone benches rimming the fountain of Spanish Plaza, looking out at the Mississippi with my arms and hands covered in black, cracked candle wax and strange, golden symbols painted onto my neck and forehead? Maybe if the episodes hadn’t gotten so shifted around then this would all make sense. Maybe I wouldn’t feel like a puzzle box full of a thousand pieces from a thousand different puzzles. My eyes burned from not sleeping for days, and the river seemed to be glowing there in the dark. I turned and looked into the fountain, pulling my flask from the inside pocket of my jacket. Not many know that the water gushing from that fountain is piped in from a special reservoir underneath the docks by the ferry, and even fewer people know that the water is trasported by
this week on the avant guardian
“You can’t step in the same river twice.” It’s a familiar phrase with a fine philosophical pedigree and whose ramifications are continuously being dealt with. The phrase is attributed to Heraclitus, an ancient Greek whose name is sometimes supplemented with the epithets “the Obscure” and “the Weeping Philosopher.” The world is always in flux, ever changing. The water which makes the river – rather than a lake – is by nature always different – so, too, is our lived experience. Heraclitus agreed with his other ancient Greeks that the world was made of basic elements: water, air, earth, and fire – a Captain Planet cosmology, if you will. But for Heraclitus, the really fundamental element was fire because it is so active and alive, changing everything with which it has contact. So, up your lighter, as they say, and feel this fire. And try to hide from that nagging suspicion that the more things change the more they stay the same…
