I always knew you were a bitch, Massachusetts. With your stupid and difficult to spell state name, your arrogant universities, and your annoying sports fans, I can't believe I didn't see THIS coming.
impermanence
paris calling
Featuring Lané Jo, and the makeup and hairstylings of Lauren Marler. Music (“Paris 4 AM”) by The Legendary Pink Dots. Location courtesy of Hotel Congress. . . . . .
navelgazing
“Sit and contemplate your navel.” A Flash movie featuring Phototapestries 1–79, in chronological order. All artwork and music copyright © 2002–2009 Michael Lujan. (Please wait for a few moments for the movie to load.) . . . . . . . .
evil’s event horizon
I. To Hell With It Coming from a religious background largely influenced by Buddhism in recent years, the concept of an eternal hell has been, for me, one of the most difficult to swallow during my recent return to my childhood Christian faith (albeit via the Eastern Orthodox Church, rather than the Catholic Church I grew up with). The Buddha propounded a reality divided into several different planes, none of which has the character of eternity attached to it, including the Buddhist hell. This is because of an essentially mechanistic metaphysic, inherited from its parent religion Hinduism (or more properly Sanātana Dharma), which depends on the workings of the law of karma for its understanding of human nature and its relationship to the rest of the cosmos. The metaphysics of karma essentially explain that a manifested being (in the provisional sense of an entirely conditioned, contingent existence with no essential nature specific to it) is the resultant vector, throughout all the various worlds of manifestation, of that being’s own past actions, and that karma can be both accumulated and exhausted much like money. Thus, given enough positive karma, one can end up a deva in one of the god-realms for
iconostasis
“It is impossible to spend the coming day in faith if we do not think of it as the last day of our life.” ~ St John Climacus I. A small blob of light in the distance bounces delicately back and forth. It comes slowly into focus, as though you’re just coming to after having passed out: a single sideways candle flame named fiat lux. You sit up and it’s now flickering up and down, marking the path of invisible air currents in the darkness. No smelling salts, just the acrid odor of hide glue gone bad from somewhere in the squalid apartment. There is almost no light: just the candle, a red flashing digital 12:00 in the corner and cracks of sunlight peering through drawn drapes. It’s cold enough to faintly see your breath. He’s still hunched over his workbench, the sole area fully benefiting from the light of the candle. You see some discarded egg shells on the floor and on the bench. His brush slowly glides over the smooth white gessoed surface of the thick mahogany panel, leaving a streak of red terra cotta in its wake, a small sable flagellum threshing blood from solid light. You can see the
a word from our silence
“The Logos became man, so that man might become Logos.” ~ The Philokalia, Vol. I, p. 156. I. We humans are creatures of comfort, and that applies no less to our purchasing choices than to our desire for warmth, food, and a roof over our heads. Enter the brand: the staple of a commercial and high-tech civilization. The difference between that which is branded and that which is not is tangibly summed up in the price difference between the “genuine” article on your store shelf, and the cheap knock-off sitting next to it—however the quantified difference may or may not correspond to a difference in quality. The brand is most forcefully seen as the logo, shorthand for the early 19th century term “logotype” or “logogram,” which combines the Greek terms for “word” (logos, λόγος) and “writing” or “what is written”: hence, from potential and abstract to act and reality. Accordingly, for all the public is aware, a company without a logo and the means to make it visible might as well not even exist. The logo concentrates into a unique, provocative and clever visual signifier the company’s mission and, ideally, the collective experience of dense hordes of anonymous peers, the magnitude
what comes out of oneself defiles oneself
The Tower of Babel, we are told, was a monument to mankind's hubris in thinking Heaven could be taken by an act of architecture. In a mythical age devoid of scientific philosophy, the Tower of Babel was what passed in that time for the Ontological Argument, a formal proof attempting to locate God at the conclusion of a series of logical syllogisms: rather than build steps toward a conceptual goal based on reason, bricks were fashioned of dried mud for much the same purpose—to get to Heaven.
that beauty which convulses and expands
The Sacred Geometry of the Tree of Life, Part Two Sephira VI: Tiphereth Carrying forth the theme of symbolic geometry of the Tree of Life (Figure 1) begun with Part One of this series, the sephira of Tiphereth, being the manifestation of the “idea” of the number 6, is symbolized by the simplest six-sided volume, the cube. The cube is thus the second iteration of the square (the first was with the base of the quadrangular pyramid representing Geburah). In addition to the cube, two traditional symbolic correspondences with Tiphereth are the heart and the sun—the combination of these two symbols should hearken back to last week’s column on the “Mystique of Blood and Light.” The cube is the first geometric figure in this series possessed of symmetry along all three spatial axes of length, breadth and depth (or x, y and z in the Cartesian coordinate system). Thus, a 3-dimensional cross is implied by its shape, as is the point at which all three axes converge—the center of the figure. Kether—the point—is thereby implied, as it was in the sephira immediately preceding, the pyramid (Geburah). In fact, given the square comprising each of the six faces of the cube, its volume
extra lucem nulla salus
A Metaphysical Field Guide for Photographers. “Eternity is in love with the productions of time” - so wrote William Blake in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," perhaps the best-known literary witness in the West to the reality of nonduality, that rarefied realm where subject and object forever incestuously join. Given a moment’s meditation, one can see in this allegation a fairly accurate description of the art of photography, taking as its substance that utterly indestructible (hence, eternal) medium: light.
