so totally sick and rad.com

I used to struggle with stuff that was too nostalgic / sentimental (ironic because I am so much both).

The peeps at Uppercase Gallery threw this flickr set out there and it totally resonates with me.

I found an old mechanical pencil sharpener the other day – the grey cast ironish and aluminium [sic] kind that mounts on the wall and cranks – and I stole it. As soon as I saw the thing I dredged up the smell of freshly sharpened pencils from the meatlocker of my mind.

One of the most influential books I have read is The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard.   Bachelard dissects the influence of space — in particular, our childhood spaces / home — on memory, perception, and the subconscious.

It’s pretty intriguing.

Some Bachelard quotes:

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

…when we discover a nest it takes us back to our childhood or, rather, to a childhood; to the childhoods we should have had. For not many of us have been endowed by life with the full measure of its cosmic implications.

I also just read this passage from Martha Grimes’ book Foul Matter

Imagine how you’d feel if I were, say, an oncologist telling you you only had a couple of months to live. You’d be shocked out of your mind not just by death but by the realization you’d squandered a big part of your life. Think about that. It’s my theory that none of us really believes he’s going to die. We think we believe it, given all the evidence, but we really don’t. Freud said a man can’t imagine his own death. Probably, we think there’s something more due us, and maybe that’s the reason immortality is such a popular idea. What we really want is another chance, and we think we’re going to get it–hte chance to straighten out everything, to get it right.

Language is a wonderful, fluid, organic medium that adheres to a structured logic of assembled units of meaning. Like design or architecture, the underlying structure follows laws of organization, geometry, temporality, and so on, yet the most exceptional writers, like the most impressive designer builders, have the facility and gumption to push, bend and break those rules intentionally in order to create something unexpectedly wonderful, visual, harmonic, or even discordant.

I love how sensual our brains’ connection to and interpretation of language is. Language is a symbology that stimulates visual, oral, aural, olfactory, even somatosensory systemic responses. Physical response through the interpretation of a symbol of meaning. Words trigger memory, associations, imaginations.

I often struggle with my place and meaning in the universe. What do I contribute? What value do I add, and what is my cost to the universal balance? Words are ideas. Ideas don’t consume physical resources, they don’t add physical waste. In today’s hip vernacular, words are carbon neutral, yet they have the power to build and destroy civilizations.

The Elephant in the Room

is a wonderful idiom and it induces that sensory response I relish. Big. Smelly. Feel the texture of its skin, the warmth of it. It’s trying to hide itself in the corner right up against your book shelf, behind your cherished mid-century modern lounge.

I have more than one elephant in my house, and it’s getting pretty damn crowded in here.