(Image: Courtesy of Sally Reed, Butter and Lightning) One of my favorite set of brains and eyes, Sally Reed, has initiated her first foray into the personal blogdominium with her new site Butter and Lightning. I’m excited. She’s my kind of thinker, with a wicked sense of the absurd while still keeping her heart wide […]
Wisdom
- Imagination
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Unseated
My friend Kathryn walks her road in the fields of Cumbria I do not believe in creation, but in discovery, and I don’t believe in the seated artist but in the one who is walking the road. The imagination is a spiritual apparatus, a luminous explorer of the world it discovers. The imagination fixes and […]
I Feel Your Pain
Desert landscape near Alice Springs, Australia I’ve gone through creative dry spells. Everybody does, but when it is happening to you, it is hard to not take it personally and forget that the condition is common. It is easier to talk about it when the episode is over. It’s a little like childbirth: Give me […]
Wisdom from the Art Tribe
Connecting—in the dark, in space, in time Some of you are part of the Jerry Saltz Facebook Tribe. And what a tribe it is, nearly 4600 strong and growing daily. For those of you who are not, here’s my take on what Jerry is doing on Facebook: By operating as more of an art advocate […]
(Im)Perfect Circles
And yet we all in the end live, do we not, in a phantom dwelling? This koanic line from Bashō became the thread through a variety of impressions and images for me this morning. *** When The Shoe Fits Ch’ui the draftsman Could draw more perfect circles freehand Than with a compass. His fingers brought […]
Culture is Dark Matter
Plate XXII: “[The Milky Way] a vast Gulph, or Medium, every way extended like a Plane, and inclosed between two surfaces.” From Thomas Wright of Durham’s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750). The Warder Collection Michael Kimmelman’s piece in the Sunday Times, D.I.Y. Culture, touches on themes that I have been […]
The Broken Mind
Path following, reconsidered: Not sure where this one is going other than away (Sidewalk markings in Boston) Looking back over the last few months, I have been sensing a particular leitmotif in my thoughts, postings, concerns. It isn’t as easily identifiable as a melodic sequence in music, but I can feel something taking form, as […]
- Anthropology
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Making Room
Seafaring Hokule’a Wade Davis is an anthropologist and ethno-botanist whose passion for unsung and underserved cultures has made him a TED talk repeater. His compelling book, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, is transcripts of radio lectures he delivered two years ago. Each chapter highlights his experiences with indigenous people all […]
Transitional Space
Istanbul: a child connects with her grandmother (Photo: Collin Key) Every once in a while you find a post that says it just the way you would have. Here’s one at All Girls by Sally Reed, regular reader of Slow Muse, about so many themes and ideas that I find compelling—the work of D. W. […]
- Technology
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Discreteness
A watercolor by Renee Collins, from my collection. I don’t know the name that Renee originally gave it, but I’ve always referred to it as “Leaky Margins.” If you spend a fair amount of time online, you have probably come up against The Membrane. It functions a bit like a cell wall, as the boundary […]