portents and signs

[guooey]

Linda Hogan, “The History of Red” from The Book of Medicines

[gundulablumi]

[20aliens-deactivated20200625]

PATRICK MCCORMACK

[notatzimisce]

[otomesuicide-deactivated2013062]

[last-picture-show]

Andrei Tarkovsky, Polaroid from the Book Instant Light

[eyexunt]

[ink-the-artist]

The angel came to me in a fever hallucination, perched upon my bed as I returned from the bathroom.

[conflictingheart]

[coquelicoq]

#every time I see this picture I am briefly overwhelmed#this piece of art outlived its context and milieu#but. but. in reality there is no such thing#because art is made anew with every glance. it comes to life. awakens laughing#and time compresses. softens. the past is not so much a mystery if we remember we weren’t the first to dance.#this is what art is for#this is what it can do#it doesn’t only speak to us of our own humanity#it reminds us that humanity is shared. this girl isn’t dancing in a mirror. she is dancing with a friend.#paintings don’t simply show us the world. they help teach us how to live in it. (via @robotmango)

[gundulablumi]

Raining Rainbows

[icried4you]

"Precarious Rooms" by Jan Dunning

[samsketchbook]

How to Decay Gracefully (ink redux)

[samsketchbook]

$10 October Patrons of My Patreon will receive a mini print of this piece ( and maybe some halloween stickers from the dollar store)

It might be the only time I do prints of this one tbh, so make sure to sign up before the 29th cutoff if you’re interested!

[samsketchbook]

patreon is mysterious about their monthly cutoff but i think there’s still a couple hours for this

[nevver]

In the fold, Cormac Powers

[thingsfromthedirt]

[micahulrichdraws]

Check out this neat flower my dudes.

[yidquotes]

“There’s a great Yiddish expression that says, “If I knew God, I’d be God.” In fact, I think that claiming that you “know God’s will” is an act of incredible hubris. Instead, what we say about God has much more to say about us than about God. There are, in fact, a whole range of different theologies within Judaism (you can find some of them in the terrific books “Finding God“ and “The God Upgrade,” both of which describe a whole range of differing, and sometimes even conflicting, theologies.) And while I can only speak personally here, to me, “God” isn’t really a noun at all — it’s a verb. Here’s why. The most common name that God gives Godself in the Torah is “YHVH,” a name that is sometimes thought to be so holy that no one was allowed to pronounce it. But that’s not exactly right — it’s not that “YHVH” was not allowed to be pronounced, it’s that it is literally unpronounceable, since it consists of four Hebrew vowels (yod, hay, vav and hay). By the way, that’s also why some people incorrectly call this name “Yahweh,” since (as Rabbi Lawrence Kushner once said), if you tried to pronounce a name that was all vowels, you’d risk serious respiratory injury. But even more importantly, the name YHVH is actually a conflation of all the tenses of the Hebrew verb “to be.” God’s name could be seen as “was-is-will be,” so God isn’t something you can’t capture or name — God is only something you can experience. And indeed, when Moses is at the burning bush, having just been told by God that he will be leading the Israelites out of Egypt, he says, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God responds that God’s name is “Ehyeh asher ehyeh,” which is often translated as “I am what I am.” But it could also be translated as, “I am what I will be.” So God is whatever God will be — we simply have no idea. Indeed, for my own theology, I believe that God is found in the “becoming,” transforming “what will be” into “what is.””

— Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman,

[adventurecore-suggestions]

my grandma embroidered little flowers on her clothes like i do and she taught me how to cook asparagus so it actually tasted good and she wrote about grief so simply that i could make sense of it when i was a child that had just lost a grandfather and sometimes i wonder how much of me is made of her and how much of me is my uncle and how much is my best friend and how much is my little sister. i wonder how much of them is me.

[mothdogs]

A few years back, I got really interested in this topic. I read a book by a man named Douglas Hofstadter, who’s the director for the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University. One of the foremost American researchers of the science of cognition, Hofstadter has written a lot of books, but the one I’m most familiar with is called I Am a Strange Loop. Strange Loop’s focus is on determining how, exactly, does consciousness—individuality, thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears, desires, a sense of personhood—arise from inert and unthinking molecules? After all, atoms don’t have personalities. But yet people, who are only atoms all told, somehow do.

The crux of his argument is that humans are self-referential feedback loops. We take in information from the world and incorporate it into how we react the next time we receive information. A whole section of Strange Loop is dedicated to Hofstadter’s concern with the memory of his late wife, Carol. She died suddenly and he was left wondering what parts of her, if any, can “survive” in his memory. And he eventually concluded that every human is a combination and response to all the other humans they’ve ever interacted with:

As long as you remember someone—a dead friend, a relative, a beloved pet—your experiences with them, the way their personalities influenced you, in turn affect the way YOU act and interact with others. Personhood is a self-replicating concept. Your actions ripple out in ways that can never be fully seen or understood. In a vast, cosmic sort of way, no one ever really dies–they live on in their friends :-) 

[clementiens]

“We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck. What at first is an artificial, alien mannerism slowly fuses into the stuff of our self, like wax melting in the sun, and gradually becomes as much a part of us as ever it was of someone else (though that person may very well have borrowed it from someone else to begin with).”