Into the Ether

Launching

They decided to send their dead into the celestial sphere, to the empyrean empire, a divine ascension. Sounding balloons, they knew, plumbed the heights of the stratosphere, gathering meterological readings. The pressure differential at a certain height, within the heavenly realm, causes balloons to burst, and they slowly drift back through the sky. If they were to place the ash inside the balloon, they reasoned, it would then be scattered from this great height, through the ether, perhaps into galaxies beyond, were it to catch a zephyr heading that way.

Ascension

The Conundrum of Word & Image

A good photo is like a good sentence ...

(For M.E.)

Oamaru, 2005, jb

Muse

Who is it that reads, listens, watches? Who does one write for, read for, draw for? The 'ideal reader' is held in the head, sometimes a real reader, someone known. Other times, a hypothetical construct, what some theorists call the 'competent reader' or 'informed reader'. More appealing is the idea of a muse. I move between muses in the writing, drawing, bringing forth, carrying a sense of trying to connect with this or that person. It is a means of bypassing the vast audience beyond, that which is fickle, running on fashion, unguessable. I was therefore transfixed by Max Gimblett's interview on the radio yesterday. Moved in many ways, even by the sound of his voice inflected with emotion, speaking truths, baring his soul. But most of all in the way he described his eschewing of audience, of working to something internal, perhaps a kind of inner muse. Unlike Damien Hirst, for example, whom Gimblett described as a fairly good sculptor, but not much else. An implied sense that Hirst and his ilk merely serve up fodder for the masses. And yet, as I turn back to my own muse, who is a hybrid, part constructed 'ideal' reader, and part real person, I wonder about the danger of this too, since so much rests upon this pact, one that the muse themself is not even aware of entering, perhaps.

Maxwell Gimblett, 2007, The Hermetic Museum

Musings

A patch of blue sky. Perhaps a herald of things to come. Time to move house, Passages' new home will hopefully be less troublesome than its previous lodgings. And hopefully to mark a moment of optimism, to shake off a pall of gloom ...a gloom born of silence. Many silences, question-mark-shaped silences, ones that demand of one a patience, a silence in response to silence. Waiting, wondering. And thinking of a patch of blue sky. A whirlwind trip to Dunedin, stimulating debate amidst academics, poets, people of many words, cant and banter, call and response, wonderful responses to ideas presented, of connecting, sparking. And yet, it is the silence which carries the furtherest ... it rings in the ears. (This blog continues its predecessor here http://passages.blog.com/)