Today's floating bed is from The Duluth Evening Herald, 1905.

From Today's Clothing by Laura Baxter, 1949.

The drama-dary, by Jonathan Caws-Elwitt.

This is a guest piece we created for DJ Misc's [now defunct] blog, showing how diamonds throw out miniature northern lights, inspired as we wre by a de Chirico quotation: "Priceless stones threw out in all directions their iridescent darts and their miniature northern lights."

Two famous biblical accouchements, Eve from Adam's rib and Jesus from the virginal Mary, are connected as shown here.  Yet these are banal miracles, inasmuch as the emergences are from human bodies.  Consider how the Tibetan Book of the Dead offers explicit instructions on how to be reborn in a lotus flower.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook: in honor of The Shadow of the Waxwing, who said, "I really want to put Ex Libris plates in all my books, but I'm not sure if I could handle that level of pretension.  My tolerance is high but my god.  It's a real struggle.  I feel like I'm allowed 2 or 3 very improbable/pretensious things before I descend into self parody, and they might be a bridge too far."  In our diagram, we've identified that bridge-too-far as cantilevered.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook.  [Thanks to Jonathan Caws-Elwitt for inspiring this one.  The hyphenated luminaries are, of course, in his honor.]

We love the expression, "Moroni always faces East (except when he doesn't)."  For our illustration, we placed Moroni on a compass that rotates with casters, and we gave him a halo like a compass rose. 

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook: Albatrosses, too, have Achilles heels.  See Professor Oddfellow's Forgotten Wisdom.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook: an anagram for our friend Holy-Mountaineering.  Other anagrams we considered were: A onetime hungry lion; A genuine loony mirth; Metering a holy union.

Philip K. Dick wrote that we can all meet again, in another part of the forest, where a boy and his bear will always be playing ... imperishable, like all of us.  We will wind up with Pooh, in a clearer, more durable new place.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook, here is our map locating Pooh's Platonic ideal in the imperishable forest.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook: how old houses spontaneously re-enchant themselves.  For an explanation of this, see our video about how to bring your own ghost to a spooky old house.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook.  The two dark horns of non-existence: the horn of the ages before your birth, and the horn of the ages after your death.  In Wolf Solent, John Cowper Powys says we must lay hold of those two cold, slippery horns and plough on.  For more about this, see our video about how to bring your own ghost to a spooky old house.

Previously, we saw this other insight triggered by a snail.

That the heart is not an internal organ but rather surrounds the human body is a profound truth revealed only by the Dutch darkwave band Clan of Xymox and the French philosopher Blaise Pascal.  The knowledge has otherwise been utterly suppressed, presumably to keep the world in darkness.  (Try Googling it for yourself — zilch.)  Clan of Xymox, in their transcendently gorgeous song "Blind Hearts" (Twist of Shadows, 1989), dares to uncloak the forgotten wisdom that "Deep in our blind hearts [is] skin and bone."  In other words, we don't wear our hearts on our sleeves, as the idiom goes, but rather our physical bodies are contained within our hearts.  Only the likes of Pascal has been as daring as Clan of Xymox, and just over 300 years earlier he let slip that it is through the heart that we know the first principles: space, time, movement, and numbers.  He divulged that it is with our hearts that we feel there are three dimensions in space and that there is an infinite series of numbers (Pensées, and Other Writings).

Speaking of Clan of Xymox, why not celebrate other things they do gorgeously in their essential tracks "Imagination," "Obsession," "A Million Things," and "Troubled Soul" — beyond the doppler'd howls like trains streaking across the horizon, beyond the soul-satiating chord progressions, and beyond the Simple Minds-eque "dokidoki" (to use the Japanese onomatopoeia for [guitar-strummed] heartbeat).  What makes these songs so incredible is that the band disguises some of its lyrical bridges as stanzas.  Forget "the map is the territory," for in this case the verse (from the Latin for "furrow") inverts itself into raised crossing.  As with the "big ferryboat" of Mahayana Buddhism, the journey is the destination, and Clan of Xymox shows that we're already across.  It's like being on the Florentine bridge Ponte Vecchio, with its little houses atop the arches — you're passing over, from A to B, and you're simultaneously there.  

The question is, how does Clan of Xymox do this, and can it be taught?  The answer to the second question is, "No," and the answer to the first is that they do it through the technique of "Occult" or "Felt" Balance, as practiced in Japanese art.  This subtle technique finds a higher balance in the asymmetries of nature.  It's not a matter of mathematical calculation, as might be presumed in the crafting of a metrical pop song.  And the secret behind this technique is that "unequal attractions balance each other in inverse ratio to their power of attraction."  If you can visualize two spots within a given area, the point of balance is farthest from the smaller spot, giving the smaller of the two the most background.  Clan of Xymox accomplishes this, but sonically.  Such a sense of balance must be developed intuitively and hence cannot be taught.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook.

This Venn diagram, courtesy of literary scalawag and connoisseur of 60s movies Jonathan Caws-Elwitt, interprets an obsolete classification system once used to pigeonhole the bachelors of yore.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook: