The heart doesn't simply open.  It continuously opens, like a fractal bloom.

Staring At the Sun




The biggest drawback to mirrorshades is that they simulate a state of permanent solar eclipse, a twilight world in which colors are distorted and shadows are deeper.  The sun has been both feared and revered throughout human history, but only a handful of people have actually had the courage to look it in the face.  Granted, the naked eye will sustain impairment if exposed to direct sunlight for too long.  Therefore, cyberpunk author Paul Di Filippo recommends optical implants as a solution.  “By stepping down the ratio of photons to electrons,” he suggests, “you can do such things as stare directly at the sun or at a welder’s flame without damage.”

But why stare into the sun in the first place?  Because it's dangerous.  Because it's deviant.  Because so few are man enough to try it.  Because radiation is natural.  Because it looked at you first.  Perhaps the best reason of all is that the sun frees us from the simplistic dogma of dualism.  Photons of light have no antiparticle.  That means that in the world of light there is no division between body and soul, good and evil, seer and scenery, past and future, man and fellow man.  In the world of light, 1 + 1 = 1.

Photographs of the sun are typically taken through telescopes.  Such photographs are pale substitutes for actually looking at the sun.  As naturalist Annie Dillard notes in an essay about witnessing a total eclipse, "The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience.  Lenses enlarge the sight, omit its context, and make of it a pretty and sensible picture, like something on a Christmas card."  Scientific instruments, then, limit our perception even as they extend the range of our vision.  No matter what apparatus we use to view the sun, at some point we will encounter a "blind spot."  Clearly, the naked eye (capable of detecting a single photon of light) or naked implant is the only way to go.

There are two steps to proper sun-staring.  First, stare at the sun with the eyes open.  This is not an easy thing to do.  Rochefoucauld, the Benjamin Franklin of France, once said that "Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye."  He was correct.  In his novel Staring at the Sun, Julian Barnes warns that "You can't stare at the sun for too long--not even the setting, quiet sun.  You would have to put your fingers in front of your face to do that."  So don't have any preconceptions that it's going to be simple or pleasant.  Try not to blink.  Try not to look away.  Shield your eyes with your fingers at first if you must, but then slowly spread your fingers to reveal the awesome light of the sun.  If you must look away then do so, but slowly bring your eyes back to the sun.  If you find yourself involuntarily blinking rapidly, hold your eyelids open with your fingers.

Second, stare at the sun with the eyes closed.  The sun's afterimage will remain under your eyelids, indelibly etched into your cornea.  James Patrick Kelley describes this phenomenon in his cyberpunk story "Solstice":  "Cage shut his eyes and still he could see it: blood red, flashing blue, veins pulsing across its surface."

What is the significance of this afterimage?  No doubt each person must find his omn answer to this question.  In her novel Century 21, Ewa Kuryluk attempts a philosophical answer.  She says that "We must preserve the sun's afterimage under our lids" because it forces us to confront "ideals, abstract beings which are neither bodies nor forces dwelling in bodies."  Perhaps she means that we can harness the sun's forces, snatch them from the physical body of the star, and carry them with us--literally within our eyelids.  In any case, Kuryluk seems to be touching upon a deeper truth about the perception of reality.  

The French poet Paul Claudel agrees with Kuryluk that we can carry the body of a star within our eyelids, making us the center of our own private solar system.  "We can see in the eye a sort of scaled down, portable sun," he says, "and therefore, a prototype of the ability to establish a radius from it to any point on the circumference."  The German poet Yvan Goll describes such a private solar system:


The Maja-Ratri, a Sanskrit text, says that light is the source of all thought, since light is a combustion of star evolution.  That star evolution exists in the inner dimensions of your mind as a phosphene explosion.  Psychologist Carl Jung once wrote that "when our senses react to real phenomena, sights, and sounds, they are somehow translated from the realm of reality into that of the mind.  Within the mind they become psychic events, whose ultimate nature is unknowable."

If you're eventually going to have your eyes replaced anyway, why not burn them out in a single blaze of glory?  Besides, the combination of sunglasses and a walking stick is a timeless fashion statement.

From The Which Punctuation Mark Are You Test:

"Congratulations! You are the semicolon! You are the highest expression of punctuation; no one has more of a right to be proud. In the hands of a master, you will purr, sneering at commas, dismissing periods as beneath your contempt. You separate and connect at the same time, and no one does it better. The novice will find you difficult to come to terms with, but you need no one. You are secure in your elegance, knowing that you, and only you, have the power to mark the skill or incompetence of the craftsman. You have no natural enemies; all fear you. And never, NEVER let anyone tell you that you cannot appear in dialogue!"

Baiting a Hook

Speaking of semicolons, I stumbled upon the most marvelous poem by Matt "World's Best Writer Ever" Getty, entitled "Inside the Semicolon (Draft)."  Here's the first stanza:


To read more (you'll be glad you did), see the poetry section of Matt's website.

After six years of determined searching, Lars Rasmussen, a purveyor of fine used books, collected a complete alphabet of books with one letter for titles (including Scandinavian letters).  He was inspired by this quotation from James Joyce's Ulysses:

Have you read his F?
O yes, but I prefer Q.
Yes, but W is wonderful.
O yes, W.

Here's a strange dream:

I dreamed I was among a group of people being tortured very viciously.  Our assailants were cutting off hands and feet, using sharp metal rods for impaling, and so on.  I noticed that one of my fellow victims, a woman, had a tiny round bandage on her forehead.  I recognized this as evidence that she had been impaled through the head, and I deeply dreaded such a fate for myself.  (In retrospect, I associate this small circle with the Hindu "bindi" representing the Third Eye, but in the dream this didn't occur to me.)  At some point during my torture, I gained enlightenment.  I felt the music of the universe enter my body through my root chakra, and I felt myself "puffing up" like a balloon being filled, especially in my belly.  I floated in bliss for a while.  When my awareness focused back on the physical plane, I saw two Hindus holding up their hands in prayer and bowing to me reverently, acknowledging my holiness.  I returned the honor.  One of them opened a book to show me which deity was my overseer or lord in the greater hierarchy of things.  I don't remember the god's name, but I remember reading these words: "This god is associated with endings and beginnings."  I scoffed slightly, thinking that the description was too generic.  "That's what they're ALL associated with," I thought to myself.  (In retrospect, I realize that my overseer is Agni, the Hindu two-headed god of fire who rules over the digestive fires in the belly.)  I only vaguely recall subsequent scenes of my dream in which I was operating as an enlightened being and interacting with my followers.  I certainly felt happy bestowing benevolence.

Bait and Switch

SONG: Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels)
ARTIST: Jim Croce

ORIGINAL LYRIC:

Thank you for your time
Oh, you've been so much more than kind
And you can keep the dime

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION AND CULTURAL TRENDS by Jonathan Caws-Elwitt:

Thanks for listening hard
On a cell phone in your yard
There goes my calling card

What makes a great story?  Marketing expert Seth Godin suggests that "The best stories don't teach people anything new.  Instead, the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the first place."  (Thanks, Gordon!)

In English:


Translated into Zoinx:


The Zoinx language (invented in 1993), does not have a fictional population of speakers or a corresponding history, yet "quite a bit of cultural information can be gathered from the language itself."

SONG: I Wanna Be A Dancin' Man
ALBUM: The Belle of New York Soundtrack

ORIGINAL LYRIC:

Gonna leave my footsteps on the sands of time,
If I never leave a dime.

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION:

Gonna leave my footsteps in bricks and mortar,
If I never leave a quarter.

I dreamed I couldn't be sure the independent clauses were not joined by a connective.

Later that night, I dreamed I visited Arabia, where my people walk upside down.  

Then I dreamed that I was a Greek question mark, though of course I looked the same as I always do.

That was followed by a nightmare about a young bully named Nicholas Semicolon, strikingly similar to the shameful character with the same name in HELLO, MRS. PIGGLE-WIGGLE by Betty MacDonald.

Backtracking

This week, the Associated Press reports that "the letter 'W' has entered the mainstream of the Swedish language, getting its own section for the first time in the country's most respected dictionary."  Linguists in Sweden have traditionally considered the W (called "double-v") to be a lower form of the letter V.  Now, according to the Swedish Academy, the Swedish alphabet has grown from 28 to 29 letters.