Drawn during conversation the first night of Queer Spirit Camp 2009. Still funny.
January 15, 2011
January 13, 2011
January 11, 2011
Images are true, explanations are divisive
This is a detail of “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” at the monastery of St. Catherine’s in Mt. Sinai, Egypt. The image is based on the ideas of a saint, John Climacus, who lived as a hermit for most of his life and then came to run the monastery. He wrote a book with the same name as the painting (which I hear is still widely read) as a guide to monks seeking (divine ascent.)
The image holds such truth for me. I’ve seen it in various forms my whole life, starting with Saturday morning cartoons. The truth of it is sensual, experiential, it merely requires the reorientation Lynda Barry demonstrates in the introduction to her book, One!Hundred!Demons! In her book distracting and discouraging voices are no longer mistaken for “the voice of reason” or one’s own good sense. They are externalized as demons. Here the temptations that would draw a person from their true path are reimagined. I assume this is done to make them easier to resist.
I was so moved to find out that this image could be attributed to a single individual (or to a single historical moment of poetic imagination) that I acquired the book. Reading John’s words, I was alarmed to discover that the first of the 30 steps on the ladder of divine ascent is the renunciation of life. I don’t imagine skipping to the second step is allowed.
Side note: I’d read somewhere that the saint’s last name was a reference to the image. I looked to online translation sites, assuming “climacus” was Latin or Greek for “ladder.” In another poetic moment, I found that it was instead Greek for “scale” which in one of its senses is what you do with a ladder.
January 10, 2011
January 9, 2011
January 6, 2011
The Octopus’s Garden In the Shade
The aforementioned Professor, as a child, on the very chalkboard which hadn’t been erased in over 15 but was erased this New Year’s Eve, drew this marvelous little world. Gratefully her mother saw the virtue in the drawing and photographed it.
Below is one of my versions of the drawing, done on a placemat at a diner while we were eating with Aditya and Mary.
December 31, 2010
Toward a New Year
We moved into the new house this year and we’ve been making all sorts of choices about what’s kept and what’s left behind. We used to draw on this blackboard when we talked on the phone back when we lived at Maya’s family house when Maya was in Grad School. We stopped drawing on it when we came up with this lively composition, changing only the year each January 1st. See up there in the left hand corner? We stopped changing even that in 1996, then in ’99 we stowed this board when we moved out of state. We moved three more times in the intervening eleven years. I don’t know what the occasion was but some time in the last months in our apartment we hung this over our bed and left it still untouched, except to every once in a while scuff it with our heads by accident. With 2011 coming on, finally in a place of our own and with a hard year passing away, we’ve decided to exchange all this history for a fresh start.
December 28, 2010
And Another Blake Stereoscope
And another Blake stereoscope (<reference: apparently without advanced skills I can’t make my post title a link to another post, too hyper a link for wordpress?)
December 14, 2010
