GHOST: Shadow and Simile

Jacquetta Hawkes:  Every living creature among us has taken an irrevocable step between the beginning of this sentence and its end.

Though it has duration, the sentence above is not about time. It is an image-sign. Like a shadow — absence relying on a presence. Real, but contingent. Like Ghost, an image-sign, like a shadow obedient to a presence. One ruminates, of what? The answer, ambiguous, eludes; slides away, a trace, beckoning.

Ghost is also like a spirit or, some say, is a spirit, an ephemeral existing beyond physical being as a body expires.  So a ghost is like an inspiration, an irresponsible potential, a latency inherent in every moment.

An ever-present shadow abiding, an unhurried soul, inevitable. Like art itself, always a shadow, a revelation, invisible until a transpiring and, as one consents, it glides across the threshold.  It crosses, they say, and some return, eliding, their tidings oblique.

James Hillman: Three dimensions become two as the perspective of nature, flesh, and matter fall away, leaving an existence of immaterial, mirrorlike images, eidola. We are in the land of the soul.

Images:

— Petroglyph image on basalt, Lake County OR Oct2020.

— Graffiti Ghost, Spray paint. Ghost (def.): Lingering image from removed graffiti.  Eugene OR 2020

— Skeletal Spectral, Mixed-media, Eugene OR Oct2020

— Eidolon, Ink and Water on Rice Paper (detail), Douglas Beauchamp 1973

Notes:

—Jacquetta Hawkes (1910-1996), a distinguished English archaeologist. from A Land (1950). Robert Macfarlane in Landmarks (2016) devotes a chapter “Stone-Books” to Hawkes.

— James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (1979)

America is a concept

Baudrillard:  America is a concept.

Q:  Are you saying that America represents the ideal of democracy?

B:  No, the simulation of power. … All our values are simulated. What is freedom?  We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car?  It’s a simulation of freedom.

(CLICK to enlarge any photo)

Roadside America Flagging photos by this blog author.

Excerpt from an interview with Jean Baudrillard (French philosopher 1929-2007), New York Times Magazine, November 2005.

VEXICON: Signs of the Times

This far from the sea and still we know these signs.

The night is an open book.

But the world beyond the night remains a mystery.

-- Louise Glück, from her poem Before The Storm, in A Village Life, 2009.

Vexicon: Image becoming communal.

Public signs and signings agitate, warn, command, envision. 

 Signs ephemeral stand forth with anger, hope, demand. 

Signs direct and mis-direct, dictate, enchant.

The night is an open book … but the world beyond …

PHOTOS:  Being random recordings situated in Eugene Oregon by the author adrift with iPhoneXR. March-October 2020.  Photos above: Hands on Street at US Federal Courthouse; Graf-Mask; Greta on Willamette River Bikeway; Lincoln Street Rose

Link to album: VEXICON: Signs of the Times

Addendum: 

Vexicon entwines with her brother Lexicon, seeding, as in the old ways...

keep 6 feet/maintain 6 feet

wildfire smoke hazardous

masks

freedom

social distancing/physical distancing

“bailouts”

resist

SEX(ED)

Pandemic

I OBJCT

Black Lines Matter

sanitize/sanitizer/sanitizing

patriotic

uprite

Seat Closed

bitcoin

FALLING

love and lightning

at your own risk

remember

on Zoom

Fatal

Silence is compliance

VOTE

For President

things to expect