Each one a Nemo in hir own right: the captain — and self-appointed, usually degree-less, mostly unqualified but mostly unpretentious and good willed (or maybe that's only sometimes) naturalist, historian, archaeologist, scientist, collector, antiquarian or futurist or now-ist-maybe-buddhist, classifier, obsessive-compulsive magpie, or simply, in accordance with and out of [unconscious?] respect for ancestral careers, a hunter-gatherer — of a floating bubble with, imagine barnacles on a whale... now, make them float just off the whale, an inch! Imagine an entirely barnacle-inhabited sphere, imagine condensation displaced illusorily just an-arbitrary-distance-not-too-far from the ice-water glass as though its surface actually hung, unseen, just outside itself. Imagine a Dyson sphere and there you have it: each little submersible with a googol of artifacts about itself, trapped, orbiting.

And I among them: I gently place my satellites into bottles, folders, clouds, and label them. Where did it come from? What is it? Where is it going? Where does it belong: what class, family, genre, species, what else? These are mine and they make Me, although I did not make any of them. [Well, maybe ~10% are my regurgitations.] I seem to acquire a personality: a Who who has selected these — only this Who could have selected these in this way, only this Who could have woven such a web, as differentiable as the variable homes of individual spider species. I gently lace my Self into a cloud.

Some float entirely anonymous, some pseudonymous, armed with their orbiters and gazing out of the only, rectangular space left clear of debris, out of their submersibles, out into the Sea of Things. They project their Selves like Pepper's Ghosts onto the outsides of those little rectangles so that each has a face. A façade. Some in swarms, some bobbing along alone, interacting via ripples sent between them: marine mammal calls? Tap, tap, tap, Roger, I acknowledge you!

And there! Where crest meets trough, a mating ritual! One performs the part of the male bird, waving all his stuff around. The other: tap, tap, tap, assumes female, and collects the flying accessories. The question becomes: Where have you been, what have you seen? That's the basis for value judgement. You can tell if a being's been around a bit by the state of that one's personal-social curio cabinet. Are they cosmopolitan; do their choices reflect worldliness in a non-literal way: the way of subtle references and selections of rarities that only someone who's been around the seas could make? Or are they still provincial, guided, like-like-liking all the safe, peddled, re-selected versions of things?

Each one in hir own little submarine, choosing choosing, outfitting a 2D, imaginary, coded, but very real Self with the Appendages of the Seas…

What are they for...
pictures of stars,
of people bursting into stars,
stars coming out of people,
humans with star-skin,
the idea of being made of
star stuff
that all of these embody –
actually, it's transcendence.
A totally physical, 21st-century
transcendence of the,
escape from the
bodies, lives, world, geo-centric, human-centric bubble
we feel ourselves bound to.
Transcendence upon realization that,
actually, we really are something else,
something lasting, infinite, beautiful,
completely chaotic,
but so much larger that it seems
‹————slooooooooow————›
[space&time]
serene, to us;
graceful, elegant,
motherly,
eternal.
A way of surpassing finite bodies,
finite experiences,
since we've lost (for a large part)
the "soul" and "god" ideas,
we take solace in the particles,
atoms,
the subatomic world,
the idea that, even when we die,
we will be recycled,
we will be eternal,
even if we don't experience it the same way
after the dismantling of the human structure
we've been compiled into.
So, bring it on!
Let's dismantle!
I don't care! I'm infinite!
Even if I won't know it.
It's still scary as Hell… to think about not "being"
not "seeing" all this beauty,
not… anything. Just moving, as little bits,
and not even knowing it.
That's really the worst part —
loss of awareness, loss of our window….
we have such a fantastic
(amazing! awe-inspiring! magnificent!
all the words that prompt the action, AH!
a breath IN, life IN, live MORE, breath - chest -BIGGER!)
...such a great window, as humans!
To sense the Universe in so many ways!
The window is the thing worth living for.
Realizing this, the dream becomes
to expand that window, to keep pushing,
keep living, extend ourselves, our lifespan,
so we can keep looking, keep experiencing,
keep playing with it… to be part of something
so enormous,
I want to extend myself into space,
into the space around me,
I want to become so MASSIVE
that I become the space itself.
Then, I'll be eternal, truly.



This wasn't supposed to be and isn't a poem —
it was only an inquiry about these pictures, this "obsession",
what's trying to be said, by others and myself,
about all this...
but it's hard to get to it unless you throw out
conventions, just enough so something is still understood but,
those patterns we use for other things, more accessible things —
they don't work for this.
it just doesn't work until you go AH! And AMAZING!
and BREATHE! And PUFF out the chest and see that
you're just being a bird,
getting bigger, getting excited,
more life-like, moving more, more particle action,
but not too much — don't get too hot,
you'll upset the stability of the structure and maybe melt,
and that's not really what we're going for,
but eventually, yes,
you do want to just explode and spread out
and lose all your feathers.

“I cannot understand why human beings should be so little individualized. Why they should behave with such great collective uniformity.” He says, “I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I’m never served a cooked telephone.”
-Salvador Dali

I loved this passage from Dali. He had a real savoir-faire.
Where are our grilled telephones? Why not?

"We are made of Star Stuff."
Carl Sagan

This is an old exploration.
...how God has changed, even grown, with our perspective — that is, from a man, to the sublime in biological nature, to this. What we see through the Hubble. What Einstein and Sagan understood; which is that reverence to the order of the universe and thus the willingness to give oneself, fearlessly, back to "the mother".
To become star stuff again; that wouldn't be so bad.

As I began this project, so I begin the post - with the Koan, Hoshin's Last Poem:

The Zen Master Hoshin lived in China many years. Then he returned to the northeastern part of Japan, where he taught his disciples. When he was getting very old, he told them a story he had heard in China. This is the story:

One year on the twenty-fifth of December, Tokufu, who was very old, said to his disciples: “I am not going to be alive next year so you fellows should treat me well this year.” The pupils thought he was joking, but since he was a great-hearted teacher each of them in turn treated him to a feast on succeeding days of the departing year.

On the eve of the new year, Tokufu concluded: “You have been good to me. I shall leave tomorrow afternoon when the snow has stopped.” The disciples laughed, thinking he was aging and talking nonsense since the night was clear and without snow. But at midnight snow began to fall, and the next day they did not find their teacher about.
They went to the meditation hall. There he had passed on.

Hoshin, who related this story, told his disciples: “It is not necessary for a Zen master to predict his passing, but if he really wishes to do so, he can.” “Can you?” someone asked. “Yes,” answered Hoshin. “I will show you what I can do seven days from now.”

None of the disciples believed him, and most of them had even forgotten the conversation when Hoshin called them together. “Seven days ago,” he remarked, “I said I was going to leave you. It is customary to write a farewell poem, but I am neither a poet or a calligrapher. Let one of you inscribe my last words.”

His followers thought he was joking, but one of them started to write. “Are you ready?” Hoshin asked. “Yes sir,” replied the writer. Then Hoshin dictated:

I came from brillancy

And return to brillancy.

What is this?

This line was one line short of the customary four, so the disciple said: “Master, we are one line short.” Hoshin, with the roar of a conquering lion, shouted “Kaa!” and was gone.



What is this?



Influenced by this reading, I began to think about The In Between, transience and ephemerality, and then went on to research time and its modern-day value.
My research included Einstein’s Theory of Relativity & reading the novel, Einstein’s Dreams (which I highly recommend), the fourth dimension, black holes and their event horizons, the Japanese Enso sign (a symbol of the universe and continuity as well as a moment when the mind is free to create), and recent theories that time is inquantifiable and
might just be an illusion.





In exploration of these ideas, I decided to develop an object that would allow the modern individual, one who is often busy and in need of “five more minutes” to be at peace with time by immersing himself within a a meditative space, constructed to imitate warped dimensions in space beyond an event horizon.
This horizon would be breached through the bottom of a block of time with “second hands” and a log slice face - a ridiculous creature, but one who might invite a person to hug it, pet it, explore it, “hold on [to] a second [hand]” and so on, in this way "becoming friends" with time and diminishing any transience-associated stress.
The creature, TIC (Time Immersion Cubicle), in itself the product of very much time, was designed to be childish; inspired by Japanese plastic culture design, & in order to invite one to perceive and interact with time in a more lighthearted manner - like a child who puts a box on his head and pretends he's in a space-cave.



Without further ado, the TIC:
















Past the TIC's event horizon lies a warped & infinite space.

By accessing the inner cavity, it is possible to use the TIC as a meditation facilitation device.

A few more at the Flickr.