I’m normally pretty good at making up some sort of symbolic meaning for the junk I find. I’m coming up with nothing solid for this.
It’s a Stanley planer, made in England. I’d guess it’s about 50 years old. Though the blade seems relatively new and sharp the rest is rusty. It appears that the front handle fell off a long time ago.
I’ll take any suggestion. All I’m imagining is “making things flat” and that is uninspiring.
I gained some resolve recently. I’m not sure how, but it feels good. At the moment it hit I was between appointments, rushing between pleasures, a little lost and late.
I saw this toy sword on the cramped landscaping of some business or another (a car lot, I think). The blade in the sun and the handle in the shade. Which to choose.
I didn’t get a picture to capture this morning’s divination moment, but it will stay in my head. A puzzle piece is always appropriate. I’ve been finding a lot of them lately, as well as playing cards. So this post won’t go pictureless.
On the way out this morning, I heard a loud burp, really loud. When I looked up a man across the street, who I suspect made the noise, just stepped in something, turned his foot to see what he stepped in and stumbled.
I helped myself a lot today by staying quiet, even though the indigestion is very, very uncomfortable.
On my walk today, I was thinking about how much my life will require more confidence and creativity now, more than in the recent past at least. I was thinking about how limits on my time, increased procedural and resource burdens and my own confusion are weighing down on me more just as my discipline and drive to express myself increase.
Then I saw this rock on some kid’s drawing. It was raining. It was easy as pulling it out from under the rock. I hope.
Some cards serve only to show the name of the game.
I remember doing an experiment in college that demonstrated that light behaved as if it were composed of particles. Then we demonstrated that, no, it’s actually composed of waves without a medium. Of course, it’s not that simply confusing. Nonetheless, it was a great provocative experience.
When I see something that appears as a symbol of something, a face in the pattern on the ceiling, a cloud shaped like a ship, a glove waving hello from the gutter, I consider it to be what it symbolizes and that completely, at least for a moment. As far as I can tell, I find what I am looking for by imagining what I am looking at.
I actually spend relatively little time looking down when I walk, even though most of my photographs are taken of low things. Those things on the ground experience a filtering process. They are dropped or discarded. They get broken and crushed. If they are valuable, they get picked up. What remains is free of purpose and meaning. I can give to each thing a meaning free from personal utility or value.
I need to spend more time looking down into myself.
It’s easy to see things as they aren’t. The older I get, the more I find value in being wrong. Of course, in most situations it’s important and urgent to be correct, or to withhold opinion. Every year, though, these situations seem fewer and fewer.
It’s important to know when to brake while driving and to be right about which end of the knife has a point on it and what to say when you’ve upset someone. On and on. But so much of life isn’t that important at all. My brain makes a gazillion little judgements a day that don’t matter to me or anyone else. That over there is a bottle cap. The lyric of that song is “you’ve been tussled”. My foot itches.
When I walk, I see cars and people and streets and sidewalks. Those are important. Nearly all the rest can be wrongly perceived. I was certain that included photo was a worn decal of a dog running. The idea of a dog running so enthusiastically, the idea of a worn decal, the idea of a decal no longer attached to what it was; all of that was a perfect reply to the what my mind was working on when I saw it. I snapped a picture.
Only then did I realize that it wasn’t a decal. And it still doesn’t matter that I was wrong.
What I most want to write about, I don’t know how to name. That leaves pointing and shrugging, I guess.
I’ve spent a lot of my life doing some sort of faithless divination, looking for signs that I know have no meaning and giving them meaning. In oracula.org, I’ve placed some things based on an nonacademic, unfaithful interpretation of the I-Ching (newwings) and Tarot (refind) and even one based on Ouija (weja–which was pulled after a nastygram from Hasbro).
The exploration that’s changed my life most, though was wingmail. I wrote this nearly every day for about eight years (3000 days). It changed the way I look at everything.
I continue now looking at stuff and trying to read and to force meaning into it all. I’m dabbling in photography based on it. I regularly stop on my daily walks having discovered something simple that had some immediately stunning meaning to me that has no real relation to the thing itself.
So, what do I call that?