Random Observations: April 14, 2008
“A Spring Aesthetic”
- The new Exxon Mobil ads are just way too beautiful for an evil empire http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/news_ad_masters_eraser60.aspx
- Many biologists got the whole “gender/sex/competition” thing wrong http://www.amazon.com/Dr-Tatianas-Sex-Advice-Creation/dp/B0013TMNIY/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208193439&sr=8-1
- When the weather changes, witches burn http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/your-comments-on-climate-and-witches/
- Even foxes are dreaming about life in the city http://www.cbc.ca/photogallery/news/1161/
Have you ever watched a television ad and wondered: what trick of fate relegated such creative genius to such nefarious purpose?
…Maybe that’s just me.
Finding myself with time on my hands (I know it is a luxury many cannot afford… and yes, I am grateful for it), I tend to read and to complicate… everything.
Sometimes I think reading has become my default state, and the complications part is my stab at acting on what I’ve read.
When I was eight years old—already completely absorbed with a supercilious ambition to know everything—I decided the best thing in life would be to have a brain that could fit every one of my family’s encyclopedias inside.
Always in a hurry to get what I wanted, I rifled through my older brother’s school scribblers and textbooks on the sly, and had taught myself to read and write, and add and subtract, long before I started school. I thought my brain must be like my stomach, back then, and, fitting this notion together with what I thought I knew at the time, I developed my first great theory about human nature:
I figured that, since my mom always teased me about my ‘hollow leg’ (because I ate so much it couldn’t possibly fit in my tummy)… maybe, just maybe, we all had a hollow space that needed filling somewhere near our brain, too.
Let me side-step the “empty headed” jokes, and just admit I stand by that eight-year-old’s theory, even today, if only because it seems to be the best way to describe this never ending hunger. If my brain is empty, or (another of my mother’s teasing phrases) if I had ‘holes in my head’, well, at least I wanted to fill them!
I have posted a list (above) with links to some of the things I have been reading and thinking about lately.
How to piece all these things together, and make sense of any of it?
There are those lovely ads, and there’s Kristof’s report about how witches get burned, when the weather turns bad.
think “global warming”…
& (poof!)
There they are: Witches frolic in the lovely images of Exxon Mobil’s “Master’s” ads. Just by thinking about the two, together in one post, I’ve tampered with them….
There’s trigonometry tracing every witchy leap, calculating the trails of each cloak as the women spin in circles. Images of Stonehenge dissolve into the wind.
A desert wind…
The sigh of sand, and the tinkling of the bells on skeletal-thin cattle…
I picture a young boy leading the last of his family’s herd, miles and miles from home in search of water or a blade of grass. Barefoot and dusty, he leans on the thick, gnarled wooden staff that the shepherds and cattle boys carry. He looks up at me with big, big eyes as we pass.
I was in Africa, once, many years ago.
Today, I remember his expression as clearly as if he were here beside me:
Not curious, really, so much as tired, and aware. He has huge responsibilities on his young shoulders.
& the witches are no longer frolicking in my collage, as I weave these stories and ideas together. Not young and beautiful and wild: they are old, and they are tired just like the boy. Dusty. Laden with responsibilities.
At one thin gray-haired woman’s feet, for some reason, I notice a harlequin-beetle-riding pseudoscorpion.
No, that’s not right: I put the animal there…. This is my montage, my complicated weaving. (And each night this week, before going to bed, I have been reading a couple of chapters from Olivia Judson’s biology book about the sex lives of animals. Trust me: the harlequin-beetle-riding pseudoscorpion story can really capture one’s attention.)
Not that my imagination is capable of ’seeing’ this exotically-named creature in the bright, perfectly beautiful hues of the Exxon Mobil ads.
This insect is a hypothetical thing. My own confabulation.
Let’s sketch it in like the scientific diagrams from the ads, instead. An overlay of stunningly coloured digital imagery. The poor male pseudoscorpion appears in the frame, only to be left to wither; downgraded to ’insect-stuck-on-a-rotting-log’ status, as his chosen mate lifts off with another fellow. He watches them ride their halequin beetle into the sunset, perhaps… (Judson has a surprisingly engaging style when she talks about evolutionary biology).
How does a biology lesson filter into a dream about witches and advertising? The pseudoscorpion, rendered in 3D wire frame—an overlay of vectors and complex algorithmic calculations—seems like a bit of a stretch, non?
(shrug)
If so, what can we say of Exxon Mobil’s claims to be spreading beauty and light across the planet?
The things I’ve read, the images I saw, collapse together in time and space.
Einstein’s theory is a brainwave that refuses to play by the rules.
(smile)
I am not getting any younger, and my mind does tend to wander these days…
Nevertheless, pieces float together: A virtual menagerie.
Now, the cbc.ca ’photo of the week’ slips in. There they are: four precocious fox kits sneaking out from under the collapsed floor of an old shed. They know it is spring, and their red fur quickly over-writes the elegant-but-cold insect wireframe, the foggy Stonehenge, the old crone, and even the young boy.
All my cynicism about Exxon Mobil, erased by an uncontrollable yearning to see these four beautiful creatures
move!
How to project a frolic?
I want to see their future, even if it is just a momentary glimpse of the next five seconds, after the camera’s shutter had closed. Better still: to return in a month’s time; see them play in the the green space of newly growing grass.
I would listen to the birdsong, with them somewhere nearby sniffing at the breeze. Maybe they are dreaming about being the hunter, instead of the hunted. The watcher in the woods, instead of the watched.
This is what I know:
Things fit together
Some things are good, some are bad
The pictures, and the words, and their meanings are shifty, and no encyclopedia can describe a shifting world. I know the foxes aren’t there anymore, for instance. That moment, when they had just emerged from their artificial den, two of them looking out towards a faceless photographer who thought their presence in a Toronto suburb was noteworthy, it is over… and for all my rambling narrative, that moment likely meant very little to them. Soon forgotten in play or a mother’s call.
They have a world to explore.
Some of what they find will be good
Some will be bad
The things we know can change.
