The Snail Queen’s Soliloquy

Many writers and philosophers have made brilliant and erudite attempts to comprehend and court the ‘soul’ of imagination, but it remains a capricious creature, cultivated solely on its own terms. When, in rare moments, we are attended by one of its minions, it is a privilege to be treasured and shared. So, with barely more than what was given to me, this sixth drawing from my Codex Gastropoda series comes courtesy of The Snail Queen who crashed my dream with her little quatrains:

I am of the water that flows through me
Weaving my hair like the silk of the sea.
Memories color my undulant waves
Tales of seafarers, pirates and knaves

But these are only artifacts of Time,
Barely a ripple in this vast sublime.
With purple-black ink I’ve filled my fine quill,
Hungry for visions to appear at will.

In your dreams I travel through phantom worlds
Mining images that briefly unfurl
Savoring some that speak to the ages
Leaving others for you to grace your pages…

Codex Gastropoda #4:The Time Snails

The onset of a new year often inspires sentiments revolving around endings and beginnings. These might be memories accumulated over the year past and/or resolutions slated to inform the coming year. Both are part of our big picture, but share an underlying urgency to affect change in our lives and in the lives of those with whom we interact. Inevitably we all wish for more time to bring these new realities into being. The irony is that the process of time in the known universe remains a universal mystery even as we create methods for containing and measuring it. In that sense, time as a human construct theoretically offers us more power to use it than we often wish to acknowledge. Though the construct of ‘leap years’ are a familiar phenomenon, ‘leap seconds’ and the need to insert them into our time systems are relatively obscure. Since 1972, the ‘temporal authorities’ of The International Earth Rotation Services of the Bureau of Weights and Measures, at Paris, France, have slipped an extra ‘leap second’ into the calendar, making their decision to do so either on June 30 or December 31 of the target year.  This was done to maintain the accuracy of atomic clocks that are affected by the irregular spin of the Earth, which seems to be slowing down. December 31 of 2010 is being considered for the next insertion. If this is not done conscientiously, they claim, then after several centuries, the time discrepancy would amount to one whole hour or more. With all the time we spend online and in pursuit of less than world-changing activities, many of us probably wouldn’t notice.  Anyway, most clocks are not designed to accommodate leap seconds and because we are so synced to automated systems, there is the potential to mess with our minds that defies logic. Remembering the pre-email days of frantic deadlines for illustration assignments, it would’ve been handy to offer the following scenario to a client: “Well, I’d love to have this drawing ready for you tomorrow, but according to temporal authorities, if I don’t have another day to work on it, time as we know it will bend out of recognition, worlds will collide and the universe will pretty much descend into utter chaos as a result. Will Wednesday be okay?”

On that thought, I’ve resolved to reset my clocks on December 31 and gather my grand plans for 2011. Here’s wishing you all the time you need for yours in the New Year, too…

Codex Gastropoda #3:The Unbearable Slowness of Reading

The German writer and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is credited with observing that “thinking is more interesting than knowing but not so interesting as looking.” Visually tethered to technology as we are, this casual aphorism characterizes our global culture in ways he could not have imagined, yet would probably have embraced with equal enthusiasm. But is our fascination with high-speed looking diminishing our ability to think analytically and understand the consequences of our thoughts and actions? I fear that to some degree it is. And books, those tactile reliquaries of conversations with minds great and small are becoming casualties in a virtual battle between the Warriors of the Printed Word and the Knights of the Kindle. Although this entry was composed on my iPhone (sigh!) ‘The Burden of Knowledge’ shown above was drawn with these thoughts in mind and in memory of the pleasures of the ‘Unbearable Slowness of Reading’.

Codex Gastropoda #2: The Snail’s Song

This next image from my Codex Gastropoda series is called Voluta Musica. In 1758, a small snail shell commonly known as the music volute was given its Latinized name by Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist. Found primarily in the Caribbean and West Indies, the markings on its shell closely resemble musical manuscript notation. In May of 2009, it was my good fortune to visit the early home of Carl Linnaeus and his family in Falun, Sweden. Though it has become a museum, the home and its furnishings have retained the elegant precision befitting a person of Linnaeus’ scientific discipline. In that sense, the Codex Gastropoda series is my tribute to his attention to detail that earned him the title ‘Father of Taxonomy’. There is an additional layer of intent to this drawing. Have you ever placed a seashell to your ear and listened to the faintly musical sounds of the ocean? Whether you believe those sounds are echoes of the blood flow in your ears or of the ambient noise in your environment matter less in my opinion than the poetic interpretation of our imaginations. And like the beautiful markings on the shells of Voluta Musica, the music we love is engraved on our memories…

Verba Volant, Sed Musica Sicut Mare Aeternus (Words Fly Away, But Music Is As Eternal As The Sea.)

Codex Gastropoda: New Drawings In Appreciation Of Little Things

Though the phrase, “God is in the details” has been attributed to several great minds from Michelangelo to Gustave Flaubért and Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, it is of unknown origin. Yet who said it first is irrelevant since its wisdom is a call for us to pay attention to ideas and images which may escape our first glance. How can anyone claim to be bored if a continuous conscious effort is made to be an astute observer of all we call life? At the very least, even without some degree of spiritual orientation, wouldn’t we be inspired to ask questions? It is this line of inquiry that led to this first in a series of drawings called Codex Gastropoda. Two more will follow later this week.

Questions anyone? What small things have you noticed lately?