Musing On The Quality Of Silence

STOP, LOOK, LISTEN.

A simple instruction that many of us remember from our early years, first as city-dwelling toddlers learning to cross streets or enter a new environment, then throughout the educational phase of our lives as we absorb the knowledge necessary to become an independent adult. Often underrated, silence is the foundation of each word of that instruction.

To stop is to stand back momentarily from everything that has or requires momentum. To take a breath and allow time to slow as you make the courageous decision to subordinate yourself to the needs or requirements of another person, animal, undertaking or event. To do so is to direct all of our senses, not just five but the intangible sixth, to fulfill their innate purpose. Like the color we perceive as white contains all other colors (according to Isaac Newton’s prism demonstration), we might consider that silence, though it suggests the absence of sound, contains the potential for all sounds to be perceived, if we choose to do so. With conscious use, silence can be the epitome of self-control. Silence also provides the side benefit of allowing us to listen carefully and ‘read between the lines’ of our interactions with others to understand more fully the intent of our communications

Once, during a visit with a friend who lived alone in a small apartment, I found it odd, if not disturbing, that her television was playing incessantly. After a while, at my request, she turned it off, admitting that she didn’t pay much attention to it but its background noise allowed her to feel less lonely. I suppose there’s some truth to that idea, yet personally, I find it quite difficult to think about anything within a constant noisy environment. This is especially true in my need for quiet while I am developing a concept for a new piece of art. Ironically, once the concept is established and the mechanics of completion have begun, music or a podcast playing in the background are soothing aids during that phase of production. I suspect this so because situation such background noise seems to neutralize other distractions in my environment thus freeing me to focus on my work instead of responding to it.

The quality of silence is also what we make of it. We can choose to believe we are bored, a state that is terrifying to some so that they require more distraction or stimulation from an outside source(s). Or we can mine it to arouse our patience and to gather our thoughts, consider personal interactions and accomplishments, past, present or future. Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT succinctly defined boredom when she said, “Boredom is {just} your imagination calling to you.” Perhaps your imagination hasn’t received any useful input from you lately? It can only work if you release it from your brain-box to help you discover the potential hidden in your mundane environment.

Possessions are a simple place to begin, such as recalling how a certain object came to be yours and why you’ve kept it. Maybe that object is a particular book, an article of clothing, a piece of jewelry or furniture. How about your ‘to-do list? When was the last time you added an entry to it? Maybe you can try to focus on how to complete an abandoned project or begin a new one?

In addition to maintaining this blog, periods of silence have aided my adjustment after I retired from a long freelance illustration career. In deciding to focus on developing forgotten projects noted over the years in numerous journals, I have kept surprisingly busy writing, illustrating and publishing my own books, creating images suggested in those journals and promoting the many original artworks sitting patiently in my studio.

From another perspective, perhaps your silence can become an internal map that guides you through your own body, examining and mentally cataloguing your physical sensations, which aside from serious distracting pain, can establish a mind-body connection to enhance awareness and evaluation of your surroundings and relationships.

The word ‘silence’ originated with the Latin ‘silens’ meaning to be still, quiet, at rest or without speech or noise, but it is much more. It describes inhabiting a space that allows and enhances concentration, encourages meditation and offers us the chance to think and/or act.

A great deal has been written online and in academic books that describes the nature of silence and its etymology so what I’ve said here may not be new to you. Still, a state of boredom need not be feared but embraced; it can be a doorway to rediscovering mental, physical and creative aspects of yourself that have been neglected to awaken their usefulness.

I like to think of my imagination as a virtual muscle which only becomes stronger with regular exercise.

Move it or lose it!

The images above are from my new postcard collection, Whispers On The Wind: A Collection Of Peculiar Perceptions. Available in packs of 36 or 12 at: http://www.magiceyegallery.com (bit.ly/3gt2gkM)

Codex Gastropoda #8: The WaterDaughter’s Dream

The WaterDaughter’s Dream is the eighth and newest to date in my Codex Gastropoda series of drawings. The melusine-like figure of the title is an iteration of the topiary figure in ‘Daphne’s Daughter’ which can be seen at: http://www.magiceyegallery.com in the Magic & Mysticism gallery under the drop-down menu. Together with my fondness for swimming, a longtime interest in legends of mermaids throughout many world fantasy traditions most likely informed this image. Do you suppose that tiny submarine is carrying little mythographers busy documenting this latest sighting? 

The WaterDaughter’s Dream is available from The Magic Eye Gallery as gicleé print on archival paper (11″x14″, 16″x 20″, or 22″ x 28″, unframed). This image may also be adapted for a wall mural in your home or office! Email : ilene@winnlederer.com for quote.

Codex Gastropoda #7: Between The Pages Of Reality

Codex Gastropoda: #7

Yesterday afternoon, in appreciation of an unseasonably warm January day, my better half and I went for a walk on Pittsburgh’s South Side. Heading east on Carson Street past a barrage of  bars and nightclubs led us to City Books, a venerable remnant of Pittsburgh’s once lively independent bookstore market. Inside the old shop, a wrought iron spiral staircase punctuates two levels of floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves whose old and rare inhabitants speak volumes on an array of subjects that include philosophy, art, science, math, history, foreign languages and vintage fiction for adults and children. A little schmooze with the owner, Edward Gelblum and his elegant assistant whose name I did not learn, was intriguing enough to provoke my tentative climb up the spiral staircase to inspect their impressive philosophy, science, foreign language and Judaica collections.

Their intimate knowledge of such collections within this timeless, musty ambience reminded me of an Imaginarius post of December 19, 2010, written upon completing the third drawing in my Codex Gastropoda series, ‘The Unbearable Slowness of Reading’. You can access that post here:https://imaginarius13.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/codex-gastropoda-3the-unbearable-slowness-of-reading/

During this little reminiscence, which inspired the new drawing above, I began to think beyond the act of reading; beyond the physical properties of books to their metaphysical attributes. Does their power to manipulate our minds and hearts come from our literal interpretation of the words, from the images they may contain, or from the associations and ideas inherent in both? Despite the proliferation of electronic media, there is a magnetic attraction to words and images on paper that I can’t trivialize as a mere Luddite denial of technological reality.

Though the written word bound in book form has been likened to ‘conversations with great minds,’ etc., I wonder whether books can be more accurately perceived as vessels made to contain the power of alternate realities? Does encoding these realities in language and 2D images make them more approachable? It seems to me that even if these ‘realities’ could be experienced directly with all ‘six’ of our senses as the human modus operandi, we would still be overwhelmed. The ‘arcane’ technology that enables cinematic ‘reality’ via animation/CGI effects has brought us closer to a total sensory experience. Even so, marvelous as it is to watch movies like ‘Avatar’ or ‘Lord of the Rings’ , we are served generous helpings of the detailed, brilliant imagination of others with little left for our own to play with. Maybe this is why the power of books to evoke and provoke our own emotions and memories remains its own distinctive experience. It is also why I think that bookstores will never disappear completely; despite the fact that the majority of Mr. Gelblum’s sales originate online. Just as great food deserves to be presented beautifully in a warm and welcoming environment,  so does a warm and inviting shop remain necessary to contain and disseminate the literary treasures that continue to define us.

Note: Codex Gastropoda #7 is available as a gicleé print at: http://www.magiceyegallery.com

“A Cord Of Blue…”

Though Parashah Shelakh-Lekha in the Book of Numbers (BaMidbar) is memorable for its dramatic account of Joshua, Caleb and the group of ‘spies’ sent to scope out the land of Canaan, its final verse (16:37) is the take-away message that will inform the identity of the Jewish people for generations to come. The message appears in the quotation within the illustration above, titled A Foundation Of Faith. It and the interpretation that follows have been adapted from my book, Between Heaven & Earth: An Illuminated Torah Commentary (Pomegranate, 2009)*

The title refers to the Even ha-Shetiyyah, or the mythical Foundation Stone upon which the world was created. Diverse legends describe this immense stone and its origins. There is an eye at its center to indicate the presence of God within every aspect of Creation. Poised on the stone is man wearing a tallit (prayer shawl) and tefillin engaged in prayer. The tallit prominently features the knotted fringes at the four corners of the garment, which the man has gathered together. Each fringe contains a cord of blue as a daily reminder of the bondage in Egypt and the instructions to observe all of God’s commandments. The tefillin are two small black lacquered boxes containing passages of Torah with black straps attached to them. One box, worn on the head bears a four-pronged letter shin. The other is placed on the left arm, near the heart. The straps are wrapped around the left arm and hand so as to form the Name of God. Suspended above the man’s hands is the letter aleph, whose description by the magic realist writer Jorge Luis Borges  inspired its inclusion here. “ In the Kabbala, that letter stands for the Eyn Soph, the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher world…”

 Above the figure is a tiny Murex trunculus snail, the origin of the famed blue dye called techeilet. Known as the chilazon in Hebrew this boneless invertebrate was found on the coast of Northern Israel and ancient Phoenicia and its secretions processed at dyeworks in Tyre. Behind the figure is a compass motif inspired by a medallion that illuminates the Moreh Nevuchim, Maimonides’ classic work, Guide To The Perplexed. As the Foundation Stone supports the ‘four corners’ of the world, the cardinal points on the compass guide the two figures representing Jews around the world towards the observances of their faith. Though the Sabbath occurs each week, its potential to remind us of what we’ve forgotten while offering us new understanding are timeless.

*For previews and purchase information of Between Heaven & Earth: An Illuminated Torah Commentary (Pomegranate, 2009) visit: http://bit.ly/g2D9Lm

Voyage Of The Snail Queen

Though journeys require literal time away from domestic doldrums, some require only an investment of imagination. So for today, still in a state of surgically enforced enervation, I’ve decided to revisit my Codex Gastropoda series with Voyage Of The Snail Queen. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Skimming the seas above her domain
The Snail Queen surveys all in her reign
One kingdom lies far beyond her reach
For want of a treaty to heal the breach

Within her shells of memories rerun,
She sails to the islands of her renegade son.
Beneath a pale moon, her dragonship flies
The shadow of a dream traversing night skies.

Dreams and Nightmares: The Foundation of Faith

Parashah Shelakh-Lekha, one of the best-known episodes in the Book of Numbers, concerns the twelve scouts, or spies, sent ahead of the Israelite camp to appraise the nature of the Promised Land. It is often compared to the Golden Calf incident of Exodus, in that both events were tests of the Israelites’ faith and trust in G-d, their leaders and themselves. When the expedition returned, ten of the men dramatically exaggerated what they had seen, in an attempt to discourage the Israelites from accepting their territorial inheritance. “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves and so we must have looked to them.” In the left-hand illustration, the small hybrid grasshopper-man addresses the terror and trepidation the scouts disseminated. Perhaps, they calculated, their negative report would ensure positions of power for themselves among the people instead of encouraging the people to act with faith in G-d and in their own abilities? I have given this creature a tattoo in the shape of the Hebrew letter ‘mem’ whose numerical equivalent is forty because this incident doomed the Israelites to wander in the desert for forty years until a new generation arose that would be spiritually prepared to realize its divine inheritance.

The symbols that comprise these illustrations each tell stories of their own that are too lengthy to include here. They can be found on page 169 in the AfterImages portion of my  book, Between Heaven & Earth: An Illuminated Torah Commentary (Pomegranate, 2009) It can be purchased directly from the publisher, http://www.pomegranate.com/a166.html or from Amazon,  amzn.to/gZSp5j where you will find several reviews.

I welcome your comments and questions here at Imaginarius and will do my best to respond. Wishing you a thoughtful Sabbath and weekend…

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…

Postscript For The New Year: A Divination Of Snails

For this fifth drawing from my Codex Gastropoda series, I was inspired by a cartoon which recently appeared in the online Tablet Magazine, drawn by the playwright David Mamet (http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/54112/a-very-special-message/). So, in addition to The Time Snails posted a few days ago, here is a postscript New Year Wish for Good Fortune to all of Imaginarius’ visitors!  I imagined the traditional forms of snails’ shells morphing into the equally intriguing shapes of a Chinese fortune cookies; which will you choose?

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’.