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Thursday 25 October 2012

Broken Stars


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File:Idea leuconoe Weiße Baumnymphe.jpg

Paper kite (Idea leuconoe): photo by Pro2, 2009
 


Idea fell to earth in a shower of light

.................................................................rain
brain cloud

a bath of heavy water


 
Untitled #8747: Todd Hido, 2009

File:Inachis io LC0077.jpg

European Peacock (Inachis io) on a Creeping Thistle (Cirsium arvense), Chemnitz, Germany: photo by Jörg Hempel, 15 July 2007

14 comments:

vazambam (Vassilis Zambaras) said...

Love how that idea seems

To be tiptoeing in flashes

Of black and white.

manik sharma said...

Tom,
The excursions of reading take you places...often forgotten and their lasting impressions undermined by the authority of truth or the fear of it...Not always

I fell upon this poem today..and i'm seeping through to seem clearer..my deformations thus resulting, are an idea too..I love this..

Anonymous said...

the rain is able to arise so many feelings.......what a wonderful metaphor !!...love it...:)

TC said...

Idea leuconoe (Paper Kite or Rice Paper butterfly, aka Large Tree Nymph) floats aethereally as its name through the tropical forests of Southeast Asia.

This particular Inachis io (Peacock butterfly) lives in the UK.

It has a split personality, wings open with flashy eye-spots and wings closed, all but unnoticeable.

And if noticed... by rubbing its wings together it is said to be able to make an annoying noise to chase off predators.

This butterfly's name recalls the story from Ovid's Metamorphoses about the nymph Io who was seduced by Jupiter, the king of the gods. When his wife Juno became jealous, Jupiter transformed Io into a heifer to protect her and helpfully emerged from the clouds to order Mercury to rescue her. Mercury guided his herd to the spot where Io was guarded by the hundred-eyed Argus, and then, disguised as a shepherd, lulled Argus to sleep and beheaded him. Not so easily foiled however Juno then took Argus's eyes and tattooed them onto the wings of Io, who flapped off to to the Nile River with the Galloping Furies hot on her trail. Finally Jupiter prevailed upon Juno to cease tormenting the poor nymph; upon resuming her natural form, Io escaped to the forest and ultimately became the Egyptian goddess Isis, happily ever after.

TC said...

(By "this" I meant not the Peacock in the photo, who comes from Germany, but the one in the video, British don't you know.)

TC said...

And yes, it's raining here this morning. And there are few floating ideas, and hardly a wing tattooed with eyes.

Jonathan Chant said...

rain brain cloud...

Wonderful connection of imagery.

Susan Kay Anderson said...

Underside topside
change now
with a flutter

thistle my favorite flower
color before
annoying strength
then there's always
the milk thistle
to fall back on
America.

Susan Kay Anderson said...

All that ordeal
to go through--
trees
unreachable roaming
time with sheep
heavy metal
more waiting, hiding
producing milk
in order
to be changed
into Isis.

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Tom,

shower of light

.................................................................rain
brain cloud

followed by "Untitled" 8747 -- all so lovely.

10.25

grey rain cloud moving across invisible
top of ridge, shadowed leaves on branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel

“subject,” not only what is
past but also what is

painting, see in particular
idea, read as follows

sunlit white clouds in bright blue sky,
shadowed green pine on tip of sandspit

Susan Kay Anderson said...

Little papery ancient
you exist
gardening
sort through
overstory
canopy of flowers
end up flitting
above it
always tasty.

dalriada said...

Everyone in a movie today

Der Himmel über Berlin ‒

and have gone the other way
as one of those witnessing angels
who views dispassionately

from the wings ...

Mose23 said...

"a bath of heavy water"

The sense of a place to contain the volatility of a thought. This is what The World does.

I can't escape the allusions to nuclear reactors.

TC said...

WB,

Thanks so much for considering the words as though they actually had a certain depth, a certain history, and certain connotations (contra standard internet practise).

Indeed I did have in mind that particular association you mention, for heavy water.

It follows as part of the radiation burden from "brain cloud".

Four consecutive computer tomography deconstructions of the brain, over the course of an endless trauma-center night, with each laminar slice infusing a Bikini Atoll level of radiation burden, topped off by the bonus radio isotope cocktail piped in intravenously by the beings behind the lead shields, not only imaged the brain cloud, but added to it in a way I would have thought redundant, had I been able to think, or allowed to say No to any of these costly (in so many senses) technological invasions.

With the initial falling-butterfly "Idea" that sparked this scrawled-in-the-dark nocturnal notebook jotting there came (for me anyway, old bore that I am) the inescapable sense of the origin of the word, as it came to Plato, from the Greek eidos, for "seeing".

(Since the automotive blunt-trauma assault upon my cerebrum I've had serious vision difficulties.)

The word "rain", however, here, was simply meant to indicate... rain. Little depth to that.

Perhaps the shallow puddle into which the pieces of broken stars silently tumbled... is that what I saw in the Todd Hido shot?

It may be that when we lose the ability make things out with clarity, we begin at last to see what we had been looking for.

(As though our lost wings had eyes?)