Agapanthus

Sugar Snap Peas

Bluebird

That, yes, that.

Sloppy thinking is not, no, not as good as good thinking, so far as thinking goes, but it’s often the same as saying, “I love you more than I do this thought,” and that, yes, that is good.

Three Things

One. Driving Toward the Sunset.

I grew up in Pacifica, where watching the sunset meant going somewhere and stopping.  We had to.  The water starts a mile away, we weren’t into kayaks, and haven’t yet become holy enough for the whole walking-on-water stunt, waves or no. Now, I love going somewhere and stopping to see the sunset.  There’s quite a bit to see (that’s kind of the point), and the focus afforded by a fixed location is quite valuable.  But.  Two days ago I became consciously aware of the distinct and magnificent pleasure of watching the sunset while driving toward it.  (I’m vaguely ashamed that this is the first time I can recall noticing it after five years in L.A.  *Must pay more attention to everything.)  Bends and curves in the road became facilitators of that dependable intensification strategy: the hide-reveal-hide-reveal-hide-hide-slow reveal.  All the fun of strong contrast heightened by the use of negation itself as one of the binaries!  And when one gets to hilly bits, the ground starts to seem less secure than the emblazoned welkin (pardon my language) above’t.

Two. Paradigmatic Colors: Incarnate!

Yesterday, the color of the trees and sky here could have been taken out of a sheaf of construction paper or a basic box of crayons.  They were the colors of children’s drawings and of everyone’s ideas “tree” and “sky.”  What!?

Happy subsequent (re-)realization: the correspondence of real stuff and personal idea(l)s is one of our chief-est-er-est-er-li-est pleasures.  Hooplay!  Unhappy subsequent realization:  This correspondence was stand-out-ish-ly significant to me, so my visual paradigms must not correspond to reality very often or well.  Hm.

Three. Jazz is Yellow.

I know this because as I was driving back from work yesterday, I turned on the jazz station.  As soon as the music started and without my willful instigation, I was suddenly and powerfully more conscious of the color yellow everywhere.  In sprinklers.  On walls.  In trees.  In the speckles that show up on earlyish- or lateish-lit asphalt.  My conclusion: Jazz is yellow.  Except when it’s blue.  Rebecca reminded me while at work today that it’s very blue.  Rhapsodically blue.

Also, jazz may be characterized by boxy shapes with rounded edges, because that’s what I noticed this morning when I turned it on.  I’m suspicious, however, of the suggestion; I may have been trying to recreate yesterday’s revelation.  I think I was.  Hm.

Why DO I Like It?

This post led to questions about what I do with school uniforms, choir boy outfits, and pleasant uniformity generally.  I don’t want every street sign to receive individual typographic treatment, do I? & etc.

What I had said was, “I think that I don’t like the OC prettiness because it seems like it exists for the sake of an ordinance.  Houses become adorned in such and such a way not because a person likes the house, but because of some rule that tells them to,” and so on.  But (see the photo above) I do rather like some ordained stylings.  I like school uniforms and all that sort of thing.  So how to I systematize my dislike for some beautification systems and my love of others?

Here’s my best stab, so far.

Uniform stylings are suitable when the thing that is being adorned is a category.  A student wearing a uniform is not wearing their uniform insofar as they are an individual; they are wearing it insofar as they participate in “student.”  The problem I have with stock makeup or clothing and with uni-styled housing is that it takes something that ought to be eminently particular–a face, a home–and reduces it, visually, to a member of some category.  People who are students can take off their uniforms when it would be inappropriate to visually instantiate their role, but it’s nice that they can give that abstraction a form sometimes.  It’s almost mythic.

In sum, basically, as it were, it turns out that my distaste for over-ordained or inappropriately ordained styles comes down to their symbolic relationship to the things so styled.  It’s a concern that has more to do with truth than with beauty.

I Love…

I love the toward-set sun spill, slipped past silver, leaning into gold.

Why Don’t I Like It?

I’ve consistently felt a little guilty for not liking the prettiness of posh Orange County or of some made-up faces.  They’ve obviously been done up for the sake of something like beauty, and that’s the sort of thing I ought to like.

There’s always, of course, the Romantic avenue to be taken: I could insist that I like ladies and vending stands best when they exhibit a natural beauty.  But that route’s never felt quite satisfying to me.  What’s a natural vending stand supposed to look like?  Man-made beautiful things aren’t inherently less beautiful than the non-man-made ones.

My next instinct, post-Romanticism, is to say that those pretty things are less attractive to me because they’re less skillfully made.  This takes care of a good number of sloppy makeup jobs and unsuccessful outfits, but when you get to Orange County, it can’t be a lack of skill that makes it rather repugnant to me.  The things there are often made by some of the most talented artists and city planners anywhere.  They are pretty.

Then I want to say that it’s too pretty.  At that point, however, I think I’m talking nonsense.

Art and Science Articles for the Day

I operate under the assumption that there is no out-there-in-the-world division between art and science, as the terms are most often used.  No, the ‘intuitive, feely things’ and the ‘analytic, logical things’ are, at base, just ‘things.’  Things, yes, with which humans are more suited to interact in one way than in another, perhaps, but just ‘things.’  And thinking and feeling, I think and feel, are modes of interaction and representation in the human soul that are precisely adapted to interact with and represent everything, though in different ways.  Thinking and feeling (and acting), when they aren’t growing together or can’t grow together, are likely growing backwards.

So it was with great pleasure that I found myself reading, within the space of a day, two articles: one that gets at design’s feeling-ish side, and one at its logic-ish side.  They’re lovely side-by-side, and I can’t count on much anyone else putting them so, so I will.

I admit, they’re not really topically related; they’re loosely topically related.  (Note: I just opposed “real” and “loose.” Ha.)  You shouldn’t take this (or the previous parenthetical) as anything more than a self-indulgent representation of a personally pleasurable experience, and a brief outline of the context that made it so pleasurable.

Context = assertions at top

Pleasureable experience = articles below

The Secret Law of Page Harmony

On Liking

Torrey Academy Banquet Opening Prayer

Father,

You are the source, sustenance, and goal of all things.  You are the wellspring of life and the true light that enlightens men.

But Father, we live among shadows and have grown accustomed to shadows.  Dogged by fears and driven by desire, we often prefer the safety of a self-made world to the sharp, bright edges of reality.

And yet we pray, “Thy kingdom come.”  You who play in ten thousand places, play more perfectly in us.  Remake, oh Lord, your world that we have wrecked.  Maranatha.

This here now is a little picture of the day of the full establishment of your kingdom.  We are delighting in the relief of completion and marking a new stage with a feast.  How we long for your final feast!

Father, we thank you for the lights you have already lit for us, here among the shadows.  We thank you for godly men and women gone before us, for discussion and laughter, and for the present, pleasure-full food.  As we accept this good sustenance, help us to remember our debt to you, the needs of countless others, and help us delight in your joy.

Lord, we love you.  Help us to love you more.

Amen.