"I know that things have been better."
Everyone has this thought, in their arsenal/supply closet of primal worries.
It is probably one of the first "thoughts" to have occurred to the earliest humans,
as they stood on the edge of some great famine or drought, in Paleolithic Africa.
It strikes me that sentience begins with being a sort of witness to the individual "animal"
(biological human being) only treated and regarded as another troublesome sack of meat,
without an acknowledged conscious being, by fate and history.Without memory and a "personal
storyline", animals would not have access to those memories, a description of THEIR world,
and ability to compare and question the past knitting consciousness out of memory and language.
Terence McKenna had a theory, probably not the first human to have the thought, however,
that "language", composed of a set of rules and noise (non-physical entities), IDEAS, had
self-assembled into a super-organism that lived only in shared sentient minds. Language; built of
noise, motion and information; information accumulates and becomes more complex as an individual
sentient being grows older and accumulates mnore experience.. He thought that it was this virtual
parasitic organism has become a shadow biosphere, "running" like program on the shared noosphere
of our meat. It has evolved into a whole fauna and flora of benign symbiots, memeplexes exercising
basic control of out meat body. Culture is an operating system running on our meat
and integrated with the organism, like mitochondria in the primal cell. I believe that this is a
more appropriate metaphor, than the "software universe" of consciousness proposed in the "
The Matrix universe".
We don't know when Language evolved the ability to jump from the shared noise and cognisance
of beasts, into the individual brains of the earlest people. Were we still more animal than primate
when sentience first bloomed amongst the mammals? Did dinosaurs ever achieve language. Were they infected
by Gaia as well?
I am sure that language and sentience have colonised other mammalian lineages, and people make strong
arguements for at least a second infection of a distant relative, the octopus; a mollusk. We share
much of the primal instructions for meat and oxygen use, but it is a good thing that those crazy octopi, squid
and cuttlefish only live a couple years, perhaps a little more for the largest specimens. A 90 year-
old cuttlefish would be a deadly enemy. A large herd of 40 year-old cuttlefish could take over England
in a year, unseen.
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The I haven't been painting, really, for the last three weeks or so. My last bit of "balls-out"
studio-time was conducted at the deer camp cabin, with propane lantern and kerosene heater, a week
or two after deerhunt. It awas freezing. Sleeping in front of the kerosene heater was like outdoor camping;
I had to keep a window open to defend against carbon monoxide poisoning from the two burning devices.
Here are the pics from that night:
The first shot has the feel of the first night on the trapline or first-night on some distant, late season
hunt. It's a little festive, tinged with the amber light and good taste of generic Canadian whiskey, the
omnipresent, loud hiss of non-electric technology and deep pungence of good tobacco.
The canvas had previously been used in the #ZzorhAndBingoRage podcast; "Podcast until we get arrested".
SPOILER: We did not get arrested. We did, however, befoul ourselves.
Van Gogh. Flowers. Fucking Sunflowers. Really?
The heart wants what the heart wants, Eric.
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I have been working on plenty of beadwork. I make deceptively "simple cuff, beaded bracelets" that have
evolved their form and function as I resolved clasping problems, thread inconsistency and structural problems
solved with reduction in media I no longer make my beadwork body on a loom, with a premade pattern on a special graph
paper. I make emergent groupings of beads' colour-fill on the growing scaffold of threads. No longfer do I lift
the sagging body of beads, cut from their roots and transplanted onto the leather bands; poisoned by electrical tape
residues, grinding up like tarpits at the feet of mountains.
What?...
Like I said; most of the new bracelets are woven peyote-stitched. My first woven freeform beading system, with built-in
thread infrastructure was brick stitch. It's OK for non-moving objects, but doesn't work for flexible jewelry; it
probably makes nice pendants.
The new, non-woven articles include stacked pin earrings and single strand strung bead bracelets, of various types and
sizes. Here are some pics of available pieces (as of Dec.22):
The Xmas sales and local tea circuit has been slow this year. My fellow Northwestern Ontario citizens aren't
spending money on the little baubles. The old holiday budget is underfunded.
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Here are some of the surfaces; papier-mache and stretched canvases that have resolved, lately.
"The Big Guy" Large papier-mache mask.
"Crane, powwow dancer" Acrylic paint and beadwork on Canvas.
Approx. 5' tall, 32" wide and 4 inches deep, 1"x4" lumber boxframe.
"Giant Pike Hunt" Acrylic paint on stretched canvas.
Approximate 50 inches wide by 40 inches high.
I worked "Giant Pike Hunt" upside-down, recently, in the #BingoRageStudio.
"Sky Battle" Acrylic painting on canvas.
Approximately 6 feet wide and 22 inches wigh.
"Spoon Hei Matau"
