the_amarant

I was watching moths swarm streetlights on the hillsides, and they flickered as small embers in the distance; illuminated in the moment - as was I.
While sitting on that hill I remembered a metaphor someone once told me; that moths must be the closest relative to humans, that they are the only other creature drawn to the light which kills them. Though spoken with some melancholy, I smiled upon my remembrance. Perhaps the moth does not crave the flame in folly nor naievity. It's as though that light were a form of enlightenment - the enlightenment so many humans lose the path to, or ignore. For even if the moth never faced the light, and flew the streets in enveloped darkness, he still would meet his end, never consumed by the flame and fury.


I have touched the flame, I am basked in it's illumination, my face in shadow through the darkness and half new moon.
I have grazed my fingers through the brazen glow. I have burned, I am burning, I shall burn again.
(Thus hath the candle singed the moth.)

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia.

For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is.

--Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus

An ambiguous animation painted on public spaces.


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Debcha sez, "This is an incredibly arresting stop-motion video, both in technique and content. Entirely composed of paintings on public walls, sidewalks, and other spaces, it follows a creature as it undergoes a mindbending series of transformations - mating, mutating, and mitosing through multiarmed monsters, scuttling spiders, a herd of teeth, and more. Considerable visual wit is in evidence, as the paintings interact with their substrates - a trompe d'oeil brick falls out of a wall, pieces of paper are snatched with a froglike tongue, and hiding places are found in the corners of crumbling walls. Watching and re-watching it consumed way too much of my time today. (and it's CC-licensed - share and enjoy!)"Link.

from BoingBoing.

I never knew if you read the LiveJournal entry I posted a few days after our return from California. To be honest, I wasn't sure that I wanted to know. I had posted in hopes that you might read it and know, regardless of future matters, that you had inspired an overwhelming emotion. That, even if nothing were ever to transpire between us again, I had felt something in that moment, and that thinking so much even once made it as real and true as anything ever could be, if only for an instant.

My mind is still cloudy. My wounds are not healed, and I can not quite place what, if anything, it is that I'm looking for. It seems pertinent at this point for me to be alone; yet, as days grow longer I find it harder to push a sense of longing from my mind at a glance in your direction. It's true that I've often found my lips longing for a smooth caress from your skin, but while my free-spirited side swoons at the idea of opportunity, my rationale speaks better of it. I'm unsure of my mind and it's intent, and the last thing I'd want is to drag you along at your heart's expense, all due to an exposure of my own inner whim.


It's such a strange and detached relationship we share, pretending not to know what's alive in each other's head, scared to speak of such things lest our friendship meet a screeching halt. (Then again the whole world seems to live in this fashion, scared to face controversies, scared of what others might think; though our situation is undoubtedly touchier than most.)
Well, let me be the first to brave the storm, and throw fear to the wind. Here is my truth:

The longer I know you, the more your presence helps fill my soul. You are an incredible individual, and while you still have growing left to do (and don't we all? and what would the point be if any of us were ever to reach a point in which we didn't have more room to grow?! ..but I digress...) I want to experience you. I want to see more of the beauty I've watched pour from your fingertips. I want to know your lips, just once, clear and without alcohol's muddled assistance...
As I said earlier, my mind is still cloudy, and I'm not really certain what it is that I'm trying to propose here, but more than anything I just want you to know what I am thinking. I want you to know who I am.

Poppies illuminate the roadside in silhouette against an otherwise drab and uninspiring landscape--

-- A pleasant reminder that we too can re-emerge after a winter gone too cold; a way to thrive, despite our own desert and drought.

To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

--Henry David Thoreau

I am confused.
To say the very least, I am confused about a great many things and again, many more.

I do know that I often miss your heat while thinking of run down hotel rooms with stains of shiny lip-gloss kisses, and sleeping on hard and unfamiliar floors.

I know also that, sometimes, watching your sleeping cheeks finds my heart overflowing; and that sometimes, I catch my mind sneaking her fingers across a memory of your lips.

Beyond this there is only uncertainty; a fuzzy snow-storm of a cloud that hangs low over my eyelids and brings a numbness to my bones, and there can be no promises.