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asterkiss · 6 years

Note

Of you're still accepting request, could I ask for Mabel x Bill and number 61 please? ^^

I’m very much always open to requests unless I say otherwise! ^^ Also I know you were requesting some possessive/protective Bill last week so I incorporated that into this drabble!

Bill’s appearance later on in this drabble is inspired by his form in Weirdmageddon.

61) “If you go anywhere near them [her], you’ll have to deal with me!”

- MIRROR

“Oi, Shooting Star!”

“Nnghn….”

“Shooting Star!”

“Five more minutes…”

“Pighead.”

“Hey!” Mabel shot upright only to wince when it aggravated the bruises on her arm. Pushing up her right sleeve, she grimaced at the four stripes marring her skin, remnants of the large hand that had yanked her away.

“For the love of— Will you come over here, dammit!”

The brunette perked up at the voice, finally taking proper note of it. That was… Bill? Unable to stop the hope blossoming in her chest, she quickly looked around the jail cell she was currently held in and went over towards the bars.

“No, not that way you idiot!”

She paused. Turning around and looking across the small room, her eyes finally landed upon the mirror pinned to the wall above the basin. Slowly, she began making her towards it.

When she finally stepped in front of it, Mabel could only blink in surprise. “Bill…?”

Instead of reflecting her current appearance, the mirror showed the image of Bill Cipher who sighed in relief as he rolled his eyes.

“Finally, jeez! How dumb are you?”

Mabel scowled. “Hey, be nicer! I’m literally a prisoner right now!!”

His expression sobered at that and Mabel then noticed the background behind him resembled the Mystery Shack. What? She reached out curiously but her fingers simply came up against glass.

“Yeah, sorry but this ain’t a portal, kid. Just a video call of sorts,” he explained, eyes flickering over her appearance in what was probably concern.

Retracting her hand, she frowned. “Are you… in the Mystery Shack? Where is everyone?”

“He heh, ol’ Sixer is putting the finishes touches to a device that’ll locate you.”

Mabel blinked. “You’re… working with Grunkle Ford?”

The demon gave a casual shrug. “Turns out that when his great-niece’s life is in jeopardy, even that guy can swallow his pride and work with a demon one last time. Who woulda thought it, huh?”

Mabel could only hope he wasn’t testing Stanford too much—the man had his limits. She wondered if he was working with Dipper and Stanley too, then.

Just as she was opening her mouth to question this, a hand came down on her shoulder from behind. She flinched, snapping her head around to come face to face with the person holding her capture. At first appearances, he looked like a ordinary middle-aged man with salt and pepper hair and a grey suit.

But Mabel knew otherwise, she’d seen the horrors hiding beneath his disguise first-hand.

“Well then, this is a surprise. I don’t think I authorized any personal calls unless old age is making me forget,” he said casually, flashing his teeth in a way that seemed a bit too sinister for Mabel’s liking. She took a step away from him.

“Azazel.”

The guttural tone of voice that emitted from the mirror drew both their attention and Mabel was caught off guard by the thunderous expression painted across Bill’s face.

The demon did his best to keep his human form in check whilst in their world. Even in times where his emotions got the better of him and his appearance fluctuated, he was usually able to keep it in check.

Until now, it seems.

His eyes were pitch black, lips stretching back to display jagged teeth sharp like razors. His skin had transformed to a shade of red as if it was burning from the inside out, pieces of skin igniting and flaking off.

If Mabel wasn’t so sure he was on her side, she would have been terrified.

“Bill Cipher,” the man—Azazel—greeted, appearing unaffected by the demons change in appearance. “My, my, how long has it been since we met in person? A millennia? Two? My memory’s not quite like it used to be.”

Bill growled, and when he spoke in it was in an animalistic manner involving a language she couldn’t understand.

“Language!” Azazel cut in, frowning in disapproval. “We have a lady present.” He gestured toward Mabel who was leaning as far away as she possibly could whilst still having view to the mirror.

Bill’s expression was murderous. “This isn’t the time to be messing about, you piece of shi—”

“I disagree,” Azazel cut in much to Bill’s clear aggravation. “You used to love playing games and causing havoc. Why such the spoil sport now? Is it because of her?” The man tilted his head in Mabel’s direction, a look of distaste crossing his face. “You made the mistake of turning me down Bill. I was being so nice with my earlier offer and you said no. This is all your fault, you should know I don’t handle rejection well.”

“Azazel—”

“In fact, why don’t we make a game of this?” Azazel tugged at the tie around his throat and loosened it somewhat, lips twitching into a cruel smile. “You always did admire a good treasure hunt, didn’t you? Why don’t I cut a few pieces off this toy of yours and leave them scattered across a few dimensions with clues?”

Mabel paled. “You can’t do that!” She very much liked having all her bits and pieces where they were, thank you very much!

The temperature in the room suddenly spiked significantly and was followed by an audible crack. When Mabel glanced at the mirror, she found a large break running down its center. There was no sign of Bill’s human form anymore, only a burning blue fire swallowing the entire screen whilst a single red eye glowed eerily within its center. Mabel could only watch wide-eyed as the blue flames came out of the mirror and into the jail cell, running trails of flame along the walls and ceiling.

She took a few hasty steps back in alarm, and when she looked at Azazel he looked… surprised?

“….Colour me impressed,” he remarked. “We’re on different dimensional planes, I hadn’t thought you capable of reaching through into this one with your powers. You’ve improved substantially since our last time together.”

“You listen to me you slimy bastard,” Bill spat, voice deep and booming and Mabel winced at the intensity of it. “If I find one hair out of place on that kid, you’re fried. She’s mine and if you go anywhere near her, you’ll have to deal with me!”

The heat was sweltering within the room now and Mabel could feel beads of sweat dropping down her neck. Azazel was staring at the mirror, lips pressed into a tight line and hands clenched at his sides.

“Bill…?” she asked, voice tentative.

The solitary eye snapped in her direction and Mabel flinched at the intensity of its gaze. Then, it blinked, and some of the heat in the room seemed to dissipate.

“Watch out for yourself Shooting Star, I’m coming. And stand back.”

“What? Why—”

The mirror exploded into pieces and Mabel yelped, covering her head with her arms as shards of glass swept through the cell. When she hesitantly lowered her arms a moment later, the mirror was completely shattered. The blue flames that had made their way into the cell slowly extinguished themselves, leaving behind scorch marks.

When she looked Azazel’s way, she drew in a sharp breath. Several shards of glass had embedded their way into the skin of his face. Yikes. She would have felt sorry for him if he wasn’t an evil antagonist keeping her prisoner.

However, as Mabel regarded him, she noted he looked almost disconcerted. He’d seemed surprised by Bill’s display of power, as if he hadn’t accounted for it.

“Well then, it seems like I’ve ruffled quite a few of his feathers. How childish. He always was easy to provoke.”

She frowned. “You’re the childish one doing all of this petty stuff because he turned you down!” Hypocrite much?

Azazel flashed her a dark smile. “I don’t like being told no, Miss Pines.”

“Oh yeah? Well you wanna know what I think?”

“No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me anyway.”

She jabbed a finger in his direction, pinning him with a ferocious glare she’d learned from none other than Bill.

“My demon boyfriend is going to kick your ass!”

#velvetcheshire #asks #mabill #drabble #by the way the words he says in his cipher language are simply put #'you motherfucker-'

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magic-and-moonlit-wings · 5 years

Text

Chapter 44: Scrapbooking

Bold italics are trollish.

This story is NOT back on its old weekly update schedule! Chapter 43 was a week late, and I happened to finish this chapter 'on time' and decided to update to match the alternate-Fridays that I wrote on my calendar. The next chapter will be two weeks from now unless it's late again instead.

Becoming The Mask

+=+

Bagdwella had offered the two human girls a seat on the box spring mattress that she had not yet disassembled to get at its bed coils, but Mary and Darci had turned her down. Instead they were sitting back-to-back on the short wooden bench that Bagdwella stood on to reach high shelves. Apparently there were tiny insects that sometimes lived in old mattresses and the humans didn't want to risk the parasites crawling into their clothes.

Each girl was writing something. Sometimes Mary referred to her phone before making notes. Darci would pause and tap her chin with her pen before returning to her papers.

"How do you spell 'divorce'?" Mary asked. They had a dictionary with them, but Darci was using it.

Bagdwella spelled it out, carefully enunciating the runes for the girl to copy down. Mary chirped a quick "Thank you!" and ducked back down over her notebook.

The humans had come earlier that night, asking if they could work on whatever they were doing in Bagdwella's backroom. She suspected it was some kind of assignment from Blinky. Or perhaps a surprise for him, since they weren't working on it in the library.

The silly man had such a dry, academic way of teaching language. Bagdwella simply had to take it upon herself to step in and teach these whelps how to converse like proper trolls. Blinky was a better choice for writing lessons, though, being one of the few people she knew who read for enjoyment.

Oh, she could appreciate good record-keeping, and in a more abstract way she understood the value of collecting knowledge, but stories just felt stilted to her when they were written down instead of spoken.

Why Mary needed that particular word, Bagdwella couldn't fathom – had the human mistranslated something? Should she have asked her what she thought it meant in English?

"What is it you two are up to?" the shopkeeper finally asked.

"Translating stories about our families," said Mary. "This one is about how my parents got divorced and my mother got married again. She was smart, the second time. She insisted they get … premarital counselling. If Mom and Dad had bothered with that, they might have realized they shouldn't get married before they did."

"But then you might not exist," pointed out Darci.

"I'm not saying there wasn't a silver lining."

Bagdwella didn't know what lining something with silver had to do with anything. It didn't have a very appealing flavour, and the shades it developed when tarnished were pretty but not enough to make up for the metal's relative softness, so trolls didn't use it much in food, tools, or decor. It was probably a human saying. She was pretty sure they considered most metals valuable.

"What is premarital counselling?" she asked instead.

"Uh … counselling, before marriage?" Mary explained haltingly. "When people, who want to get married, talk, to … sometimes a leader, an Elder, like Vendel. Sometimes a … therapist … like a medic, but for thoughts and feelings. A person whose job it is, to make sure people who want to get married talk about … the things people should talk about before marriage. Things people who don't talk will fight about because they don't agree but did not know."

Bagdwella nodded thoughtfully. "Your parents did not do this, but your mother and her next spouse did?"

"Yes, exactly."

"That is …" Darci frowned in a way Bagdwella was learning to recognize, the furrow-browed looking-up expression of a human who knew what they wanted to say but didn't know the word for it. "That's kind of heavy, don't you think?" Darci said in English instead. "I write – written – am writing, about my older brother teaching me to drive."

"I need to explain why the divorce. My parents both are good people who learn from their mistakes. They did not divorce because one did something bad."

+=+

Claire knocked once on the nursery door, a hard thump, before entering.

"I need you to check my trollish." She shoved a three-ring binder at the Changeling.

"Uh?" said Enrique, not dropping his human face.

"For the love of," Claire muttered, not specifying what she was invoking the love of. "Fine. You know what, fine. Please check my trollish."

Enrique shapeshifted obligingly and took the binder. "Was that so hard?" he teased. He made a show of examining the angular squiggles, turning the first few pages with a solemn expression, and then handed the book back to her. "Looks troll-y to me."

She rolled her eyes and pushed it towards him again. "I meant see if my grammar's okay and I spelled everything right."

"I'm not much for spelling. And yeh'd have to read it out for the grammar bit."

"… What, you can't read?"

"I'm picking up English and Spanish okay," he said defensively, gesturing to the shelf of storybooks.

"Jim can read trollish."

"Yeah, well, Jim is a madman who thought it was worth the risk, annoying Gunmar's advisor like that. Plus he's had Strickler and the other Mister Six Eyes to keep the lessons up since he left."

"Left? Left where? The Darklands," she answered her own question. "But, wait, I still don't get it. If you guys are supposed to be spies, why didn't anyone teach you to read and write?"

"If we're s'posed to be spying on fleshbags, what'd we need to read in troll for?"

"Ciphers?" she suggested immediately. "I mean, it's still a language so it's still got patterns, but it would take longer for a human to decrypt one if it's not based on a human language."

"… Some of the higher-ups know it. Could be why the rest of us don't." Make it a status thing. Control access to information.

Or maybe Claire was just smarter about spy stuff than Gunmar was.

+=+

"So, we've been thinking about what you said," said Darci to Blinky. "And you're right. We went too fast, suggesting to Vendel that he should let us tell our families about trolls."

"And yet somehow I find myself suspecting that you are not telling me this as a precursor to setting that goal aside."

"We're asking him, all of you really, to trust complete strangers just because we vouch for them. And that wasn't fair. And there's not exactly a way for a troll to get to know a human without secrets coming out."

"Or is there?" said Mary dramatically.

Claire handed Blinky the binder he'd noticed she was holding behind her back. "We've collected some pictures of our families, for putting faces to names, and we're writing down stories about them – you know, anecdotes. Memories. Stuff they've done and that shows what kind of people they are. We're going to get Toby in on it, too. Maybe Jim, if he's got anything that can calm Vendel down about Dr Lake knowing already."

"And once Vendel knows everyone by proxy," continued Mary, "he should be more okay with actually meeting them."

Blinky took the binder cautiously. It wasn't heavy, and the stiff covers closed triangularly around the pages. Perhaps twenty pages, he estimated, which was quite respectable considering these three could only have been working on it for a few days.

It was divided, inside, with tabs to skip directly to any of the families described therein. The first section was Darci's family.

Several pages of photos grinned toothily out at him, captioned with names written in both the humans' Roman alphabet and phonetic trollish transliteration, and sub-captioned with each human's relationship to Darci. Mother, father, older brother; three living grandparents, plus one in a group picture who was noted to be deceased; and a maternal aunt and uncle and two cousins, with a note clarifying that Darci did not expect Vendel to agree to meet her entire family, only that knowing who these four humans were would help the stories make sense.

Blinky restricted himself to skimming only the title of each anecdote, though it was tempting to thoroughly read the one about the driving lesson right away, and move on to the section about Mary's family.

This section followed the same format. Blinky was impressed and proud that they'd managed to write almost the entire thing in trollish. He turned to the section on Claire's family and, three pages in, froze up.

The photo had to be of the Changeling that the humans had taken to calling Not Enrique – yes, that was how the caption identified him – lit by the blueish glow of the crystal staircase. The picture was lower quality than the others, as though the camera weren't as good, or as if it were a close-up of a larger picture.

Blinky already knew the Changeling had gotten into Trollmarket. They hadn't exchanged words yet, but he'd met the boy. And from his interactions with Jim, Blinky had really thought he was at peace with the idea that Changelings could be allies; friends; (perhaps family).

He should not be reacting to this image with the degree of shock and horror that he felt – this sense of no – this sense of wrong.

"I … do not think admitting to Vendel that one of your family members is known to be a Changeling will reassure him that it is safe to trust the rest of your relations."

"But he should take it better if we come clean than if he finds out later, right?" said Claire. "I don't think any of us can pull off acting like he got swapped after we tell our parents what's going on. And Jim said Vendel knows he's a Changeling."

"I honestly can't say what Vendel's reaction will be. But I can say," closing the book firmly, "that this was a highly dangerous picture to bring to Trollmarket." Hard evidence of Changelings amongst them …

Well, very strong circumstantial evidence. One slightly out-of-focus picture of a young troll with a handwritten caption claiming the youngling was a Changeling was hardly a compelling case.

It could still be enough to have Claire imprisoned on suspicion of conspiring with Changelings, since she had brought 'her little brother' to Trollmarket while knowing what he was. And from there, the Trollhunter's identity could be exposed, and even Vendel's protection – Vendel's collusion with the conspiracy to allow a Changeling Trollhunter to live and to operate freely – would likely not be enough to save Jim's life; and probably the best Blinky could hope for himself would be banishment.

"Okay," said Darci, jolting him out of his thoughts. "So what if we took the stuff about Not Enrique out for now, and told Vendel later? Do you think learning more about our families would help convince him?"

"… Possibly," Blinky conceded.

+=+

Previous Chapter (Various characters try to comfort Toby in the aftermath of a nightmare)

Table of Contents

Next Chapter (Barbara finds out Draal has been living in her basement)

You would not believe how long an internal debate I had about whether Enrique would say 'spy stuff' or 'espionage strategy' in his own head.

On the one hand, inside his head he's got no one to perform for except himself, and so he doesn't need to dumb himself down to remain underestimated.

On the other hand, speech patterns can affect thought patterns and it sounds weird phrasing it like that when the scene is supposed to be in his voice.

#Bagdwella #Mary Wang #Darci Scott #Claire Nuñez #Not Enrique #Blinkous Galadrigal #Trollhunters #Tales of Arcadia #Becoming The Mask chapters #Changeling Jim #fanfiction #My Fanfiction #Monday is fanfic day!#family #anecdote #Vehicles #relationships #Changelings #espionage

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red-stick-progressive · 6 years

Text

A response to that racist responding repeatedly to my additions to the post on Colonial Genocide

1: “La Hispaniola, in where most if not all of the indigenous population dissapeared. I’m only agreeing partially with you, Spanish colonization was devastating, BUT that just isn’t ALL (as you dare to put, in a kinda of cospirazy-theory way): There were a lot of other factors, in were DID play a part the illnesses and the war the own indians had agaisnt others.”

(Then you talk about the Aztec, unrelated to Hispaniola)

2: “The book you provided to me has taken, unsurprisingly, the highest balance of people (8 million) it supposed to exist in the island of La Hispainola before 1492 (of course, the bigger deads, the better! gets easier to acuse of holocaust and genocide).”

(You misread Stannard, I assume in a preview or something. He mentions the population estimate considered standard by most academia for most of the history of the research of the indigenous peoples of the new world, which was the laughable 8 million in the entire western hemisphere. This is obviously an example of academia being a tool of propaganda, colonialist and yes genocidal propaganda. By diminishing the population they reduce the weight of the colonial crimes and reduce the legitimacy of contemporary peoples to the identities of their ancestors. All which benefits colonial power structures. Currently, the most conservative and still legitimate estimate of populations in Mexico before contact is 25 million. That is just in the region of Mexico. The most current and reasonable estimate for the population of Hispaniola before contact is 1.8 to 2.9 million. That many Taino people may have lived on that island when the Spanish arrived. Less than 1 generation later there were no Taino left on the island. All that survived, less than 50 thousand did so as slaves elsewhere or as refugees in other native nations.

American Holocaust by David E Stannard

https://gsp.yale.edu/case-studies/colonial-genocides-project/hispaniola

http://www.wou.edu/history/files/2015/08/Cain-Stoneking-HST-499.pdf )

3: “There you have the ciphers of people other specialist gives that goes from 60.000 (how they dare!) to 8 million, and the problems actual historians have to put a real number, because, as I’ve been saying, de las Casas simply exagerated the number of deads and the ways spaniards killed indians to make his point (spaniards bad, indians good). You know, census didn’t exist that time in 1492. But of course, that’s not a problem for those who’re appealed to lie. Just put the higher, albeit surreal, cypher to make it more proper to accuse of “genocide”, call you book something as “Genocide in America” or “Holocaust”, and you’ve got it.”

(This is mostly incomprehensible. First of all, no contemporary estimates are done exclusively based on personal accounts. Most population estimates are done by testable evidence like residence numbers in archeological sites compared to a standard model for what local populations looked like. This is still a flawed system constantly producing unreasonably small estimates but even this system far dwarfs what you argue. Cuz you’re a racist who is divorced from reality so much so that you are still using decades-old estimates based on nothing but propaganda.

The second point I have to address is that holocaust is a title, and genocide is a defined term. According to Google, Genocide: “the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.” There is no conceivable argument against the fact that what the Dutch, the English, the Portuguese, and the Spanish did in the new world is genocide. Every single European power has dirtied hands. They stole land, erased languages and profited from other people doing the killing even if they didn’t explicitly do so at first.

https://www.google.com/search?q=genocide+define&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS750US750&oq=genocide+define&aqs=chrome..69i57.4815j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 )

4: “how in 1492-1502 spaniards AND indigenous people were both attacked by a same illness, the supposed illness spanish were “using” to kill indians (like 8 hundreds of millions of tHroUsAnDs of hundreds), per your lasts reviews… They were so smart that you know, “used” the same illness to being killed.”

(As for the idea that the same diseases killing millions of Natives were also killing the Spanish, that is very specifically not true. The diseases that the colonizers and conquistadors brought and then weaponized were more or less experientially harmless to them in context. Things like measles and the flu or malaria and typhus. Even the common cold and chickenpox killed and spread like plagues. The things that were periodic plagues in Europe such as cholera, bubonic plague, and smallpox were instantly devastating. Describing how and why is its own post and maybe I will make that post soon but I’ll just say here that Europe was a fucking dumpster fire in terms of sanitation where most cultures in the New World were so socially organized that every early encounter with any given tribe is usually followed with the Europeans marveling at how often Natives bathe and how much soap they use. Another important factor is the fact that Europe had dozens of different livestock animals that lived in immediate proximity to people often sharing water sources to defecate into and drink from. This meant diseases leaped from chickens and pigs and cows and horses to people much more frequently in the thousands of years since domestication. Native Agriculture developed along different paths and so the numerous livestock animals throughout the western hemisphere were fewer and more sanitarily maintained than in the eastern hemisphere. The only disease spread back to Europe during the Columbian exchange was syphilis, though not a plague still terrified Europe. Important detail: it also did not nearly exterminate the entire population of the entire Old World.

The specific example in the first section of American Holocaust was the first such plague event, that made many Spaniards sick and killed thousands of Natives almost immediately. The first plague, unexpected and abrupt, the Spanish took note and it informed the numerous following invasions. It was swine flu, the kind Columbus deliberately spread ahead of himself later on in his return invasions.

As for the argument that the Spanish didn’t know that spread disease and plagues was possible or that they did so accidentally… I mean, to think this you just have to deny or ignore the insurmountable volume of personal; and first-hand accounts of people saying that’s what they were doing. The compilation of accounts and historical sources that Stannard uses often is Harvest of Violence, but Robert Cormack, it is a hard read of historians primarily from Guatemala and Mexico. As opposed to the pure Spanish propaganda you seem to subscribe to, it prioritizes our own voices and is also filled with the accounts from the colonizers themselves which need no special framing to be transparent and genocidal as they discuss leaving the plagued and dead in fields to prevent healthy harvest and piling the dead and debris in the aqueducts and canals of Tenochtitlan to starve and pollute and trap civilians. Just to be clear and definitive though, Europeans definitely knew about plague bodies spreading plague, obviously, they did not understand how or why, but they did. The Spanish had weaponized blood infected with leprosy to poison wine in Naples in 1495, and there were incidents of biological warfare all throughout the Reconquista, which pointedly ended in 1492 before Columbus left Seville.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200679/ : examples of Europeans using infected cadavers to poison arrows and wells and so on many times throughout history and recorded by contemporaries.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X14641744 : the Spanish blood in wine thing, as well as a long list of other biological attacks in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconquista : this is just a link to the Reconquista from Wikipedia in case you were unaware of the very recent and relevant Spanish relationship with ethnic cleansing and genocide.)

5: “In this article, of course, if you could read spanish,”

(I can read Spanish, and speak it. I used to be pretty fluent but now mi español es limitado y lento, pero es mejor que otras personas, ¿no?)

6: “there were indians that just went to the forest and lived there outside from the cities, and like, nobody had a problem with that. Why they didn’t dissapear? Maybe, because, you know, conquest was not a genocide?or in other words: If it can be considered a genocide, is the worst and most inneficient genocide made ever.”

(I’m going to begin with the weird racist part about living in the forest. I, honest to god, don’t know what to say to explain why that's a laughably dumb claim and fundamentally racist thing to say at all. I was shouted at by some dumb racist in a town hall for my local representative, a Republican who hates immigrants etc. One of the things the racist yelled at me was “Go back to the woods.” I don’t know, figured I’d just mention that. Also, you know, it also just didn’t work either. Natives did flee from persecution and attack, and there are many individual accounts of being hunted down by dogs and soldiers and being brutally killed for it. One of the chiefs of the Hispaniola Natives fled with the few survivors of his people to another island where he identified the wealth and valuables that the Spanish sought and threw them in a river in a desperate attempt to make the Spanish leave them alone. He was known by Hatuey, and the “ good christian” Spaniards crucified him and burned him alive.

Also, I would argue that the relative efficiency of a genocide is not super relevant when measuring its moral value. Odd metric btw.)

7: “You can accuse of spanish colonialism of sclavitude, clasism, racism (even race wasn’t a part in the idea of conquering the indians, was a religious thing) and a lot of other things, really, I’m not even doubting about that, but “Genocide” it’s not one of them.”

(The Spanish are actually the best case for inventing the notion of race, they applied a lense that mirrors the way American white supremacists measured race and how Nazi’s determined whether someone was Jewish regardless of identity or practice. The Spanish invented “Limpieza de Sangre” during the Reconquista while expelling Jews from Spain and hunting remaining Moors. And we know that Columbus brought it to the New World during colonization.

Again just google the word genocide. https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/659/tracing-the-roots-of-discrimination/ )

8: “even in the ancient spanish colonies there still a lot of indigenous people that survived and thanks to the own spanish colonial politics, instead of being killed in the moment for being considered as “sub-humans” or put in indian reservations and being killed of drunkness or surviving by putting casinos, but it is what it seems when some anglo-american just accuse other countries of doing the same and it shows.”

(Whew boy. Where to start?

“Ancient” Spanish colonies? Ancient?

Indigenous people survived despite colonial politics.

Literally, every account dehumanizes the Natives. Every single one, even the patronizing friars and supposed benefactors who just so happened to still not do anything to help Natives.

Just gonna put this here “put in indian reservations and being killed of drunkness or surviving by putting casinos,” Jesus.

And, ding ding ding, ya fucking idiot; can’t even read. I’m not “anglo-american” I’m Lumbee/Nanticoke, an indigenous eastern woodlands Native American. The Spanish colonized the Lumbee predecessors; idiot.)

@imanopinionatedadult @givemeyourtired @roxas-has-the-stick @givemeamomentortwo @thatmidstea @padawan-thunderairborne

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imjustthemechanic · 6 years

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Natalie Jones and the Golden Ship

Part 1/? - A Meeting at the Palace Part 2/? - Curry Talk Part 3/? - Princess Sitamun Part 4/? - Not At Rest Part 5/? - Dead Men Tell no Tales Part 6/? - Sitamun Rises Again Part 7/? - The Curse of Madame Desrosiers Part 8/? - Sabotage at Guedelon Part 9/? - A Miracle Part 10/? - Desrosiers’ Elixir Part 11/? - Athens in October Part 12/? - The Man in Black Part 13/? - Mr. Neustadt Part 14/? - The Other Side of the Story Part 15/? - A Favour Part 16/? - A Knock on the Window Part 17/? - Sir Stephen and Buckeye Part 18/? - Books of Alchemy Part 19/? - The Answers Part 20/? - A Gift Left Behind Part 21/? - Santorini Part 22/? - What the Doves Found Part 23/? - A Thief in the Night Part 24/? - Healing Part 25/? - Newton’s Code Part 26/? - Montenegro Part 27/? - The Lost Relic Part 28/? - The Homunculinus Part 29/? - The End is Near Part 30/? - The Face of Evil Part 31/? - The Morning After Part 32/? - Next Stop Part 33/? - A Sighting in Messina Part 34/? - Taormina Part 35/? - Burning Part 36/? - Recovery Part 37/? - Pilgrimage to Vesuvius

Where has Newton gone next? It’s a pun.

By morning, the smoke had cleared and the volcano was quiet.

This was definitely not what anyone had expected. As the group ate breakfast in the hotel’s little restaurant, the news playing on the television above the bar was all about the sudden cessation of the eruption. An anchorwoman said in Italian, with rather poorly-translated English subtitles for the tourists, that scientists were puzzled but Etna seemed to have gone back to sleep. If the volcano remained quiescent for twenty-four hours, the evacuated Sicilians would be allowed to return to their homes on the slopes. There were interviews with several people who expressed their gratitude to God that their farms were not going to be destroyed, and their eagerness to go home.

“They did something,” said Sam, pointing a fork at the TV.

Natasha had been thinking the same thing. Desrosiers must have come here because she knew Newton would go to an erupting volcano to get geothermal energy from it… maybe that was where the enormous heat in his gauntlet had come from. Somehow, he’d convinced her to help him make the philosopher’s stone, and now that they had the notebooks, they’d returned to the volcano to drain the rest of its energy.

“Do they have everything they need now?” she wondered aloud. “Are they ready to just make the philosopher’s stone?” Maybe they were working on it right now, down in the bowels of the volcano… or would it still be too hot in there? “Where’s our Voynich book?”

Sharon pulled it out of Sir Stephen’s backpack. “We still can’t read it,” she said.

“Yeah, but there might be something to give us a hint,” said Nat.

That seemed pretty unlikely, even to Nat, but for the moment nobody had any better ideas. They flipped through the softcover facsimile. There were no pictures of volcanoes anywhere in the book, but Nat supposed any form of energy would do. Solar, geothermal, wind… ancient alchemists might have even tried to do it with fire. The Minoan alchemists on Santorini had used the volcanic heat of Thira. Heaven knew what Rasputin had found in the middle of Siberia, maybe one of the powerful Russian rivers. Of course, if Newton could drain energy from a volcano to store and move it, he could go anywhere he liked.

Even so, she was pretty confident now that Newton was not going to Australia. The simple fact that he’d gone out of his way to mention it seemed evidence enough of that. She glanced at the book again, as Sharon idly turned pages, and then something caught her eye.

“Wait,” said Nat, and turned back a page or two.

It was an illustration of a plant – this entire section of the book was drawings of plants. Notes in the margins said that botanists believed it might be a sunflower, which suggested that the book was about the plants of the Americas. Somebody had even offered the theory that its alphabet was an attempt to record a native American language in a way that would be intelligible to Europeans. But Natasha, thinking of volcanoes, had noticed something else.

Taormina was full of volcano-related souvenirs and merchandise right now, and as she and Jim had walked down the street yesterday, they’d seen multiple versions of an illustration showing a cross-section of the mountain. The posters, postcards, and t-shirts depicted many fissures branching off a big central well that brought lava to the surface, where it erupted from the vents and gave off steam that rose into a tower with billows at the top. Everything in alchemy was recorded in codes and metaphors. This was not botany. This was geology.

“Etna,” said Natasha. She put her finger at the top of the page, where a heading was written: five of the mysterious letters, the first and last the same. The name of the mountain in Greek was Aetna.

“No way,” said Sharon, turning the book to face her again. “Really?”

“Somebody get a pen,” Nat ordered.

A waitress was walking by. Jim snatched her notebook and pen from her. “Sorry, need this,” he said, and sat back down to copy out the four letters that were A, E, T, and N. These were fairly common letters in Greek, so they were soon able to get to work on the rest of the page. The results were disappointing: they found things that might have been words, but many more seemed like random groups of letters. Some were repeated multiple times, some appeared to be backwards or to have had the letters arranged in alphabetical order. There must be layers and layers of code and cipher here, Nat thought, and without the key they didn’t know what to look for where. Figuring it out might take years.

“If the sunflower is a diagram of the mountain,” Nat said, “maybe these labels are places to say where to best collect its energy for alchemical purposes.” Unfortunately, it was hardly a map to scale. Without being able to read the text, they couldn’t tell where to look for Newton and Desrosiers.

Sharon turned the page. There was another plant… was this one also a volcano? The second letter of its name was an E, but the rest weren’t ones they’d figured out. Nat counted them, and made some guesses. The headings were the most simply encoded parts, and letters one and five in this word were the same. If those were Greek beta, then the whole name might be…

“Vesuvius,” said Jim, before Nat could speak. “We gotta go to Mount Vesuvius.”

“Not necessarily,” said Sam. He reached over to flip a few more pages. “The Mediterranean’s full of volcanoes. What about Stromboli or Kolumbo?”

“No, he’ll go to Vesuvius,” said Jim. “I’m sure. Trust me.”

A piece suddenly fell into place. “He’s right,” said Nat. “He’s got to be.”

“You’re biased,” said Clint.

“No,” Nat insisted. “It’s a word game! Alchemy is all in puzzles, codes, and puns. Newton in German is Neustadt, and in Greek it’s Neapoli. That’s the area in Athens where his apartment was. What’s the city below Vesuvius?” she asked, and waited expectantly. One by one, she saw her companions’ expressions change as the light dawned.

“All right,” said Sam, as Sharon closed the book. “Naples.”

With the evacuees returning in droves, it was no problem to get a ferry to the mainland. In Calabria they got on a train heading north to Termini in Rome, where they transferred to one bound for Naples.

It was a hot day when they arrived, but it wasn’t like the pounding dry heat of Santorini or Athens. Naples was drowning in a thick, humid heat that sweating did nothing to help because there was no wind to make it evaporate. Locals didn’t seem to mind, but the tourists walked around fanning themselves, their faces red and glistening from exertion. Shops selling bottled water and gelato did very brisk business.

They reached Naples late in the afternoon, and as the train entered the city they could see a cruise ship in port. Nat caught Clint peering at it, trying to figure out whether it was a familiar one.

“It’s not,” she said. “Wrong company. See the logo on the superstructure?”

Clint nodded and looked back down at the screen of his phone. He’d just typed in the question would you like anything from Naples? A flashing icon suggested that Laura Francis, back home in Nottinghamshire, was typing her reply.

“What are you looking for?” asked Sam.

“I don’t know yet,” said Clint. “She hasn’t answered.”

“No,” Sam said, “I mean, why were you looking at the boat?”

“He thinks the Scorpio II is following us,” said Nat.

Clint shook his head. “Next time we are definitely doing this on a cruise ship,” he said. “If I’m going to hop from island to island around the Mediterranean without ever having time to stop and see anything, I’m gonna do it with room service.”

“Foot massages,” said Sharon.

“Wi-fi,” said Natasha.

“Cold beer,” Jim agreed.

“That’s it.” Sharon nodded. “When we get back, we’re telling Fury and the Queen that from now on we only travel by cruise ship.”

Nat grinned as she imagined that conversation. Fury would roll his eye, fully aware that they were joking and determined not to dignify it with an acknowledgement. The Queen, on the other hand, might just take them seriously. She spent her own vacations in Monte Carlo and a series of palaces, so why not?

Clint’s phone vibrated. He took a look. “Oh, great,” he groaned.

“What’s it say?” asked Nat.

He turned the phone around to show them. Laura’s reply said simply, surprise me.

Sam whistled. “You’re being tested now, my man,” he declared.

“I know,” Clint said. “And I don’t think one of those glitter-covered panda figures is going to do it.”

The moment they stepped out of Napoli Centrale, they were bombarded by vendors offering them tours and trinkets. Nat kept her head down and tried not to make eye contact, but she did have to look where she was going and the Neapolitans were happy to follow the group out into the street. Brochures, maps, hats, and sunglasses were all thrust into her face in quick succession, and it was very difficult to keep a hold on the instinct telling her to throw these people across the road.

“I have changed my mind,” Sir Stephen announced, as they shooed the last of them away.

“About what?” asked Sharon.

“About whether this is like going on pilgrimage,” he said, and turned to wave away a man offering tour tickets. “No, thank you, Sir, we do not want to visit Positano!” Returning his attention to Sharon, he went on: “this is exactly the sort of thing that greets a pilgrim in Canterbury.”

“Canterbury didn’t become a place of pilgrimage until the late twelfth century,” said Natasha, but she wasn’t going to worry about it much. Sir Stephen’s world was not one that concerned itself with historical accuracy.

From the city, there was a clear view of Mount Vesuvius. Mount Etna in Sicily was surrounded by other peaks, all of which had once been exit points for the volcano but were now extinct. Vesuvius stood alone. From this angle only one of its two cones was visible, covered with green woods all the way to the snow line. There hadn’t been a major eruption since 1944, leaving the vegetation plenty of time to recolonize the slopes.

Even so, the mountain looked almost exactly like how a child might draw a picture of a volcano: a steep conical hill with a crater in the top. Nat had to wonder how the people of Pompeii and Herculaneum had ever thought this was a good place to live. Then again, she observed, here they were nearly two thousand years later, with people still living in Naples and Sorrento. The very reason this city was called Napoli was because it was the New City, founded after an eruption had destroyed the older one.

Volcanic soil was excellent for wine grapes. Maybe in Italy, that was enough to make people stay.

#fanfic #natasha romanov #steve rogers #sam wilson #sharon carter #clint barton #bucky barnes

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wallshipjournal · 7 years

Text

BSC Company 2017: Aaron Tveit Media Links & Review Excerpts

Last update: 25/8/2017 (Video+Review) - Will be updated if/when new links/reviews appear. Reviews excerpted under cut.

VIDEO Barrington Stage Company - Rehearsal Footage Broadway.com - Opening Night Backstage Interview Barrington Stage Company - Performance Footage Promo Video

AUDIO WAMC "The Roundtable" - Preview w/ some Full Songs & Interviews sarcasticstagemanager - “Being Alive” (full audio bootleg for trade/gift)

PHOTOS Barrington Stage Company - Official Production Photos on Flickr BroadwayWorld - Opening Night Bows & Afterparty Broadway.com - Backstage on Opening Night Playbill.com - Behind-the-Scenes Photos by Mara Davis (+ Snapchat video)

REVIEWS

News Sources & Magazine Blogs

Broadway World Boston: “Barrington Stage Company (recently voted Best of The Berkshires) set a new record at the opening night of Stephen Sondheim's COMPANY last night. There appeared to be more selfie photos attempted of Aaron Tveit the show's star and the cast leaving the stage door of the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage than are taken by the ever present throngs in Broadway's Shubert Alley after a show. Aaron, who was Bobby in the extraordinary production directed by BSC's founder and artistic director JuliAnne Boyd, was mobbed by what seemed like the entire audience as Tveit and the cast tried to exit the stage door and continue on to the after party at the home of BSC Chair, Minky and Bruno Quinson. [...] You can't talk about Aaron Tveit, you have to hear and see him on the stage. One minute he's brilliantly acting and all of a sudden you realize you're hearing his glorious voice singing. One minute he's walking and all of a sudden you're watching a handsome guy moving like Fred Astaire. It's a Tony Award Winning performance, although in this case it will probably garner a Berky Award given by the Berkshire Critics Association.” (x)

Broadway.com: “Broadway.com was in on the action to capture Tveit taking his bow as "Bobby, baby...Bobby, bubi" after an incredible performance. [...] We'll be here, dreaming about Tveit's fantastic take on 'Being Alive.’” (x)

Albany Times Union: “Aaron Tveit brings a riveting magnetism to the leading role of Bobby in “Company,” the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical that is receiving a masterful revival at Barrington Stage Company. Tveit, returning to BSC after a decade during which he achieved significant success on Broadway, television and film, has the presence but not the remoteness of a star — he’s a standout, yet also fully part of a remarkable ensemble. It would be easy to overplay Bobby, a single man in 1970s New York City surrounded by five married couples all eager for him to join their wedded ranks. Tveit, as directed by Julianne Boyd, instead makes Bobby both the focus of the couples’ attention and a mirror reflecting their varied relationships. Bobby has to just be, neither too anguished about being single nor too carefree, and Tveit achieves this to perfection. [...] By the end, there’s only one thing left to do, and that’s Bobby singing “Being Alive.” It’s a song, Sondheim has said, that moves from complaint to prayer...As sung by Tveit, it’s neither cynical nor sappy. It’s bitter and angry, plaintive and hopeful, pleading and optimistic. It’s being alive.” (x)

The Daily Gazette: “The show’s glue is Aaron Tveit. Boyd rightly sets him down stage center on “Someone is Waiting,” “Marry Me a Little,” and “Being Alive” because he’s such a great communicator. Listen to the phrasing. Read his body language. In these songs and elsewhere, Tveit convincingly reveals why people like Bobby and why what they like may not be what he wants.” (x)

The Westfield News: “Aaron Tveit is a superb Robert, a difficult character to portray, since he’s primarily an observer with little outward emotion, until he breaks his barriers with the emotional Sondheim song “Being Alive”, which is the heart and soul of Company. Tveit is a fine singer, dancer, and actor, and he makes Robert an appealing leading man.” (x)

Boston Globe: “Bobby is a tricky character to play, largely because he’s a protagonist who is more reactive than active (perhaps only Hamlet is more paralyzed by indecision than this guy). Though he is the obsessive center of attention for his friends and his lovers, virtually the apple of their collective eye, Bobby’s posture is largely that of a detached observer...If anything, the Barrington Stage production further emphasizes Bobby’s apartness; while the rest of the cast are attired in garish ’70s clothes...Tveit wears a tastefully understated blue jacket that would not look out of place in 2017.That apartness means that an actor playing Bobby can seem remote or passive, and Tveit does not entirely avoid that trap. His Bobby is urbane, enigmatic, bemused, sometimes amused, sometimes amusing, but he does not come across as terribly conflicted. Except, crucially, in song. There, Tveit shines. He powerfully nails the yearning in Bobby’s solo “Someone is Waiting,’’ and he captures his character’s confusion and ambivalence in “Marry Me a Little,’’ in which Bobby insists he’s ready for marriage while stipulating rigid conditions that suggest he’s not at all ready.In the climactic “Being Alive,’’ Tveit passionately conveys the liberation achieved, paradoxically, when a gregarious loner like Bobby finally surrenders, unconditionally, to his need for another person. (x)

Berkshire Fine Arts: “This season Boyd has taken another crack at Company and critics appear to be unanimous that a sensational production is on the short list of her best work. Boyd is noted for loving musicals and this one is a corker.Much of that is owed to the serendipity of casting Aaron Tveit as a truly charismatic, charming, sexy and all around fabulous Bobby. He is the now 35-year-old swinging bachelor who just can’t take the plunge into marriage. The character charmngly (sic) hovers on the cusp of maturity...There were chills and goose bumps all over me when Bobby belted out that final solo ‘Being Alive.’” (x)

iBerkshires: “Hugh Jackman has it. The young Robert Redford had it – that preternatural ability to exude charisma and magnetic sexiness even when standing stone still. Aaron Tveit has it, too, in addition to his impressive singing, dancing and acting skills. Tveit is the star of Barrington Stage's "Company," one of Stephen Sondheim's biggest hits, and he is just the tip of the talent iceberg in this simply fantastic production. [...] Those of us in the audience who knew the show eagerly awaited "Being Alive," Bobby's final song that sets his inner realization to music. As we all suspected he would, Tveit knocked this iconic musical song out of the ballpark.” (x)

ZEALnyc: “Tveit, in particular, turns out to be an inspired choice for Bobby. Tveit has a chiseled everyman look, pretty but not ethically specific, which actually works well for Bobby, who’s meant to be a sort of cipher. Tveit has a powerful voice, great scene presence, and a terrific, focused way with interpreting a song.Tveit appears to have come a long way since his homogeneously bland take on Frank Abagnale, Jr. in Broadway’s Catch Me If You Can. Plus, he’s so damned good-looking, he can even make a ‘70s leisure suit look hot. Tveit wisely sings most of the songs pretty straight, although he couldn’t seem to help himself during “Being Alive,” during which he threw in a few vocal flourishes and Elphaba riffs.” (x)

Arts Fuse: “If you are a Sondheim enthusiast and can’t get enough of his music, lyrics, and sensibility, you will be pleased to know that Julianne Boyd has cast a strong production of Company, with an excellent Bobby (Aaron Tveit) and vibrant band and ensemble. [...] Slender and likeable Aaron Tveit delivers Bobby’s songs in a lyric tenor; the performer does his best to put some flesh on this stick figure as he ponders the passage of time and lack of human connection on his 35th birthday. Like [the rest of the cast], Tveit is a consummate performer, speaking, singing, and dancing with equal élan.” (x)

The Berkshire Eagle: “There is a stunning ah-ha moment late, very late, in Julianne Boyd's hugely accomplished production of Stephen Sondheim's "Company" at Barrington Stage Company. It occurs in Bobby's — and the musical's — final number, "Being Alive." Bobby (a smart, masterly performance by Aaron Tveit) spends the first half of the song cataloging the downside of relationships, marriage in particular — the entanglements, the choking obligations, the surrenders. The tone is unforgiving. There is not an upside anywhere until Bobby comes, for the first time, to the words "being alive," which he then, as interpreted by Tveit, repeats three more times, slowing down each time as he hears and begins to consider what he is saying. You can see a hint of something registering in Tveit's eyes. Music director Dan Pardo holds the orchestra in a vamp while Tveit's Bobby takes in what he is hearing; begins, finally, to put everything together and then goes back through the catalog he's just completed, this time with surging hope and welcome. It's a defining moment for Bobby. At 35, he has come of age, at last. The number would be triumphant enough on its own. The fact that it comes virtually on the heels of the memorable Ellen Harvey's perfectly calibrated delivery of "Ladies Who Lunch"...makes "Being Alive" an absolute coup de theatre. [...] Tveit wasn't even born when "Company" premiered on Broadway in 1970, but watching him go to work on Barrington Stage Company's Boyd-Quinson Mainstage feels as though he and Bobby were destined for one another. I say go to work, but in fact, Tveit's meticulously crafted performance looks so effortless. His singing voice is a marvel of control, breadth and expression and he dances with graceful assurance. His timing, his sense of Bobby's sense of purpose is clear and resonant, especially in his scenes with the girlfriends... [...] It's been 17 years since Boyd first tackled "Company." Barrington Stage was in Sheffield then. Tveit was 17. Just look how far they all have come.” (x)

WAMC Midday Magazine: "Company is one of those shows, however, that cannot succeed without the lead role of Robert being sensitively interpreted – including his two musical show-stoppers: “Someone is Waiting,” and “Being Alive.” The leading man must be charming, dashing, vulnerable, disarming, wistful. This production has such a star in Aaron Tveit, who proves up to the task from opening to closing curtain." (x)

Wall Street Journal: “Directed by Julianne Boyd, it stars Aaron Tveit as Robert, the commitment-phobic New York bachelor whose role was created by Dean Jones in the original 1970 production. I doubt there’s been a better Robert since Mr. Jones left the show. A true tenor with brilliantly gleaming high notes, Mr. Tveit is also a superior actor whose interpretation of the part is a volatile mix of charm, reserve and well-concealed fear. Not since Ben Platt opened in “Dear Evan Hansen” have I seen a musical performance as exciting as this one. In a way, though, what’s most surprising about Barrington Stage’s production is that Mr. Tveit doesn’t stand out nearly as much as you’d expect given the remarkable quality of his performance. Role for role, this is the best-sung “Company” I’ve ever heard—not just in regional theater, but anywhere.” (x)

Review Blogs

Boston Bright Focus: “Tveit is young, handsome, slender and charming, a decent dancer and a good singer, a comedic actor who keeps us serious in this funny show about funny people. There is a strange quality to his work at time when Bobby is hurt or mentally injured we see and feel his pain rather than just witness the incident or hear the remark. He reacts to everything in this role better than anyone else I've seen play Bobby. In its short, two year run on Broadway I saw the show four times with both its male stars, Dean Jones and then Larry Kert. I saw the revival with Raul Esparza. I saw the revival with Boyd Gaines. I saw George Chakiris in Los Angeles. None of them ever brought this quiet understanding, or struggle for understanding that Tveit conveys in the role.” (x)

CurtainUp: “All fourteen actors are multi-talented and each makes his/her role an integral part of the cast dynamics. However, it is Aaron Tveit's Bobby as he quietly glides about and absorbs the energy of those around him who drives the show to its rich and satisfying conclusion. His facial reactions are empathic and he truly becomes the human each of the others believes him to be. Yet he knows that this is not satisfying and is destructive to his own development. Tveit's "Being Alive summarizes the dichotomy of the human longing to connect while remaining free of responsibilities. When he sings In the final line "Someone to force you to care/ Someone to make you come through/Who'll always be there frightened as you /Of being alive," the electricity is palpable and breathtaking as he realizes '...The unlived life is not worth examining.'” (x)

Berkshire on Stage: “The acting, led by Tveit’s sensitive portrayal of Bobby’s confusion and understanding, is marvelous.” (x)

Critics At Large: "...it’s in the show’s revered pair of final numbers, “Ladies Who Lunch” and “Being Alive,” that the production shifts into a different gear. What I find so impressive about Harvey and Tveit in their respective deliveries of these two songs is the sense that they aren’t just basking in their star moments in the spotlight. Instead, they’re using the numbers to take their characters somewhere. [...] As for Tveit, he doesn’t possess superhuman powers, so he can’t make “Being Alive” work in terms of Bobby's overall narrative, but he does convey a remarkable sense of progression throughout the number. It’s a moment of genuine revelation for Bobby. It also stands in stark contrast to the rest of Tveit’s performance, not because he’s bad in the role, but, paradoxically, because he’s perhaps cast almost too well. Since I’m hammering on about the weaknesses in Furth’s script, it’s always bothered me that he intentionally and explicitly makes Bobby such a cipher. The idea that he’s the likable, inoffensive guy whose refusal to wade too deeply into a relationship allows his friends to project their desires onto him, thereby making him their common best friend, makes sense, but it’s also hard to figure out how an actor ought to approach such a role, or how to get the audience to invest in him emotionally. Tveit manages to convey Bobby’s breezy but noncommittal charm, making it clear why his disparate groups of friends enjoy being around him – although, at 33 years old and with a record of playing younger than his age in his major roles, it’s hard to fully buy into this actor as someone who is hitting an age-related crisis. However, he’s smart enough to play up the contrast between that version of Bobby and the newly uncertain but more complex character who emerges at the very end of the play. There’s an open-endedness to such an interpretation, a suggestion that this is merely a beginning, rather than a cathartic ending, for this man." (x)

Rural Intelligence: Tveit faces the challenge of any actor who plays Bobby. While his friends continually profess their love for him, it’s not actually clear what’s so endearing about Bobby besides his being a reliable third wheel who helps keep his friends’ marriages intact; in return, these married couples keep Bobby company so he doesn’t have to settle down. In the finale, Tveit reveals that Bobby’s been paying attention to his friends, and he delivers “Being Alive” with the gusto of a pilgrim who has finally glimpsed the promised land. (x)

From the Desk of Jim R, Take 2: "As played by the enigmatic Aaron Tveit, Bobby's complicated plight and final resolution, is real, raw, honest, soulful, cheerful, passionate and very moving. There's also a vibrant charm, passion and natural dreaminess to the character that makes Tveit's interpretation of Bobby much more believable and grounded than that of his Broadway predecessors Dean Jones, Larry Kert, Boyd Gaines and Raul Esparza. Back then, all four were simply acting out a part and nothing more. Here, Tveit plays Bobby. But he also owns the part. Big difference. From the moment he appears on the Barrington stage, he is Bobby, front and center, backwards and forwards, etc. Moreover, there's real talent behind that boyish allure mixed with just the right amount of poise, presence, flair and personality. Sure, it's all rehearsed, but Tveit makes us believe we're seeing his Bobby for the very first time. There is nothing remotely calculated about his facial expressions, line delivery, body language or interaction with the other onstage actors. Though he wasn't born when "Company" was first conceived, you'd swear Sondheim and playwright George Furth wrote Bobby with Tveit in mind. It's the musical performance of 2017. And one, you'll want to see again and again. Vocally, Tveit's voice is beautiful, polished, strong, commanding and natural. He pays close attention to the beats, lyrics and different rhythms of every Sondheim song he sings. And when he takes center stage and joins the entire cast for a song or two, he avoids that annoying grandstanding you find in other Sondheim shows where the lead actor looks you right in the face with private thoughts that cry out, "Hey, look at me. I'm in a Sondheim show." With the emotional "Being Alive," Tveit passionately reveals the quiet longing and intimacy Bobby desires with another person. The stirring "Marry Me A Little" conveys his confusion and doubt over a real relationship while "Someone Is Waiting" poignantly portrays the character's quiet yearning for that special something collectively shared by his married friends." (x)

Mixed or Negative Reviews (Negativity Warning!)

The Saratogian: "We see all of them through the eyes of Bobby, a handsome, 35-year-old bachelor, portrayed by Aaron Tveit as an unobtrusive observer. George Furth’s book tells us little about Bobby, and Tviet [sic] is faithful to that failing. His main function in this interpretation is to provide an outsider’s view into the private lives of the couples. A problem with the Barrington Stage production results from Tveit playing Bobby as a passive character. We are uncertain as to why the others want him as a close friend and confidant. Tveit presents a handsome figure who is a genuinely nice guy, but for most of the play, he is rather anonymous. It’s not wrong to make Bobby a cipher, but it doesn’t add depth to the friendships. This same passivity extends to his relationships with the three girlfriends we meet. We might understand why they are attracted to Bobby, but his disinterest with the women makes his expressed interest to be married seem insincere. The only times Bobby reveals anything of himself is through the songs “Someone is Waiting,” “Marry Me a Little” and the iconic anthem, “Being Alive.” In these moments, Tveit is marvelous. The doubt he expresses in these songs is revealing, touching and real. If we could see more of this personality throughout the show, the production would have been much more genuine and sincere." (x)

The New York Times: “Company’...is in some ways the least ambitious of the three, and also the most successful. By least ambitious, I don’t mean the material itself...the original production in 1970 was a musical theater game-changer that remains, with its impenetrable main character and abstract action, a difficult piece to pull off. I mean that despite a skilled New York cast led by the glossy Aaron Tveit, Barrington’s “Company,” directed by Julianne Boyd, is neither a Broadway tryout nor an attempt to reinvent the wheel. From the ’70s satire inherent in its pungent costumes to the gorgeous singing of the entire cast, it has evidently been packaged as pure entertainment. How well that approach represents the ambivalence at the show’s core is another matter. Bobby (Mr. Tveit) is a 35-year-old singleton at the height of the sexual revolution; he insists he is enjoying his freedom but his “good and crazy” friends — five married couples — think he is just afraid of commitment. The action consists mostly of Bobby’s watching those couples bicker, and drawing what conclusions he can from the way they make up. Time has not made the plot less problematic. A 35-year-old in 1970 apparently was more middle-aged than he is today; as played by Mr. Tveit, who is 33, there is no sense that Bobby is late to the marriage gate. And later revisions made by Mr. Furth to foreclose on the possibility that Bobby is gay now seem counterproductive. His denial comes across as more of a devious dodge than his silence ever did. Could it be that, absent disruptive directorial interventions like those made by John Doyle in the 2006 Broadway revival, the book is becoming untenable? Instead of psychology, it gives most of the wives gimmicks: One’s a first-time marijuana smoker, another a karate enthusiast. The interchangeable husbands barely get that much. And even Mr. Tveit, though ideally cast, can’t find much to do besides taking his safari-style suit jacket on and off. His Bobby is not merely passive but disaffected to the point of depression. It’s a reasonable reaction to a plot that incessantly nudges him from point A to point A. The good news is that Mr. Sondheim’s score remains thrillingly incisive, dramatizing every issue in its path. Problems of interpretation tend to dissolve when the songs are sung and played as well as they are here, not only by Mr. Tveit but also by Nora Schell as an earthy Marta (“Another Hundred People”) and by Ellen Harvey as a furious Joanne (“The Ladies Who Lunch”). If the result feels like a highlights reel, there are far worse things a musical can be.” (x)

Post-Chronicle: “In the key role of Bobby, Mr. Tveit cuts a handsome figure but rarely projects a distinct personality here. This may be again due to the writing, but in recent revivals both Neil Patrick Harris and Raul Esparza did create a Bobby of both magnetism and depth. Tveit’s bland acting is gratefully overshadowed, though, by his magnificent tenor voice and he successfully rocks the theatre with such Sondheim standards as “Marry Me A little” and “Being Alive”. In a company of superior singers, he is an able leader and often capable of being a thrilling performer.” (x)

#aaron tveit #company #barrington stage company #info #review #company: info #i promised myself i wouldn't do this #and i can't even go *sob*

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radioactivedelorean · 7 years

Note

Stan and Fuerd!! 3!! OwO *rocks in a corner, eagerly*

3. “Hah! And for once I thought you actually gave a damn about someone other than yourself!” - Stan and Ford

“Hah! And for once I thought you actually gave a damn about someone other than yourself!” Stan exclaimed rather jovially. “Guess I was wrong, then, huh?!”

“Stan, what are you talking about?!” Ford snapped. “I do care about you! And the kids!”

“No you don’t,” Stan scoffed. “You don’t give a flying fuck about anyone else! All you care about is yourself and your dumb science. Well, guess what?! After the summer’s over and the kids have gone home, you’ll have the place to yourself again and you can do your science all you want because I won’t be here either.”

“What…?” Ford frowned, looking confused and somewhat concerned. “You won’t be here? Why the heck not?”

“Because it’s clear that you don’t want me around.” Stan huffed. “And if I’m honest, I don’t blame you. I mean, I ruined your life more than once, so why would you want me around?!”

“Ruined my - Stanley that was an accident!” Ford insisted, taking a step towards his brother.

Stan raised his arms, his hands curled into fists. “Back the fuck up. I’m not an idiot, Ford. It’s clear as day that you want absolutely nothing to do with me, and ya know what?! That’s fine because I’m growing real sick and tired of your bullshit!”

“Stanley, I’m trying to help you-”

“You’re just trying to help yourself,” Stan cut him off before he could finish. “I’m a conman, Stanford. I have been for pretty much all my life, so don’t bother lying to me.”

“Stan I’m not lying!” Ford exclaimed. “I’ve made some pretty big mistakes in my life and I’m -”

“Well you know what?! So have I!” Stan shouted. “I’ve fucked up real bad too, Stanford, but you wouldn’t know about that, would you?! No, of course you wouldn’t, because you never once bothered to see how I was doing, not once in ten years. You only contacted me because you needed me for something, and it was only me because everybody else saw some sense and left you!”

Ford was rather taken aback by that, stepping away from his brother with shock painted all over his face. Now that Stan had brought it up, he was right. Everybody else had left him because Ford was a danger to them. In all honesty, it wasn’t as if he had many others in the first place, but even the few he had turned their backs on him as soon as things went downhill. Before he realised it, tears welled up in his eyes, a few stray ones dripping down his face. He felt his heart drop into his stomach.

Stan blinked in shock. He’d expected Ford to lash out at him, to scream and shout and hit, or at least to retort with something equally as venomous. He hadn’t expected Ford to start crying. Despite this, his anger remained firmly in place and he fixed his brother with a glare. “You’ve put everybody in danger, Ford, and I just wish I’d come to my senses sooner rather than later.”

“I know… and I’m sorry…”

“Of course it was your fault - wait, what?” Stan’s anger faded at the sudden change of tone in Ford’s voice. Before long, he’d felt guilt and concern creep in instead.

Ford was shaking slightly, a few more tears pouring down his face. “I-I’m so sorry…”

Stan frowned. “What for…?”

“E-everything… I’ve ruined everything … s-something really bad is going to happen and it’s all m-my fault…”

“No, it’s not…” Stan murmured, taking a few steps towards his brother.

Ford backed away. “I - you don’t understand… he’s coming and he’s going to end everything… he’ll destroy the world and he’s going to get through b-because of me…”

“Who is?”

“B-Bi…Bill… Bill C-Cipher…” it hurt just for Ford to say his name. The two simple words brought up so many bad memories. Painful injuries, sleepless nights and thirty years of having to run and hide from anything that even looked at him the wrong way. “He’s - the portal downstairs, w-when you opened it - he’s going t-to use that t-to come through.”

“Ford you’re not making much sense.” Stan frowned. “Just take a deep breath, okay? Take a nice deep breath and count to ten.”

Ford inhaled slowly, counting to ten in his head as he breathed in. He held it for a moment before breathing out slowly, counting to ten again. He repeated this action a few times. It worked and before long he was calm again.

“Now, slowly, tell me what’s going on.” Stan gestured for Ford to follow him into the living room. The pair sat down, Stan in his usual chair and Ford perching on the dinosaur head beside it.

“It… it all started a couple of years before you arrived here,” Ford murmured. It was clear he was nervous, uneasy and uncomfortable, but he knew he owed his brother the truth. “I had been exploring a cave system not far from here, when I came across some strange drawings in one of the caves, talking about some strange being simply named ‘Bill’. There was an incantation painted on the wall, surrounded by warnings not to read it out loud. Curious, I murmured the incantation aloud to myself. I didn’t think much of it until later that day when I fell asleep beneath a tree…”

Ford explained everything. The way Bill had presented himself, the things he had offered Ford and what the pair had accomplished together. As his story grew closer to the part where himself and Fiddleford had tested out the portal, Ford’s body language changed. He curled in on himself a little more and his voice had more of a stutter to it, indicating that he was nervous and still upset by what had happened over thirty years ago.

“…and he can use that Rift to break through into our world, which is why I must keep it contained for as long as possible,” Ford finished with a quiet sigh. He’d had to explain a lot to Stan, including a lot of things he wasn’t entirely comfortable with talking about just yet.

Stan took a deep breath and put a hand on his brother’s shoulder, giving it a light squeeze. He could tell that this had been a huge struggle for Ford and Stan was very proud of him for that. “It seems to me like this Bill guy has done nothing but lie to you and manipulate you. None of what you’ve talked about seems like your fault, Poindexter.”

“I was the one to make the deal with him in the first place,” Ford muttered. “I’ve put the whole universe in danger.”

“That isn’t your fault, and even if it was, the Rift is still sealed, right? He can’t get through until that thing breaks, and since it’s still in one piece, I reckon we’ve got a while yet before him and his goons break through.”

“I suppose…” Ford sighed heavily, resting his elbows on his knees as he slouched on the seat. “But it’s inevitable that he’ll break through.”

“Well, when he does, we’d best make sure we’re ready for him, eh?” Stan patted Ford’s shoulder and offered him a reassuring smile.

Ford smiled weakly in return. “Yeah, we’d better.”

“Well, what are you waiting for?!” Stan grinned and got up. “Come on, I’ll show you where the guns are hidden.”

Ford rolled his eyes. “I’ve already got a gun.”

“I mean real guns, Ford, not some cheap-looking plastic toy.”

“I’ll have you know that my blaster can vaporise anyone from up to eight hundred yards away.”

“Well we’d better hope Bill isn’t too far away then.” Stan chuckled.

Ford smirked a little. He knew things could go bad very quickly, but for now, he was willing to try and stop that from happening, now that his brother was by his side.

_____

Prompts list

Here ya go guv’nor

#gravity falls #stan pines #ford pines #bill cipher #guilty ford?#maybe?#my prompts

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kher4life-blog · 7 years

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My Stalker - My best friend - 0137 Part One: Introduction: 37, 73, 137 and Qabalah

SEPTEMBER 29, 2014 BY JAKOB THELEN

ciphers names of godCiphers and Cryptography: A Very Brief Foundation

The use of ciphers and subtle allusions in mysticism, philosophy, literature and religion, though generally ignored or unknown in modernity (by and large), are indeed well-established practices (such as the three literary practices in Qabalah, all of which involve some form of cryptography: transpositioning; substitution; skip-codes; re-arrangements of text into columns, as with the 72 Names of God; interpretation as number; etc).

“Ciphers are hidden in the most subtle manner: they may be concealed in the watermark of the paper upon which a book is printed…bound into the covers of ancient books…hidden under imperfect pagination; they may be extracted from the first letters of words or the first words of sentences; they may be artfully concealed in mathematical equations or in apparently unintelligible characters…they may be word ciphers, letter ciphers…they may be discovered in the elaborately illuminated initial letters of early books or they may be revealed by a process of counting words or letters.” – Manly Palmer Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, p. 491.

Repetitions

Some of the more observant readers may have noticed in various books, films, TV shows and the like, a profound repetition of three distinct numbers: 37, 73 and 137. I offer the following examples:

Literature and Poetry: 1308-1870

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (c. 1308-1321 AD): The 7th realm contains 3 spheres (this could be an allusion to the harmonic ratio 7:3) Jules Verne’s Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870): 37 and 73 are referenced no less than 7 times throughout (as is the Golden Section, no less than four times). For example: “Now, had it not been for the exceptional strength of the Moravian’s hull, she would have been shattered by the shock of collision and have gone down with all hands, plus the two hundred and thirty-seven passengers she was bringing home to Canada.” p. 16(It may be worth noting that the name Moravian could be read as the French “Mort a vient,” a grammatically flawed phrase yielding roughly “Death has come.” Jules Verne was French.) “In a smooth sea, with a favorable breeze, on the 13th of April, 1867, the Scotia, of the Cunard Company‘s line, was in 15º 12’ longitude and 45º 37′ latitude.” pp. 16-17 “It came, therefore, to $337,500…” p. 83 “About eleven o’clock in the morning the Tropic of Capricorn was crossed on the 37th meridian, and we sighted Cape Frio standing out to sea.”These are only in one book! Surely these numbers could not have been chosen at random, Jules Verne was a very intelligent, meticulous author that dedicated great effort to his work. Verne was almost undoubtedly initiated – as revealed by his novels, the two most obvious being The Green Ray and Robur the Conqueror (R.C., Rosae-Crucis). The company he kept also establish this connection quite conclusively (refer for example to Hetzel). Aside from these, examine his tombstone closely and you will see a definitively occult sculpture, showing him emerging from the grave with arm extended (not unlike Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam) shrugging off the veil of the material in aspiration. All quotes here given were taken from the Readers Digest edition (in English). Film and Media: 1984-2012

Eddie Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop III (1994): In the beginning it reads “Tuesday, 1:37 AM.” The Big Bang Theory: Sheldon asks, “What is the best number? -By the way, there’s only one correct answer…The best number is 73…it is the 21st prime number. It’s mirror 37 is the 12th…” Significantly, this appears in episode 73: The Alien Parasite Hypothesis (S.4 e.10). Tim Allen’s Last Man Standing: Tim’s boss says: “…on page 37 of Tzun Tzu’s The Art of War…” 21 Jump Street (2012): The police officer mistakenly says near the beginning: “37 Jump Street. 22 Jump Street (2014):During the football game a player on the sidelines is wearing jersey #37 (approx. 1hr in, center-background).There are countless other examples, but these few should serve to illustrate the on-going obsession. Though some of these are more subtle than others, all are intentional. What makes these numbers so special? What are all of these directors, producers, actors, writers and poets -spanning over 600 years- pointing to? Creation

2nd

Gematria: Wisdom in Number

Gematria is a Qabalistic practice that involves assigning particular numerical values to certain letters. It is one of the three literary Qabalistic practices, the other two being Notarikon and Temurah. It is most commonly seen in Hebrew or Greek, though there is substantial evidence both Arabic and Sanskrit have been similarly employed. In fact, the Vedic Katapayadi System proves without doubt that our current chronology for the discovery of pi is wrong (more later). Many attempt to apply similar cryptographic techniques – i.e. Qabalistic permutations – to languages of the Latin alphabet such as English, albeit with little success. There are two systems most commonly employed: The Ordinal, which is simply the placement value of each letter (1-22); and The Standard, in which the 11th letter becomes 20 and the 21st becomes 300 (1-400). Typically, in Hebrew, Greek and Arabic gematria the latter system is used, while in Mayalana and Sanskrit katapayadi the former is most commonly seen.

(An easy way to remember the Standard Gematria values is to simply add the two numbers and put a zero on the end. For instance, Mem is the 13th Hebrew letter and it has a standard value of 40 [1+3=4, add a zero=40]. If it is 10s, add one zero; if it is 20s, add two [Tau=22, 2+2=4, add 2 zeros=400]. For

those who may have difficulty, this ‘rule’ works invariably for Hebrew.)

Before we continue, I feel that a comprehensive chart of the Hebrew alephbeit will help (we will only be focusing on Hebrew for now). The esoteric meaning is bracketed, while the literal is written plainly: (Ordinal) (Standard) PALEO-HEBREW CELESTIAL YETZIRATIC

ENGLISH HEBREW VALUE SYMBOL CORRELATE DIVISIONS

A 1. Aleph = 1 = א = An Ox 1. Air 1 (Mother) (Father)

B / V 2. Beit = 2 = ב = House 2. Mercury 1 (Double)

(Mother)

G 3. Gimel = 3 = ג = Camel 3. Luna 2 (Double)

(Nature)

D 4. Dalet = 4 = ד = Door 4. Venus 3 (Double)

(Authority)

H 5. Hé = 5 = ה = Window 5. Aries 1 (Simple)

(Religion)

V 6. Vau = 6 = ו = Nail 6. Taurus 2 (Simple)

(Liberty)

Z 7. Zain = 7 = ז = Weapon 7. Gemini 3 (Simple)

(Ownership)

Kh / Ch 8. Cheit = 8 = ח = Fence 8. Cancer 4 (Simple)

(Distribution)

T 9. Teit = 9 = ט = Serpent 9. Leo 5 (Simple)

(Prudence)

I 10. Yod = 10 = י = Hand 10. Virgo 6 (Simple)

(Order)

K 11. Kaph = 20 = כ = Palm 11. Jupiter 4 (Double)

(Force)

L 12. Lamed = 30 = ל = Ox-Goad 12. Libra 7 (Simple)

(Sacrifice)

M 13. Mem = 40 = מ = Water 13. Water 2 (Mother)

(Death)

N 14. Nun = 50 = נ = Fish 14. Scorpio 8 (Simple)

(Reversibility)

S 15. Samekh = 60 = ס = Support 15. Sagittarius 9 (Simple)

(Universality)

O 16. Ayin = 70 = ע = Eye 16. Capricorn 10 (Simple)

(Balance)

P / F 17. Pé (fé) = 80 = פ = Mouth 17. Mars 5 (Double)

(Immortality)

Tz 18. Tzaddi = 90 = צ = Fish-hook 18. Aquarius 11 (Simple)

(Shadow)

Q 19. Qoph = 100 = ק = Back Head 19. Pisces 12 (Simple)

(Light)

R 20. Resh = 200 = ר = Head 20. Sol 6 (Double)

(Recognition)

Sh 21. Shin = 300 = ש = Tooth 21. Fire 3 (Mother)

(Sacred Fire)

T 22. Tau = 400 = ת = Cross 22. Saturn; 7 (Double)

(Synthesis) Earth Element

*Note: The English letters are meant to convey the pronunciation. The seemingly random arrangement of attributions (i.e. Simple, Double, Mother) is only apparent: when sorted according to the Sepher Yetzirah, or Book of Formation, the Elements emerge in the Three Mothers; the Planets in the Seven Doubles; and the Zodiac in the Twelve Simple or perhaps inappropriately named ‘Elemental’ letters. This arrangement was allegedly designed with the intent of mirroring the occurrence of God in Genesis: “God Made” 3 times, “God Saw” 7 times, and “God -” 12 times; “God said” 10 times, reflected in the 10 Sephiroth or Emanations of the Tree of Life.

(See: Adele Nozedar’s The Illustrated Signs and Symbols Sourcebook, Frater Achad’s Q.B.L., and the Sepher Yetzirah for sources of these symbolic attributions.)

The word Chokmah, meaning Wisdom, has two values – one according to each of the systems mentioned above. It has an ordinal value of 37(ח כ מ ה = Cheit8 + Kaph11 + Mem13 +Hé5 = 37) and a standard value of 73 (8+20+40+5=73). The latter is “the best number” according to Chuck Lorre, while the former is a religious and literary favourite.

Threes and Sevens Everywhere According to the gospel accounts, Jesus Christ performed exactly 37 miracles in his lifetime. The average pregnancy lasts between 37 and 42 weeks (42 being “The answer to life, the universe, and everything in it” to Hitchiker’s fans), and 37º Celsius is the normal human body temperature. The name Elohim (Heb. Lord, Ruler, God, Power[s]) appears for the 37th time in Genesis 3:3:

“But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.”

To re-appropriate Revelation 13:18, “Here is wisdom.” How elegant that the verse containing the 37th occurrence of Elohim should be one with that which forbids man from eating the Fruit of Death! – This is indeed wise advice, as will be seen in a much later part (Part V).

Mathematically, 3 and 7 are the only two dimensions in which binary problems (i.e. defining vector products) may be solved. This in itself makes them incredibly useful numbers. 37 is the 12th prime number, while 73 is the 21st; 37 is the 3rd star number, while 73 is the 4th.

For those unaware, numbers are inherently capable of representing geometric forms: for example, 3, composed of 3 individual units [called counters] creates a triangle. 3 is technically the second [1+2=3], while 6 is the third [1+2+3=6] and 10 is the fourth [1+2+3+4=10]. The latter forms the Pythagorean Tetractys. There are squares, cubes, stars, indeed all manner of shapes, typically referred to as figurate numbers.)

If we add the star placement values of 37 and 73 (3+4=7), as well as their two prime-number placement values (12+21=33), we obtain the Days of Creation and the traditional lifespan of it’s Redeemer (many Christian traditions claim that this was the age of Christ at death, though Luke 3:23 states that he was “about 30”).

7 and 33

The Days of Creation and the age of Christ -derived from Chokmah- offer much wisdom. For one, 33-7=26, the gematria of Yahweh ( י ה ו ה = Yod10 + Hé5 + Vau6 + Hé5 = 26). Our modern week is exactly 7 days, and it takes exactly 33 years for the sun to rise a second time in the same spot over the Earth (this is the lifecycle of the Solar Man, partial key to 33 and its relevance to the so-called World Mystery – as Manly Hall puts it). There were 7 Classical Planets. The visible-light spectrum consists of precisely 7 colours (of which 3 are primary), the modern musical scale consists of 7 notes (do re mi fa so la ti; the second ‘do’ is the first octave [from Lat. Octavus, eighth], or double the first note), while there are 7 modes used in Western music (Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian. Interestingly, in Carnatic or South Indian Classical Music, there are 72!). The frequency of 1:1, aka Unison or the C-note = 33 on a Harmonograph, and perhaps most importantly: the human head has 7 orifices and the human spinal cord has 33 discs (24 upper, 5 to the sacrum and 4 to the coccyx). These latter two are reflected in the Macrocosm of the ancients, the 7 Planets and the 33-Year Solar Journey. This surely would have been seen as profoundly significant. Shockingly, the ratio of Moon:Earth = 3:11. The median of these two numbers is 7, and their multiplied sum is 33 (it is quite likely that the ancients were aware of this ratio, as will be demonstrated in a much later segment).

There are 7 Chakras (from Sanskrit, meaning “wheel”), now believed to be the 7 major endocrine glands (there are also the parathyroid, hypothalamus and gastrointestinal tract -yielding a true total of 10-11, that are not considered part of the “major” endocrine glands). Surely a great many Vedic and Tantric sages would scoff at the notion that the whirling vortices of latent energy are material in nature; in many cases the body is used as an analogy to something non-material, as a Sacred Map of the ethereal realm. In any case their knowledge of human anatomy is certainly rather impressive.

(The Egyptians were similarly well-educated, performing incredibly daunting surgeries with tools still in use today. Herodotus and many other Greek historians have claimed that their knowledge was derived from that of Egypt, and there has been much speculation that the knowledge of Pythagoras was in fact Indian in origin. Take for example this quote from a 1775 letter written by Voltaire: “I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganga – Astronomy, Astrology, Spiritualism, etc.. It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganga to learn Geometry.” The former half of this statement is at least partially verified by Hadith Al-Halila – also referred to as the Islamic Tradition of the Myrobalan Fruit, or more recently, The Confutation of Atheism. In this text a Muslim preacher discourses with an Indian atheist physician, who describes that his people discovered and continue to practice Astrology – a science that is apparently unknown to the Imam. It is also known that Pythagoras had gone to Alexandria, but it is worth pointing out that the so-called ‘Pythagorean Theorem’ is seen in Baudhayana’s Shulba Sutra, a Vedic mathematical text that predates him by some two centuries.)

Note that the Kundalini Serpent resting in 3&1/2 coils in Muladhara (base), when awakened, traverses the 7 chakras along the 3 nadis: to the right, ida; the left, pingala; in the center lies Sushumna – Path of the Serpent of Awakening. Following a materialist line of thought, both ida and pingala may correspond to the spinal nerves that appear on each side (this would make Sushumna – the Serpent’s Path – the 33-disc spine in between). Here we see a Serpent traveling 33 discs along 3 nadis through 7 chakras.

In verse 2 of the Vedic Asya Vamasya (Riddle of the Sacrifice, Rig Veda 1.164), we read:

“Seven yoke the one-wheeled chariot drawn by one horse with seven names. All these creatures rest on the ageless and unstoppable wheel with three naves.”

The sum of all numbers in this verse equal 19, the number upon which both the Egyptian and the Mayan peoples based their mathematics (both used grids of 18:19; 18+19=37).

Given the omnipresence of 37 in so many religions (Jewish, Christian, Vedic), it should come as no surprise that, in the Buddhist Sambara-Mandala, we see exactly 37 goddesses – each being a personification of a particular characteristic or accessory to Enlightenment.

3rd

Illustration above: The 7 Major Endocrine Glands: 1 Pineal 2 Pituitary 3 Thyroid 4 Thymus 5 Adrenal 6 Pancreas 7 Ovary 8 Testis (from Wikipedia)

4th

Illustration of chakras: The 7 Main Chakras (from top down): 1 Crown: Violet, Sahasrara; Pineal; 2 Third-Eye/Brow: Indigo, Anja; Pituitary; 3 Throat: Blue, Visuddha; Thyroid; 4 Heart: Green, Anahata; Thymus; 5 Solar-Plexus: Yellow, Manipura; Adrenal; 6 Spleen: Orange, Svadisthana; Pancreas; 7 Root/Base: Red [often with yellow root-square], Muladhara; Ovaries or Testes.

http://www.spiritofthescripture.com/id2808-part-one-introdu…

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thetruthseekerway · 5 years

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The Decimal and Islamic Mathematics

New Post has been published on https://www.truth-seeker.info/jewels-of-islam/the-decimal-and-islamic-mathematics/

The Decimal and Islamic Mathematics

By J. L. Berggren

The Decimal and Islamic Mathematics

Muslim mathematicians were the first people to write numbers the way we do, and, although we are the heirs of the Greeks in geometry, part of our legacy from the Muslim world is our arithmetic. This is true even if it was Hindu mathematicians in India, probably a few centuries before the rise of Islamic civilization, who began using a numeration system with these two characteristics:

The numbers from one to nine are represented by nine digits, all easily made by one or two strokes.

The right-most digit of a numeral counts the number of units, and a unit in any place is ten of that to its right. Thus the digit in the second place counts the number of tens, that in the third place the number of hundreds (which is ten tens), and so on. A special mark, the zero, is used to indicate that a given place is empty.

These two properties describe our present system of writing whole numbers, and we may summarize the above by saying the Hindus were the first people to use a cipherized, decimal, positional system, “Cipherized” means that the first nine numbers are represented by nine ciphers, or digits, instead of accumulating strokes as the Egyptians and Babylonians did, and “decimal” means that it is base 10. However, the Hindus did not extend this system to represent parts of the unit by decimal fractions, and since it was the Muslims who first did so, they were the first people to represent numbers as we do. Quite properly, therefore, we call the system “Hindu-Arabic”.

As to when the Hindus first began writing whole numbers according to this system, the available evidence shows that the system was not used by the great Indian astronomer Aryabhata (born in A.D. 476), but it was in use by the time of his pupil, Bhaskara I, around the year A.D. 520. (See Van der Waerden and Folkerts for more details.)

News of the discovery spread, for, about 150 years later, Severus Sebokht, a bishop of the Nestorian Church ( one of the several Christian faiths existing in the East at the time), wrote from his residence in Keneshra on the upper Euphrates river as follows:

I will not say anything now of the science of the Hindus, who are not even Syrians, of their subtle discoveries in this science of astronomy, which are even more ingenious then those of the Greeks and Babylonians, and of the fluent method of their calculation, which surpasses words. I want to say only that it is done with nine signs. If those who believe that they have arrived at the limit of science because they speak Greek ad known these things they would perhaps be convinced, even if a bit late, that there are others who know something, not only Greeks but also men of a different language.

It seems, then, that Christian scholars in the Middle East, writing only a few years after the great series of Arab conquests had begun, knew of Hindu numerals through their study of Hindu astronomy. The interest of Christian scholars in astronomy and calculation was, in the main, due to their need to be able to calculate the date of Easter, a problem that stimulated much of the Christian interest in the exact sciences during the early Middle Ages. It is not a trivial problem, because it requires the calculation of the date of the first new moon following the spring equinox. Even the great nineteenth-century mathematician and astronomer C.F. Gauss was not able to solve the problem completely, so it is no wonder that Severus Sebokht was delighted to find in Hindu sources a method of arithmetic that would make calculation easier.

We can perhaps explain the reference to the “nine signs” rather then the ten as follows: the zero (represented by a small circle) was not regarded as one of the digits of the system but simply a mark put in a place when it is empty, i.e. when no digit goes there. The idea that zero represents a number, just as any other digit does, is a modern notion, foreign to medieval though.

With this evidence that the Hindu system of numeration had spread so far by the year A.D. 662, it may be surprising to learn that the earliest Arabic work we know of explaining the Hindu system is one written early in the ninth century whose title may be translated as The Book of Addition and Subtraction According to the Hindu Calculation. The author was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi who, since the was born around the year A.D. 780, probably wrote his book after A.D. 800.

We mentioned in Chapter 1 that al-Khwarizmi, who was one of the earliest important Islamic scientists, came from Central Asia and was not an Arab. This was not unusual, for, by and large, in Islamic civilization it was not a man’s place (or people) of origin, his native language, or (within limits) his religion that mattered, but his learning and his achievements in his chosen profession.

The question arises, however, where al-Khwarizmi learned of the Hindu arithmetic, given that his home was in a region far from where Bishop Sebokht learned of Hindu numerals 150 years earlier. In the absence of printed books and modern methods of communication, the penetration of a discovery into a given region by no means implied its spread to adjacent regions. Thus al-Khwarizmi may have learned of Hindu numeration not in his native Kharizm but in Baghdad, where, around 780, the visit of a delegation of scholars from Sind to the court of the Caliph al-Mansur led to the translation of Sanskrit astronomical works. Extant writings of al-Khwarizmi on astronomy show he was much influenced by Hindu methods, and it may be that it was from his study of Hindu astronomy that he learned of Hindu numerals.

Whatever the line of transmission to al-Khwarizmi was, his work helped spread Hindu numeration both in the Islamic world and in the Latin West. Although this work has not survived in the Arabic original (doubtless because it was superseded by superior treatises later on), we possess a Latin translation, made in the twelfth century A.D. From the introduction to this we learn that the work treated all the arithmetic operations and not only addition and subtraction as the title might suggest. Evidently, al-Khwarizmi’s usage is parallel to ours when we speak of a child who is studying arithmetic as “learning his sums”.

———

This article is excerpted from the book “Episodes in the Mathematics of Medieval Islam” by J. L. Berggren.

Read also:

Muslim Scholars of Medicine and Mathematics

A Brief Look at Islam’s Contribution to Mathematics

Who’s Afraid of Arabic Numerals?

Muslim Civilization is the Source of European Renaissance

Technology Transfer from Islamic World to the West

Western Thinkers’ View on Early Muslim Scientists

#Faith #Featured #Islam #Islamic mathematics #math #Muslims #science #The Decimal and Islamic Mathematics

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zodiackillerrevealed · 5 years

Text

I will start this blog with a quote I came across while I was working on this post. It was found under the cap of my Honest Tea drink and I found it quite fitting.

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

~ Albert Einstein

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories were ones obsessed with madness and the condition of absurdities and unbelieving truths. I feel the Zodiac Killer was attempting just this with his cipher codes. Poe’s character in “The Gold Bug” story who uncovers the answers to a coded message he found was believed to be mad for a time until he actually found the treasure along with two dead bodies.

But now you may be asking yourself why Edgar Allan Poe would have anything to do with the Zodiac Killer…let’s find out why.

While researching about the Zodiac Killer recently, I found something interesting I had not known before. There was an article written to the Zodiac Killer to try and persuade him to place his real name within a cipher coded message of his own creation. The article quoted Edgar Allan Poe to try and manipulate the Zodiac Killer into using Poe’s cipher code methods. The author of this article did this so that when Zodiac created a new code he might end up using one of Poe’s cipher methods to create it. That way it might be more easy to decode his hidden message within when and if he were to take the bait and send a new cipher letter. Here is the article mentioned.

Will Stevens. “Cipher Expert Dares Zodiac To ‘Tell’ Name.”

San Francisco Examiner (Oct. 22, 1969)

Learn more by reading this article. “My Name Is” Cipher Motivation by Michael Cole

I was previously unaware that Edgar Allan Poe had any association with cipher codes until I had researched about this written article. But I was semi familiar with stories such as “The Tell-Tale Heart”. So I started researching more of his stories to see if I could find any connections with my previous work I had done on Zodiac’s correspondences.

On my journey to find out more I fell down another rabbit hole. The story I found ended up leading me to some very interesting things. I now believe my theory for the Halloween card and the way I have decoded it goes hand in hand with Edgar Allan Poe’s Story “The Gold Bug”. I also have a theory that once this link between the two has been discovered it can then open a new door to the Z340 code as I have started to see similarities between all three subjects when linked together.

The San Francisco Examiner article was published Oct. 22, 1969

The Z340 was sent on November 8th 1969

A couple of weeks after the article was published.

Learn more about the Z340 here.

This would not have given Zodiac much time to create a thoughtful code. Perhaps this was just a quick response to the article.

Zodiac’s Halloween Card was mailed on October 27th 1970

Sent almost exactly a year apart from the article.

Learn more about the Halloween card origins here .

Learn about the Halloween card and what Zodiac altered in it here.

If the Halloween card is a response to the article, he would have had time to really plan a coded message out. (Perhaps he mixed his previous codes with this one.)

Now let’s look into Edgar Allan Poe’s story…

“The Gold Bug” Plot Summary – Quoted from Wikepedia

“William Legrand has relocated from New Orleans to Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina after losing his family fortune, and has brought his African-American servant Jupiter with him. The story’s narrator, a friend of Legrand, visits him one evening to see an unusual scarab-like bug he has found. The bug’s weight and lustrous appearance convince Jupiter that it is made of pure gold. Legrand has lent it to an officer stationed at a nearby fort, but he draws a sketch of it for the narrator, with markings on the carapace that resemble a skull. As they discuss the bug, Legrand becomes particularly focused on the sketch and carefully locks it in his desk for safekeeping. Confused, the narrator takes his leave for the night.

One month later, Jupiter visits the narrator on behalf of his master and asks him to come immediately, fearing that Legrand has been bitten by the bug and gone insane. Once they arrive on the island, Legrand insists that the bug will be the key to restoring his lost fortune. He leads them on an expedition to a particular tree and has Jupiter climb it until he finds a skull nailed at the end of one branch. At Legrand’s direction, Jupiter drops the bug through one eye socket and Legrand paces out to a spot where the group begins to dig. Finding nothing there, Legrand has Jupiter climb the tree again and drop the bug through the skull’s other eye; they choose a different spot to dig, this time finding two skeletons and a chest filled with gold coins and jewelry. They estimate the total value at $1.5 million, but even that figure proves to be below the actual worth when they eventually sell the items.

Legrand explains that on the day he found the bug on the mainland coastline, Jupiter had picked up a scrap piece of parchment to wrap it up. Legrand kept the scrap and used it to sketch the bug for the narrator; in so doing, though, he noticed traces of invisible ink, revealed by the heat of the fire burning on the hearth. The parchment proved to contain a cryptogram, which Legrand deciphered as a set of directions for finding a treasure buried by the infamous pirate Captain Kidd. The final step involved dropping a slug or weight through the left eye of the skull in the tree; their first dig failed because Jupiter mistakenly dropped it through the right eye instead. Legrand muses that the skeletons may be the remains of two members of Kidd’s crew, who buried the chest and were then killed to silence them.”

Read the full story here.

“The Gold Bug” – Readable PDF – Full Story ( read pages 1 – 47)

Here is the information about the books origins.

Book Source Link

Here are a few pages from the book just for quick reference.

This is a small excerpt from an article about the origins of “The Gold Bug” story.

THE GOLD-BUG: The Most Mysterious Edgar Allan Poe Story You’ve Never Heard Of. By Tasha Brandstatter

The Gold-Bug was the first work of fiction to incorporate cryptography into the plot. In fact, the very word cryptograph was invented by Poe and used for the first time in this story. It inspired future cryptologists for generations to come (including William F. Friedman, an American famous in cryptographic circles for breaking Japan’s PURPLE code in WWII), and dozens of writers all over the world. Think Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s Devils in Daylight, or The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers. It’s entirely plausible that the science of cryptanalysis as we know it today wouldn’t exist without The Gold-Bug. Before Poe, cryptography was a complete mystery to most people. Simple substitution ciphers like the one in The Gold-Bug were considered unbreakable unless you possessed the key to decode them. But Poe’s knowledge of language and obsession with logic, or “ratiocination,” made him realize that any code could be broken. And he showed people exactly how to do it.

In 1839, four years before the publication of The Gold-Bug, Poe published an article in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger where he challenged the readers to send him coded messages, stating,

It would be by no means a labor lost to show how great a degree of rigid method enters into enigma-guessing. This may sound oddly; but it is not more strange than the well know fact that rules really exist, by means of which it is easy to decipher any species of hieroglyphical writing—that is to say writing where, in place of alphabetical letters, any kind of marks are made use of at random. For example, in place of A put % or any other arbitrary character—in place of B, a *, etc., etc. Let an entire alphabet be made in this manner, and then let this alphabet be used in any piece of writing.

You can read the full article here.

Now that you have either read the story or the plot summary, how does Poe’s story connect to the Zodiac Killer’s “Halloween Card”?

Let’s look at what I did with some of this information.

One of the things I had done when I was first working on the Halloween Card last year was to take a computer printed version of the card to a light box so I could see through it. This helped me figure out a few things within the card itself to solve it. You can find some of that previous work here.

After finding out about “The Gold Bug” story I decided to look for new connections again. The story stood out to me to begin with simply because it had mentioned two skeletons as well as a cipher code which seemed to be a similarity to the “Halloween Card”. When reading the “Gold Bug”story, the main character mentions the way he first started to figure the coded message out was by accidentally placing it up to the light of the burning fire; only than did things start to appear to him within the parchment.

In the story it was heat that uncovered the code. But what if Zodiac also read it as light and used that instead to create his own code? Or perhaps he used both methods. Though I do not know if a heated process would work on parts of the “Halloween Card”.

These two excerpts are quoted from “The Gold Bug” story. It is the beginning of the explanation of how the character figured out the coded message through the use of the lighted fireplace.

“When, at length, we had concluded our examination, and the intense excitement of the time had, in some measure, subsided, Legrand, who saw that I was dying with impatience for a solution of this most extraordinary riddle, entered into a full detail of all the circumstances connected with it.

“You remember,” said he, “the night when I handed you the rough sketch I had made of the scarabaeus. You recollect also, that I became quite vexed at you for insisting that my drawing resembled a death’s-head. When you first made this assertion I thought you were jesting; but afterwards I called to mind the peculiar spots on the back of the insect, and admitted to myself that your remark had some little foundation in fact. Still, the sneer at my graphic powers irritated me –for I am considered a good artist –and, therefore, when you handed me the scrap of parchment, I was about to crumple it up and throw it angrily into the fire.”

“The scrap of paper, you mean,” said I.

“No; it had much of the appearance of paper, and at first I supposed it to be such, but when I came to draw upon it, I discovered it, at once, to be a piece of very thin parchment. It was quite dirty, you remember. Well, as I was in the very act of crumpling it up, my glance fell upon the sketch at which you had been looking, and you may imagine my astonishment when I perceived, in fact, the figure of a death’s-head just where, it seemed to me, I had made the drawing of the beetle. For a moment I was too much amazed to think with accuracy. I knew that my design was very different in detail from this –although there was a certain similarity in general outline. Presently I took a candle, and seating myself at the other end of the room, proceeded to scrutinize the parchment more closely. Upon turning it over, I saw my own sketch upon the reverse, just as I had made it. My first idea, now, was mere surprise at the really remarkable similarity of outline –at the singular coincidence involved in the fact, that unknown to me, there should have been a skull upon the other side of the parchment, immediately beneath my figure of the scarabaeus and that this skull, not only in outline, but in size, should so closely resemble my drawing. I say the singularity of this coincidence absolutely stupefied me for a time. This is the usual effect of such coincidences. The mind struggles to establish a connection –a sequence of cause and effect –and, being unable to do so, suffers a species of temporary paralysis. But, when I recovered from this stupor, there dawned upon me gradually a conviction which startled me even far more than the coincidence. I began distinctly, positively, to remember that there had been no drawing on the parchment when I made my sketch of the scarabaeus. I became perfectly certain of this; for I recollected turning up first one side and then the other, in search of the cleanest spot. Had the skull been then there, of course I could not have failed to notice it. Here was indeed a mystery which I felt it impossible to explain; but, even at that early moment, there it seemed to glimmer, faintly, within the most remote and secret chambers of my intellect, a glow-worm-like conception of that truth which last night’s adventure brought to so magnificent a demonstration. I arose at once, and putting the parchment securely away, dismissed all farther reflection until I should be alone.

“At this stage of my reflections I endeavored to remember, and did remember, with entire distinctness, every incident which occurred about the period in question. The weather was chilly (oh rare and happy accident!), and a fire was blazing on the hearth. I was heated with exercise and sat near the table. You, however, had drawn a chair close to the chimney. Just as I placed the parchment in your hand, and as you were in the act of inspecting it, Wolf, the Newfoundland, entered, and leaped upon your shoulders. With your left hand you caressed him and kept him off, while your right, holding the parchment, was permitted to fall listlessly between your knees, and in close proximity to the fire. At one moment I thought the blaze had caught it, and was about to caution you, but, before I could speak, you had withdrawn it, and were engaged in its examination. When I considered all these particulars, I doubted not for a moment that heat had been the agent in bringing to light, on the parchment, the skull which I saw designed on it. You are well aware that chemical preparations exist, and have existed time out of mind, by means of which it is possible to write on either paper or vellum, so that the characters shall become visible only when subjected to the action of fire. Zaffre, digested in aqua regia, and diluted with four times its weight of water, is sometimes employed; a green tint results. The regulus of cobalt, dissolved in spirit of nitre, gives a red. These colors disappear at longer or shorter intervals after the material written on cools, but again become apparent upon the re-application of heat.

“I now scrutinized the death’s-head with care. Its outer edges –the edges of the drawing nearest the edge of the vellum –were far more distinct than the others. It was clear that the action of the caloric had been imperfect or unequal. I immediately kindled a fire, and subjected every portion of the parchment to a glowing heat. At first, the only effect was the strengthening of the faint lines in the skull; but, on persevering in the experiment, there became visible, at the corner of the slip, diagonally opposite to the spot in which the death’s-head was delineated, the figure of what I at first supposed to be a goat. A closer scrutiny, however, satisfied me that it was intended for a kid.”

Knowing that Zodiac liked his codes placed within the newspapers as he sent them to reporters to publish, it would be a good assumption that light is to be used instead of heat. He wanted random people to try and figure out his coded messages.

Placing Zodiac’s “Halloween Card” up to a glowing light source.

When I started noticing similarities between Poe’s “Gold Bug” story and Zodiac’s “Halloween Card” I decided to put the images into Photoshop instead of using a light box so I could create a version of it the way it would be seen through a light source. This way I could more easily look for visual connections to see if the two had any more similarities between the story and the images shown. Would the Halloween Card mimic anything within Poe’s story?

This was the result.

The Original

Now let’s see what happens when you put the card up to a light source. Does anything interesting happen?

If you look at this picture closely, it now looks like the skeleton on the card is climbing a tree similar to the character within the story of “The Gold Bug”. In fact this is one of the more memorable parts of the story where the character “Jupiter” climbs a tree while holding onto a string with a gold bug or a (goole bug; the name Jupiter gives the beetle) tied to the end of it to reach out and place the bug within the skeletons eye that is hanging from the long main branch of the tree.

Quoted from “The Gold Bug”

“De bug –I’m berry sartain dat Massa Will bin bit somewhere bout de head by dat goole-bug.”

This video from 1980 of the ABC’s Saturday Special adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Gold Bug” will give you a small visual in similarity before I show how the “Halloween Card” relates to the story even more.

There is a spot in the video where a boy climbs a tree and places the gold bug hanging from a string within the skeletons left eye till it reaches the ground and then they draw a Bee line from the tree.

Please note they changed the character to a little boy instead of the adult servant (slave) “Jupiter”in Poe’s story. This movie is not an exact replica of Poe’s story but shows a good visual representation of what has taken place in the actual book.

Start at the time 34:13 and stop at 36:30 to see the spot I am mentioning.

youtube

Could this represent the depiction in Zodiac’s Halloween Card?

Poe’s Cipher code solved within his story.

On page 42 of “The Gold Bug” (from the pdf mentioned earlier in this post) the first paragraph describes part of the stories solved coded message. This leads into climbing the tree in the story after they followed the codes directions.

Here is Poe’s solved coded message.

‘A good glass in the Bishop’s hostel in the Devil’s seat — forty-one degrees and thirteen minutes — northeast and by north — main branch seventh limb east side — shoot from the left eye of the death’s-head — a bee-line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.'”

Now back to the Zodiac’s “Halloween Card” and how the code might relate.

Now that we see the Halloween card through a light source similar to in Poe’s story let’s see if the solved code also has any coincidences or parts that match up.

If the Zodiac killer was trying to incorporate visuals into his coded message similar to dual coding theory methods then maybe this is what he did.

“main branch seventh limb east side”

I believe the eyes resemble the branches on the tree. His foot is nestled on (branch 1). His head is next to (branch 7) His arm is holding onto the main branch (branch 6 ). The Zodiac Killer circled the main branch with text. (Peek-A-Boo You are doomed) The skeletons arm is reaching outward from the main branch towards the other skeletons skull which is resting on the long main branch. (branch 6). I believe the sentence ( “But, then, why spoil the game!”) resembles the rest of the long main branch with the skeletons head resting on it.

In Poe’s story there is a bit of a confusion between the main branch and branch 7.

“One, two, tree, four, fibe –I done pass fibe big limb, massa, ‘pon dis side.”

“Then go one limb higher.”

In a few minutes the voice was heard again, announcing that the seventh limb was attained.

The skeletons hand is extended almost as if it is holding something like a string in it’s hand. (The string is not visible though.)

If the skeleton was holding a string like the servant (slave) Jupiter in the “Gold Bug” story, then what is directly below where a string would be hanging?

A capital B rests directly below. (Could the letter “B” be a reference for Bug or Beetle?)

Is this Zodiac’s attempt to show the story of “The Gold Bug” through a coded message? Did he pick this card because he saw the ironic similarity with the story? I believe him to be a visual thinker as well as an artist. Minds that can see images together easily simply by looking at them. But unless we knew what we were looking for and what importance they had, the images together would remain a mystery as they would not connect in a solvable way.

If the letter “B” does resemble the gold bug in Poe’s story then the character in the story had climbed the tree not once but twice with the same bug. They had made a mistake the first time and placed the bug through the wrong skeletons eye dropping it on the ground and digging in the wrong location. Does this rendering of the “Halloween Card” show this?

The B is found twice under the pinched fingers of the hand.

What other clues can we find that might follow this story?

“shoot from the left eye of the death’s-head — a bee-line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.'”

If we follow Poe’s story he drops the string with the bug attached to the end through both of the skeletons eyes. Let’s see what would happen if we dropped a string from both eyes.

Strangely two B’s rest right below the skeletons eyes as well. But only when this card is seen through a light source just like in Poe’s story. The coded message can only be fully seen when brought to the light.

After each string was dropped in Poe’s story they had drawn a Bee Line ( straight line) from the tree. This is what I found within the legs of the skeleton right between the “two B’s” that are only seen next to the skeleton in the card when placed up to a light source. Could Zodiac have used similarities, visuals along with wordplay to jest this as a letter B for creating a Bee line?

After they drew a B line they had dug holes within that spot. If the center of the B legs is the digging spot what will we find inside?

On the left the letters D and I are found but are halfway cut off and not fully within the leg digging spot. On the right the reverse K is directly found within this leg digging spot. This was from the left eye of the skeleton where there was something supposed to be found there. I have a theory about this letter. You can find it further down in this post.

Let’s look at another portion of Poe’s solved coded message from earlier.

“forty-one degrees and thirteen minutes — northeast and by north — main branch seventh limb east side

The numbers 41 and 13 seemed familiar within the “Halloween Card” to me. In fact those numbers stood out to me when I first read Poe’s story and noticed them directly in his solved code. I thought to myself what were the chances that they just fit?

Here are two images I put together for one of my previous posts about these numbers.

Now if we go by Poe’s code from the story and use it in reference to the “Halloween Card” what do we find?

“main branch seventh limb east side.”

Here I have sectioned off the spot where the 7th limb would be above the main branch. It mentions the east side of the branch, (northeast by north) so lets look right from the tree. Lets take notice that this is exactly where the skeletons starting hand is at first.

“forty-one degrees and thirteen minutes — northeast and by north”

When you view this card like this the 14 in the hand looks like a 41 and the word TEEN can resemble the number 13 for teen years. The 4-TEEN could even resemble a relevance to time. 4:13.

What were the coincidences that this is what would be found in that spot?

The skeletons hand has it’s fingers circled directly in the right spot to make this look like the symbol you use for degrees when placed above a number.

The 3 fingers in the hand could symbolize an E for East.

If you add the arms of the skeleton that are located where the main branch is and put them into the equation, they look like the symbol for N.

If we used a map this also might relate to a different kind of directions.

Looking for more clues within the 7th limb location.

I decided to look and see what letters stood out when looking at this spot in the “Halloween Card” by following Poe’s story directions.

This is what I found. (The letters on the left are excluded as we were meant to look eastward from the tree.)

The letters G and F shine through the card when placed to the light source.

The other letters present in this specific spot without the light present is the letter T both within the eye of the skeleton as well as in the word TEEN. If you want you can also include the letter b within the hand of the skeleton as I have shown it previously within another blog. The letter B shows through when placed up to a light source right below the b hand symbol.

Also notice when placed up to the light source that within the wrist of the skeleton the letter t shines through as well.

“T.B” or all of the letters “T. G. F. B. ”

Following Poe’s story to find two letters which are possibly a clue to directions.

If we look North East on the card like in the directions for Poe’s story, the one letter that shines through with light is the letter P. And then if we follow the other directions with digging a hole within a specific spot I believe we get the letter K which shines through only with light.

I personally believe these two letters have to do with road names for directions to a specific location that I have decoded previously within the Halloween card as it says “By P. as well as By K”

The directions I have uncovered and followed lead me to an unsolved murder to a boy who was stabbed by a knife 4 times with the initials of T.B. He was killed on the church grounds of Saint Basil the Great in the center of two streets one by the name Pike Springs Rd. or (113) and the other by the name Kimberton Rd.

Part of a postcard Zodiac sent within the same month of the Halloween Card

The Saint Basil church where the boy was murdered has some very interesting artwork within it’s church that seems very similar to some of the constructs of this card as well.

I have placed a partial amount of information about the directions I came by and a few other things that go along with them on a previous blog.

If you would like to learn more you can read about it here towards the middle of the blog.

Connecting Zodiacs “Halloween Card” and Poe’s story “The Gold Bug” to Zodiac’s “Z340” code.

Once I started noticing things through a light source I also began seeing possible similarities between Zodiac’s “Z340 “cipher code and his “Halloween Card.”

Here is just one out of many I have found.

After this I got an idea from reading a post by Shaqmeister.

Take the skeleton from the inside of Zodiac’s “Halloween Card” and place it onto Zodiac’s “Z340” coded message. This skeleton was placed onto the “Halloween Card” by the Zodiac Killer and was not part of the original card.

You can read the original post here.

I used Photoshop once again and tried to size the skeleton to be the proper dimensions to fit the Z340 in the way it could be meant to be used. While this is just an example for now, there are many different things that I have seen shine through when the skeleton is placed within specific spots.

I also started looking for clues within Poe’s “Gold Bug” story to see if there were any similarities between the story to piece together with Zodiac’s “Halloween Card” and the “Z340” all in one. I believe I have found quite a few connections when messing with wordplay and a few other similarities in descriptions. But these connections will all be for another blog at another time.

Taking a closer look at the characters in Poe’s story.

Character Analysis

William Legrand – The text’s protagonist, Legrand is a reclusive man who lives on desolate Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina. A man of the wealthy Huguenot bloodline, we are told Legrand lost his riches (although we are not told how) while living in New Orleans and moved to South Carolina to removed himself from the embarrassment of his misfortune.

Legrand is an intelligent and focused man; showing a resilience to distractions once he realizes that his bug can help him hit the jackpot. That said, his mission devours his entire being, resulting in what appears as manic behavior to the narrator and Jupitar. After they have recovered the treasure however, Legrand is composed, confident and ultimately proud of his accomplishment. His erratic behavior has ceased, and he calmly explains to the narrator how he figured out the location of the riches. Legrand has a passion for cryptology, mystery and nature.

Unnamed Narrator – Although he carries the entire story, the only things we are told about the narrator is that he lives in Charleston, practices as a physician, and is a friend of Legrand’s. He accompanies the man on his treasure hunt out of worry of his health.

Jupitar – Legrand’s black servant. A dim-witted and southern-tongued freed slave, Jupitar provides comic relief with his thick accent and tendency to disappoint his master. Although Legrand gets frustrated and angry with Jupitar on the hunt for treasure, it is understood that they maintain a peaceful, quasi-friendship.

Captian Kidd – An allusion to the 17th century Scotish sailor who was executed by English Parlimanet in 1701 for charges of piracy. At the time of the text, Kidd is long dead, only living on through the enormous treasure of that Legrand finds buried on Sullivan’s Island. Legends of Kidd treasures exist not only in The Gold-Bug, but in other literature as well as in folklore. It’s possible, though, that these tales are based in fact – for a treasure buried by the sailor was found on Gardiner’s Island off of Long Island, NY, shipped back to England and used as evidence against him in his trial. Kidd’s physical character does not appear in the text, but his contribution to the story is so great that he warrants a description on this page.

Take a look at the Biography of Captain Kidd history channel video here.

Old Negro Woman – Woman that Legrand finds in the brush; helps him locate the site of the buried treasure.

The Gold-Bug – classified by Legrand as a member of the Old World genus Scarabaeus, the beetle is dominantly gold in color – save for multiple black spots on the bug’s back – and about the size of a hickory nut. There is confusion as to whether or not the insect displays antennae; Legrand insists they are present and visible, while Jupitar and the narrator insist they cannot see them. No identical species exists in nature, though it is hypothesized that Poe used a combination of traits from Callichroma splendidum and Phanceus carnifex to create his composite gold-bug (see Poe’s Motive and Inspiration).

My thoughts on possible relations and observations to the characters within Poe’s story “The Gold Bug” combined with the “Halloween Card”.

The man climbing the tree in Poe’s story is called “Jupiter”. When you relate this character to the skeleton climbing the tree in the Halloween card what do we find?

When I was previously working on the Halloween Card I had associated this skeleton with the name Jack / John. They all have the same first initial. You can read more about Jack/john here.

In Poe’s story he mentions a Lieutenant G– but never gives the name. He just uses the initial G.

I had found the letter G on the main branch seventh limb spot using Poe’s code.

Here is a previous blog I wrote about the name George.

William Legrand is probably representative to the person trying to figuring out Zodiac’s riddle. If this were true it would be a kind of sick humor on Zodiac’s part. Him wanting people to think the person solving his riddles to be insane.

Captain Kidd could relate to another card zodiac wrote, “The Dragon Card” which has pirate references in it. Learn more here.

In conclusion…

I think the Zodiac killer wanted to make the person who uncovers the answers to his codes to appear to be mad in a way. Because what code would appear in this form and how will they find a way to explain it?

Language can be a tricky thing. Spoken language can have one meaning while written can have another separate meaning; add an image into the mix and you might have multiple meanings. How do we find the right way for the pieces to fit together? And are there multiple ways that they are saying the same thing over and over in the different formats to prove them to be the answer?

Though I am not an expert on all coded formats nor the names by which they go by, I believe the Zodiac Killer may have used something similar to a dual coding theory method meant to confuse the mind and leave people questioning if the answers found are actually true. This way all we can do is speculate. The methods used were controversial for the times back then and they still are to this very day. That is why I believe they are so hard to prove.

I will share a couple of small excerpts from this book…

The Visual Experience of Image Metaphor: Cognitive Insights into Imagist Figures By Daniel W. Gleason

“In the 1960s, however, the cognitive turn in psychology and the rise of reader-response theory in literary studies helped thaw the mental imagery freeze. Slowly, and then with increasing speed, psychology studies brought the visual image back into circulation., As Roeckelein (2004: xii) notes, scientific interest in the topic of imagery made “a dramatic recovery with enormous increases from 1961 to the present.”- Stephen Kosslyn, William Thompson, and Giorgio Ganis (2006: 5) note that this shift was sparked by changes in methodology: “Cognitive psychology offered a way to begin to assess properties of internal representations, which opened the door to studying mental imagery objectively.” Alan Richardson (1969), Paivio (1971), and P. W. Sheehan (1972) were among the first psychologists to closely investigate mental imagery after behaviorism. During this time, the modern imagery debate (the successor to the imageless thought debate of the late nineteenth century) began, and cognitive psychologists con-ducted experiments to discover the format of mental representations; some argued that the brain represents information through a propositional code (i.e., an abstract verbal code) alone, and others countered that the brain makes use of both propositional and depictive (i.e., visual image–based) formats..

Paivio’s “dual coding theory,” which posits a nonverbal, mental image–based mode of mental representation alongside a verbal one as an explana-tion for the mnemonic superiority of concrete words over abstract words,/has attracted serious attention to mental imagery and visual imagery in particular. Though the “nonverbal” code accommodates mental imagery in general, Paivio’s early methods and discussion privileged the visual mode within mental imagery. Indeed, in Paivio’s (1971: 233) 1971 formulation the dual coding theory proposed the image and verbal codes after studying responses to “abstract words, concrete words, and pictures,” a framework that helps reveal the theory’s particular investment in visual imagery. Much of Paivio’s (ibid.: 207) discussion reveals a slippage between broad term image and the more specific visual image: “Thus concrete words not only are read or heard but some of them also evoke referent images; familiar pictures are perceived (images are aroused).” Perhaps because a few thinkers challenged the preeminence of visual imagery within his nonverbal system (Kintsch 1977; Flanagan 1984), Paivio (1986, 1991, 2007) moderates this visual investment in later versions of the theory, carefully noting the many modalities within the image system. Nonetheless, visual imagery remains a key feature within Paivio’s system”

Ironically, such an association of Imagist poem and picture prompted the editors of Some Imagist Poets (1916: v) to attempt to push beyond this simple equation: “In the first place ‘Imagism’ does not mean merely the presen-tation of pictures. ‘Imagism’ refers to the manner of presentation, not the subject.” Finally, there is Hulme. In his dogmatic, declarative way, Hulme is perhaps most emphatic about the importance of visual imagery in poetry, both for the reader and for the writer. Hulme’s literary philosophy centers on a sharp, visual language that communicates through images. He declares: “Each word must be an image seen . . . a man cannot write without seeing at the same time a visual signification before his eyes. It is this image which precedes the writing and makes it firm” (Hulme 1955c [1925]: 79). To Hulme, authors can only write through visual imagery, and readers must be able to see (presumably through visual imagery) each word that the author has written—a daunting requirement. Hulme (1955a [1908]: 73) even argues that the best poetry will make readers visualize so much that they become exhausted: “The new visual art . . . depends for its effect . . . on arresting the attention, so much so that the succession of images should exhaust one.” Certainly, other sensory modes, most notably touch, appear within Imagist theories of poetry, but overall their visual poetics is foundational. Despite these strong claims of visuality for both the writer and the reader in Imagist theories of poetry, many scholarly accounts of Imagist poetics seem uninterested in or even hostile to the visual aspect of those poetics. Scholarship on Imagism disagrees widely on a few contentious issues (e.g., who really created Imagism?), but the central accounts of Imagism seem to agree that the visual imagination is not a very important subject for schol-arly attention. These accounts particularly devalue the reader’s visual imagery, minimizing its role within Imagist poetics and its contribution to poetic understanding.

Anyways this is just a little food for thought to ponder over. There is much more that may be gleaned from Poe’s story “The Gold Bug” as there is a whole code he mentions within the pages that may relate in another way to the Zodiac’s messages. These are just a few of my thoughts and ramblings, please take them with a grain of salt.

My Honest Tea Cap

The Zodiac Killer may have used Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Gold Bug” to create some of his cipher codes. I will start this blog with a quote I came across while I was working on this post.

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woollyqueen · 5 years

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usse 55

Floral Patterns ~ An Essay About Flowers and Art (with a Blooming Addendum.)

by Andrew Berardini

A Change of Heart installation view at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, 2016. Courtesy: Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Michael Underwood

“Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.”

— Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire (2001)

“Not even the category of the portrait seems to have ever attained the profound level of painterly decrepitude that still life would attain in the sinister harmlessness in the work of Matisse or Maurice de Vlaminck… the most obsolete of all still-life types.”

— Benjamin H. D. Buchloh on Gerhard Richter’s Flowers (1992)

Don’t worry, nobody’s looking. Go ahead.

Stop and smell the flowers.

Feel that sumptuous perfume blooming from those spreading petals. That’s pleasure. That’s sex. That’s the body lotion of the teenage beauty fingering your belt buckle to take your virginity (or the one you wore when you tugged that belt off your first). That’s your grandmother’s bathroom and the heart-shaped wreath at her funeral. That’s the lithe fingers and supple wrists of the florist, an emperor of blooms arranging the flowers for your mother just so.

Those petals, that scent, those colors.

Somehow flowers have become a decrepit subject, “the most obsolete of all still-life types,” to use Buchloh’s words. Despite the eminent Octoberist’s antipathy (and he is hardly alone in his disdain), flowers in art are back in bloom.

Flagrantly frivolous, wholly ephemeral, though ancient in art, the floral’s recent return as a major subject for artists marks a pivot toward those things that flowers represent: the decorative, the minor, the ephemeral and emotional, the liveliness of their bloom and the perfume of their decay, a sophisticated language of purest color and form that can be both raw nature and refined arrangement, poetic symbolism rubbing against the political mechanisms of value, history, and trade. Flowers are fragrant with subtle meanings, each different for every artist who chooses them as a subject. They are a move away from literal explications, self-righteous cynicism—and toward what, precisely? Let’s say poetry.

Bas Jan Ader, Primary Time (still), 1974. © Estate of Bas Jan Ader / Mary Sue Andersen, 2016 / Bas Jan Ader by SIAE, Rome, 2016. Courtesy: Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles

Free in the wilderness, rowed in gardens, in bouquets on tables, or as a decorative aromatic around the dead, flowers offer an opportunity for a simple, sensual pleasure—both a temporary escape and a corporeal return. Their origins as a species are a bit shrouded in mystery, but most who study flowers and evolution agree that they came about in order to employ insects and animals in their reproduction (a process that surely continues with our artful interventions). They lure with beauty, eventually tricking humans into agriculture and the dream of making such fecund and lively yearnings permanent, into art.

First and foremost, flowers are the sex organs of plants. Those bright colors and elaborate bodies were meant to turn us on. Georgia O’Keeffe transformed her blossoms from still-life representation into a kind of abstraction that tongued that first truth of flowers; all of her blooms wore the faces of interdimensional pussies. Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of flowers look even more suggestive to me than some of his more obviously lusty snaps of men in various states of undress and erect action.

Though their flounce and curve have a pornography of color, flowers as a metaphor can be easily read as safe, sanitized stand-ins for the real musk and squelch of sex. A vase of flowers in grandma’s parlor might be less notable than a bouquet of dildos erupting out of a bucket of lube. The opposite of badass to all the tough boys playing with their power tools, flowers to them are for old ladies and sissies and girls. Macho minimalists preferred stacks of bricks and sheets of steel to prove the heft of their seriousness. Besides, the florals look too comfortably bourgeois for the shock and spectacle of self-serious avant-gardists, though Giacomo Balla’s Futurist Flowers(1918-1925) look as radical as anything else those defiant Italians cooked up.

Virginia Poundstone: Flower Mutations installation view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, 2015. Courtesy: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield. Photo: Jean Vong

Though flowers have appeared in art for thousands of years, first evidenced in funerary motifs in the earliest Egyptian dynasties, they’ve been used mostly as a sideshow, a decorative motif, a signifying prop. But around 1600, during the time of the tulip mania that rubbled the Netherlandish economy, Dutch artists began to paint blooms as the main attraction: finely wrought bouquets with delicate strokes, an idealistic botanist’s attention to perfection and detail, each variety laden with meaning, some held over from religion, some devised for newly invented varietals. This efflorescence came about with the disposable income of the bourgeoisie and the introduction of the tulip to international trading with the Ottoman Empire; in the court of Constantinople, flowers were all the rage. As an object of desire and prestige, the flower earned its worth as a central subject.

By the Victorian era, the language of flowers became wildly popular, as that repressed period needed something sexy to finger, especially for the corseted women. The frivolity of flowers was perhaps an area of knowledge the patriarchy let ladies have mastery over, but male artists weren’t ignoring the chromatic potential of blooms, either. With wet smears and hazy visions, Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet were among the best floral daubers of their time (with a solid shout out to the drooping beauties of Henri Fantin-Latour, whose 1890 painting A Basket of Flowers made it onto New Order’s 1983 album Power, Corruption, and Lies, itself an elliptical Richter reference). Flowers to these painters were a way to explore the power and range of their medium with unfettered color. “Perhaps I owe it to flowers,” said Monet, “that I became a painter.” As art took an intellectual turn, however, flowers fell out as serious subjects and became the provenance of Sunday painters, appropriate only for the marginalized. Yet as outsiders increasingly collapse binaries, the center cannot hold and vines snake into the heart of power to bloom a variety as diverse and beautiful as the spectrum of humanity.

A Change of Heart, an exhibition organized by the curator Chris Sharp at Hannah Hoffman Gallery in Los Angeles in summer 2016, touched on dreams and contemplations I’d been having about obvious forms of beauty and their force in art as both assertion and escape. Sunsets, moonlight, waterfalls, and, of course, flowers, all easily dismissed as sentimental kitsch, seemed to be enjoying a new life, born of a self-conscious romanticism that acknowledges these subjects as perhaps decayed and misspent, but lets their beauty sweep them up anyway. Sharp stated in the press release that the work in the exhibition “embraces the floral still life in all its formal, symbolic, political and aesthetic heterogeneity… a radical and even dizzying diversity of approaches, including the queer, the decorative, the scientific, the euphemistic, the memento mori, the painterly, the deliberately amateur and minor as a position, and much more.”[1]

Willem de Rooij, Bouquet IX, 2012. Courtesy: the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo: Michael Underwood

From historical works by Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly, Jane Freilicher, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Bas Jan Ader to art made much more recently by Camille Henrot, Willem de Rooij, Amy Yao, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Paul Heyer, the pieces in A Change of Heart approach the floral in wholly unique ways. Rather than cordoning off the artists in Sharp’s excellent show, I’m going to weave their methods, ideas, and visions into a larger conversation, some aspects of which were quite likely on the curator’s mind, as any art gallery and its resources can only be so expansive. In London as well, the gallerist and curator Silka Rittson-Thomas has opened up a project space and storefront called TukTuk Flower Studio to host the floral visions of contemporary artists.

Of course some artists in recent history focus on the base, mass appeal of flowers, like Warhol and his iconic screenprint Flowers (1964), or Jeff Koons with his giant, bloom-encrusted Puppy(1992) and solid shimmering metal of Tulips (1995-2004). But despite the blank-faced games of pop cipher employed by Warhol and the spirited industrial-scale exuberance of Koons, I can’t help finding a whisper of contempt in both, a pandering hucksterism, giving the people what they want. This obviousness and its exploitation is of course a part of the story of our modern interactions with flowers, but it obscures a more nuanced narrative.

Capitalism has so often turned beauty as a notion into kitsch, or as Milan Kundera puts it, “a denial of shit,” and we can find this modern kitsch in the unblemished bloom on the cheeks of a Disney princess, or in “America’s most popular artist” Thomas Kinkade’s creation of an imagined past of perfect old-timey townships, a good old days that glosses over all the problems of inequality and oppression endemic to that era. Donald Trump is the kingpin of this kind of kitsch these days. The best of our feelings can be easily hijacked for political purposes, but it is a mistake to cynically dismiss those feelings simply because others would take advantage of them.

All aspects of creation are beautiful enough to need little human improvement, including flowers. As John Berger writes in The White Bird, “The notion that art is the mirror of nature is one that appeals only in periods of skepticism. Art does not imitate nature, it imitates a creation, sometimes to propose an alternative world, sometimes simply to amplify, to confirm, to make social the brief hope offered by nature.” [2] We attempt to capture the power of these moments not to improve upon them, but to fix their power, to make ephemeral hopes and desires into something more permanent. Perhaps the natural versus the human-made is one more collapsing binary, and the diversity of flowers allows for such wild variety that the simple monolithic subject of “flowers” can’t easily contain it. In using flowers as a subject, artists have gravitated from the classic still life (like Richter on the ass end of Buchloh’s anti-floral sentiment), with its entwined poetical and political meanings and their elaborate symbolic language, operating at the decorative margins, toward the center. This can be traced in the atmospheric floral patterns of Marc-Camille Chaimowicz (enjoying a fantastic resurgence of interest), the pastel squiggles of Lily van der Stokker, and the softly erotic washes of Paul Heyer. Pulling the margins into the center is also of course one of the great political projects of our time.

Felix Gonzales-Torres, “Untitled” (Alice B. Toklas’ and Gertrude Stein’s Grave, Paris), 1992. © The Felix Gonzales-Torres Foundation. Courtesy: Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

The poetical-political intertwining in flowers has a few significant contemporary exemplars. Felix Gonzalez-Torres imbued common objects with profound poetic and political force throughout his work, and included in A Change of Heart was his photograph of the flowers on the graves of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. In a single snap, an almost slight touristic photograph, the artist reveals a nexus of forces around flowers: as memorial, as assertion of love with all its political and artistic forces, as vaginal (given their lesbian sexuality), and as a visual poem that matches Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose…,” itself of course an invocation of William Shakespeare’s “A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.” A rose is a rose and love is love, by any other name.

With a blend of flowers, sometimes artificially constructed, and his own indexical variety of sharp critique, Christopher Williams takes a more distinctly political focus, working wholly on reclassifying a collection of flower models (fakes, to be clear) not into botanical hierarchies but into political relevance. The photographs in Angola to Vietnam* (1989) are snapped pictures of selected replicas from the Harvard Botanical Museum’s Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models, made between 1887 and 1936. Williams, however, focuses on flowers from countries where political disappearances were recorded in 1985, reclassifying them by country of origin rather than by the museum’s system. But although these are certainly flowers, one gets the feeling that Williams wants to undermine their bourgeois beauty and the colonial impulse that collected, modeled, and classified them.

This sharply political act finds force in Taryn Simon’s photo series Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015) and Kapwani Kiwanga’s ongoing series Flowers for Africa (begun in 2012), with their similar focus on floral arrangements made for banquets celebrating important political moments. Simon’s pictures tend to flatten the arrangements into manipulated environments. Kiwanga presents living bouquets, with the intention that they rot over the course of the exhibition (I watched one whither in A Change of Heart) so as to describe a complex physical poetic. For Kiwanga, the flowers that stood on the tables of important moments in politics represent the colonial import of European flower arrangement: where, for what, and by whom these flowers were cultivated, but also the hope and heartbreak involved in many of the agreements they witnessed. Some represented a marked turn toward liberation, while other accords withered along with the flowers. (Both of these projects echo, for me, Danh Vo’s display of the chandeliers from the Hotel Majestic in Paris hanging over the agreement that ended the US-Vietnam War.)

Zoe Crosher, The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project in Conjuction with LAND, Fourth Billboard to Be Seen Along Route 10, Heading West… (Where Highway 86 Intersects…), 2015. Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Chris Adler

Zoe Crosher’s billboard series Shangri LA’d (2013-2015), produced in collaboration with LAND, displayed a lush array of flowers and greenery arranged by the artist and shot in a storefront in Los Angeles’s Chinatown formerly occupied by the Chinese Communist Party. As one drove across the country on the transcontinental highway, I-10, the flowers rotted further with each successive picture, until a decayed brown mass greeted the traveler as they crossed into California and on to Los Angeles. The dream of prosperity and possibility that drives a traveler westward became the hardships of the road and the realities of the place.

For the last decade, Virginia Poundstone has included in her artwork all aspects of floral cultivation. She has climbed the Himalayan mountains to find the wildest of wildflowers, and traveled to the factory farms of Colombia, tracing industrially grown blooms from growth to auction to wholesalers to flower markets and shops. Her interest grew from her day job as a floral arranger and her research into the gendered origins of that craft in the West and its resonance as a mode of art making in Japanese ikebana. She has also curated exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum that included floral works by Christo, Nancy Graves, and Bas Jan Ader (Ader’s video Primary Time [1974], of endless arrangements, is also in A Change of Heart) that have informed her deep investigations into the complex symbolism and language of flowers.

Other artists focus primarily on this language. Willem de Rooij’s Bouquet series (first begun with his late collaborator, Jeroen de Rijke, in 2002) speaks without literal language. Discussions around politics are followed by meditations on color or a collection of blooms gathered for their intensely allergenic qualities. The giant displays, in contrast to Kiwanga’s, are carefully maintained throughout an exhibition; a florist collaborator always makes regular visits to an exhibition to maintain the scent, color, and freshness of the expression.

In A Change of Heart, Sharp also included Camille Henrot’s ikebana interpretations of important modern novels as well as Maria Loboda’s A Guide to Insults and Misanthropy (2006), which attempts to use the symbolic language of flowers to insult their receiver.

Camille Henrot, The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing, 2014. Courtesy: the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

For flowers, the recent turn holds an echo of romanticism, the intuitive, the emotional, the poetic, existing alongside a belief in political freedoms. The lusty poet Lord Byron died in the war for Greek independence. One of the fundamental human rights is a right to pleasure, to beauty. Beauty isn’t our collective ignoring of the hard struggles of the world, but rather an assertion of exactly what we’re fighting for.

As Fernando Pessoa writes in The Book of Disquiet (1984), “Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life. What moves lives. What is said endures.”[3]

[1] http://hannahhoffmangallery.com/media/files/pr_acoh_web.pdf. [2] John Berger, The White Bird (London: Chatto & Windus, 1985) [3] Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (London: Serpent’s Tale, 1991)

~ BLOOMING ADDENDUM ~

Christopher Williams, Angola, 1989, Blaschka Model 439, 1894, Genus no. 5091, Family, Sterculiaceae Cola acuminate (Beauv.) Schott and Endl., Cola Nut, Goora Nut, 1989, from the series Angola to Vietnam*, 1989. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

Orchid / #DA70D6

General Sternwood: The orchids are an excuse for the heat. You like orchids? Marlowe: Not particularly. General Sternwood: Nasty things. That flesh is too much like the flesh of men. Their perfume has a rotten sweetness of corruption… — The Big Sleep (1946)

The shape of this flowering plant’s pendulous doubled root ball suggested to some ancient Hellenic botanist the particular danglers in a man’s kit, and the orchid got its name from the Greek word for testes. Thus the dainty beloveds of aristocratic gardeners and fussy flower breeders are buried balls, dirty nuts. Try not to snicker when granny effuses, “I simply adore orchids.” Flowers have always been symbolic of sexuality, and even more so for those for whom it’s suppressed. Women, especially older ones, have been forced by social norms to stanch their desires, rarely granted the allowance to fuck freely. It gladdens the heart in its own weird way to hear old folks homes have the highest rates of STDs these days. Not because it’s good for anyone to catch the clap, but because it means they fuck with more abandon than most might care to admit.

To some, orchids are the sexiest of flowers. Their namesake roots lie buried in most variants, while those strange blooms pump horticultural hearts with lively colors, generous curves, and lusty orifices. If vaginal decoration took a sharp surgical turn past bejeweled vajazzling, you might find yourself confronted with one of these psychedelic pussies when dipping down for a French lick. As flowers, they fall into an uncanny valley. Too close but not close enough, the effect is just creepy rather than alluring. While other flowers invite an inserted nose, a huff, and though not yet an erection, their floral perfume has turned my head in that general direction. But the fleshy orchid does not inspire my lusts even a little. Perhaps even the opposite—its odor and form the absence of body, a dry, funereal thing.

“Crypt orchid” is the term for an undescended testicle, though I dream a flower that can only blossom in tombs.

The bright, rich purple creeps its name from the flower, one of innumerable possibilities for a plant with wild variation. Though it has the crackle of electricity beneath its buzz, orchid’s too muted to be much beyond a suggestion. Bright but not the brightest, rich without being creamy, orchid’s a faded purple haze on a bright day, the fading neon of a strip club past its prime.

Rose / #FF007F

A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

When a beautiful rose dies beauty does not die because it is not really in the rose. — Agnes Martin (1989)

Each five-petal-kiss of colors from the tangled, toothy green stems. A brokenhearted smear, a yearning expressed through the formality of its presentation, the rose’s simple obviousness is its charm. The color of nipple, just exposed before cold air and hot mouths harden it into a deeper shade.

In many languages, the words for “rose” and “pink” are the same.

Rose-colored glasses. Roseate glow.

Rose tints my world Keeps me safe from my trouble and pain. — The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Ask any florist and he’ll know how much a dozen will cost, one extra thrown in for luck. The rose grows thorns to better climb over its neighbors, to push over other flowers hungry for a beam of sunlight. More than one rose has drawn my blood, the dripping finger quickly mouthed.

Rose, floating in the pond, a dead flower in the eddies of the silver surface spangled with light. A lover’s bathtub blanket, a romantic’s bedspread. Rose, a gesture, an empty signifier, a lover’s lament, a husband’s apology. A shapely scented flower, a dream of what pussies could be.

Flowers and fruits are the sex organs of plants. Georgia O’Keeffe knew surely what she was doing with her folded blooms, plumped petals peeled back. Victorian ladies corseted by rigid morality spent repressed hours devotedly fingering their carefully cultivated flowers. Fresh blossoms will wilt on the vine whether they are nabbed or not. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, you virgins who make much of time. The scientific term for wilted plants starved of nutrients and water is “flaccid.”

A lover once told me she only enjoyed flowers knowing that something was dying expressly for her pleasure. Every rose has its thorn…

Flowers began as a funeral tradition to mask the odor of a decaying corpse. Wreathed, bouqueted, and sprayed, apple blossoms and heliotropes, chrysanthemums and camellias, hyacinths and delphiniums, snapdragons and, of course, roses. Anything goes for funeral flowers, just as long as they are fresh.

One artist I know dreamed of casting in concrete the cast-off flowers at the base of a Soviet war memorial. All the original flowers she stared at for hours, snapping picture after picture, measuring and admiring the perfect war memorial, the waste of pageantry all heaped and rotting, all the showy pomp to be swept up and trashed. Failing to gather them all from a park one Sunday afternoon, she made a memorial to that one. Under marbles carved Pro Patria, sometimes you’ll find flowers, but you’ll be sure to find a corpse.

“Roses,” she thought sardonically, “All trash, m’dear.” — Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

As bright blooms fade, what is the color of decay?

Is it a sinking brown, a pale green, a moldy black that captures the wilted flower, the rotten fruit, the decomposing body? Spotted and mottled, both wet and dusty, alive with death’s critters and aromatic with rot, the color is unsteady at best, a hue with a checkered future. Tuck a rose away, let it dry, and though the life goes and the color fades, its form remains.

Ah Little Rose—how easy For such as thee to die! — Emily Dickinson (1858)

I won’t forget to put roses on your grave.

Lilac / #CBA2CB

I lost myself on a cool damp night Gave myself in that misty light Was hypnotized by a strange delight Under a lilac tree I made wine from the lilac tree Put my heart in its recipe It makes me see what I want to see and be what I want to be When I think more than I want to think Do things I never should do I drink much more than I ought to drink Because it brings me back you… Lilac wine is sweet and heady, like my love Lilac wine, I feel unsteady, like my love

Pale purples are the fucking saddest. Lavender’s forgetful wash. Mauve’s lonely decadence. And lilac. The color of unwilling resignation to lost passion. The pale fade, a lost spring.

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. —T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

The lilac flower originated on the Croatian coast whence it found its way into the gardens of Turkish emperors and from there to Europe in the 16th century, not reaching the Americas until the 17th. The scent of lilac has become for many the scent of spring. Carried by the compound indole, which is also found in shit, lilac’s aroma carries with its fade a special decay, heavy and narcotic. To a nose that does not know the tricks of the master perfumer, indole dropped in chocolate and coffee makes a product smell natural.

A note found in perfume, bottled spring, often worn by elderly ladies. In the Descanso Gardens near Los Angeles, there is a grove of two hundred fifty varieties of lilac, their names a horticulturist’s poetry of yearning: Dark Night and Sylvan Beauty, Snow Shower and Spring Parade, Maiden’s Blush and Vesper Song.

I missed their bloom this year, gone to the snowy mountains where the flowers blossom late, but to walk among the towering shrubs is to be punched in the face with perfume. So sweet, so heady. Running my fingers over its heart-shaped leaf, failing to feel my leaf-shaped heart. I dreamed of going to the gardens with my lover and went there many times after she left me. Dreaming of her. Feeling the sweet sadness of her perfume, the unwilling resignation of her love withdrawn. And this lover, all the lovers who always go away. One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs… — Kenneth Koch (1994)

Walt Whitman dropped a sprig on the passing coffin of a murdered president and birthed a poem for dooryards and students. Not his most beautiful by far, but its love is real. As any love for a distant leader can only be so real, but the lilac is love. Staring into a screen full of its color, I am both spring and its destruction. Its bright lovely burst of life, its wilt and loss. The cool kiss of night, naked skin shivers but still you stay. And you stay and drink its sweetness and its rot, you drink your heart.

In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; “But I like it Because it is bitter, And because it is my heart.” — Stephen Crane (1895)

Cherry Blossom / #FFB7C5

A Selection of the Traditional Colors of Japan; or, Bands I Wished I Was In

Cherry Blossom Ibis Wing Long Spring Dawn Orangutan Persimmon Juice Cypress Bark Meat Sparrow Brown Decaying Leaves Pale Incense The Brown of Flattery The Color of an Undried Wall Golden Fallen Leaves Simmered Seaweed Contemplation in a Tea Garden Pale Fallen Leaves Underside of Willow Leaves Sooty Willow Bamboo Thousand-Year-Old Green Insect Screen Rusty Storeroom Velvet Harbor Rat Iron Storage Mousy Wisteria Thin Color Fake Purple Vanishing Red Mouse Half Color Inside of a Bottle

Andrew Berardini is an American writer known for his work as a visual art critic and curator in Los Angeles. He has published articles and essays in publications such as Mousse, Artforum, ArtReview, Art-Agenda.

Originally published on Mousse 55 (October–November 2016)

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djfreedomlives · 7 years

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Peace to you and yours. When ever I greet you, that is how I present myself. There are different words I use but I always come in peace. When I leave you it is the same and I will tell you the same, may even add love and then peace. The bridge between beginning and ending is the wisdom; the dialogue, behavior and/or spirit I come in when I am in the cipher (your presence). Those things embody and tell you if I just said peace but then began to behave like a man with no peace in his language-body language, verbal language are just as important and sometimes more so! What is the point of my posting this when I am always posting about music and travel, events and so on? Because this is what powers my movement, my articulation and every detail of every post. I am building, to put it simply, so when I come like this it is to remind both the civilized (who already know b.u.t.!!), those striving to be content in their civilization and those who decided they don't want to be civil (I can respect that better than what the 10% deal with) this is who I am and all ways will be. It is not to frighten the "non-believers" or to make anyone think suddenly "Freedom woke up!" cause I BEEN woke, sun. And you hip-hop minded already know why I call you sun. 💥 Today is the 11th, or as the civilized say "knowledge knowledge" which is also a greeting we utilize. In this greeting I come today as the embodiment of my post represents that in the image of Malcolm X because he is sometimes presented as only militant, like the man walked talked and lived only radical thinking and behavior. I didn't know him personally but he had a wife and children a there was more to him than just a message of upright life changes and mastering one's own self. It was about having peace of mind and of body, of inner peace and exterior peace. So to close this up for now I know the power of peace is to have peace within to all I do without. #todaysmath is #peace #knowledge (2x) #twofingers #together #civilized #MalcolmX #Brooklyn #museum (photo credit) #loveyourself #peacefuljourney #byanymeans #supremebeing #mgt #knowyourpower #knowbetterdobetter love support and protect our #Queens (at Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn)

#brooklyn #peace #civilized #loveyourself #knowledge #knowbetterdobetter #supremebeing #todaysmath #queens #museum #together #malcolmx #peacefuljourney #knowyourpower #twofingers #byanymeans #mgt

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canaliculi · 7 years

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Take me somewhere nice (5/?)

Gravity Falls

Bill/Ford

M: slow loving romance between two best buds

Bill edges Ford towards the creation of the portal.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

The good thing that I have found

Devotion.

Ford isn’t a religious man. He isn’t one to believe in superstition, in fables or the power of stories. But-

Some kind of god.

-for some reason, those words have become lodged in his mind. Stuck to the insides of his skull like a chewed wad of gum. The kind Stan used to cram up against the underside of his desk with his thumb, winking when Ford’s unimpressed stare caught his eye. He remembers the thin shine of slick saliva on Stan’s finger, and with an unpleasant shudder, the way Stan would wipe his hand on the side of his jeans and grin at him.

Now Bill grins at him, and nigh-indescribable blue prints are written across the sky. Unraveling in bright glowing script, numbers that shuffle themselves into endless equations and lines that connect and combine in alien, unnatural angles. Ford is slaw-jacked, eyes darting back and forth over his mindscape. It’s like trying to read another language, or a cipher – he can pick out some patterns, instances of repetition that hint at something, but without a key it remains a stubborn, jumbled mess.

“Well, Fordsy? What do you THINK? Ready to BUILD IT?”

His wonderment drops through the bottom of his stomach, heavy as a black hole.

“HA! Just kidding! That’s kinda putting the CORPSE before the CARRIAGE, huh?” Bill appears at his side and elbows him. “Gotta learn to crawl out of the PROVERBIAL MUD SOUP before you can GROW LUNGS and SPROUT FUR, am I right?”

“I-” What? Bill, or more precisely, another Bill, pops up before his face, and squishes his cheeks together. The flickering-lightbulb flashing of his body as he speaks is almost blinding this close.

“I’m saying, let’s start with the BASICS!” This Bill lets go of him and swings like a door to the side, to clear his view. Ford’s eye is caught by the slim glint of his profile. Bill’s not quite two-dimensional, but the descriptor’s not far off. His arms and bowtie and hat are all a flat, matching black, and could they be made out of the same material? It doesn’t make sense, but concerning Bill, when has anything?

Bill flips back to him without warning and Ford actually recoils a fraction of an inch, feeling acutely like he has been caught. It carries with it the edge of his adolescence, freezing motionless at the creak of footsteps beyond his door, heart pounding and eyes fixed through the dark on the battered door of his room, hardly even able to breathe. Bill’s eye curves. His muse splits down the center, and like a cell, two Bills are there where there had been one. This newest copy is wearing a graduation cap in place of his top hat, and carries a pointing stick instead of a cane.

“The basics!” New Bill repeats, and floats away from him. The other two hover by his sides, both watching their copy as though they, too, are ready for a lecture. Ford finds himself smiling.

“You are the expert, Bill,” Ford says, and the sprawling, almost labyrinthine blueprints vanish in hazy wisps of blue tinted smoke.

“That’s RIGHT, I AM! But YOU’RE my, what’s the word?” Bill smacks the stick down in the palm of his free hand, the sharp, cracking sound of wood against flesh that sends a rolling wave of something down his center, branching out along his limbs. “Student, mentee, protégé, take your PICK!”

Each choice fills his mind with a different imagining - Bill before him, Bill at his side, Ford on his knees - and Ford isn’t sure which he prefers. He isn’t forced to decide. The smoke coalesces into a long and meandering equation, that nonetheless feels familiar in some distant way. His eyes run across it again and again.

“Now, smart guy, what can you tell me about-”

“Gravity!” Bill drops his stick, and the two at his sides turn to stare at him. All their small, thin limbs are drooping gracelessly from the bottom of their forms. The tips of his ears turn hot, and Ford fingers along the hem of his shirt. “Uh-” clears his throat “-that is what this equation, or at least part of it, refers to, correct?”

“…You got it in ONE! Man, am I IMPRESSED! They didn’t call you Poindexter for nothing, huh?”

Ford can feel himself beaming and he tries to reel his reaction back in. Bill has never shown any inclination to control his own emotes, but Ford’s old habits die hard and his heart is beating almost painfully in his chest. It’s even harder when a small hand shifts through his hair, scratching over his scalp in a way that sends pleasing, tingling chills shivering down his spine.

He turns his head to the left, staring up at Bill – or the copy of his muse – still dragging his black hand up and down, back and forth, and whatever expression Ford has on his face causes his muse’s eye to crinkle upward in a smirk. Bill’s hand goes to the back of his head, and his fingers tighten around the fluffy locks of Ford’s hair, tugs gently and insistently to face him forward again. Ford swallows, hyperaware of Bill withdrawing as he turns his attention back to the equation. The other Bill is tapping his foot midair, impatient.

“SO, now that I have your ATTENTION… GRAVITY! HOW it WORKS – which I’m SURE, a SHUT-IN NERD like YOURSELF already KNOWS ALL ABOUT – and more IMPORTANTLY, how to make it NOT WORK!”

Ford learns what he can at night, and spends his days penning out page after page of mathematic theorems and crude, prototypical models of the machine he and Bill will build together. He writes until his hand cramps and the neat lines of his usual script become sloppy and smudged from the side of his palm. More than once he puts the wrong end of his pen up to his lips, resulting in a splattering of black ink across his mouth.

When he closes his eyes, numbers swim incorporeally across his vision, and when he tries to go to sleep he tosses and turns while his mind runs over his work without end. Bill comes more often, both in his dreams and as the semi-hallucinatory, intangible projection that pops up in the middle of his days without warning.

One such occurrence comes as Ford is mulling over his journal, plagued with the nagging, skittering sensation that he is forgetting something. With his thoughts occupied he doodles in the margins of his notes. A few cipher symbols, some pieces of as-yet theoretical machinery, and perhaps a scattering of triangle shapes here and there (and everywhere). Something isn’t fitting together quite right, but Ford can’t put his finger on it. He draws three lines. Did Bill say something that has managed to escape him?

“How’s it GOING?” With his usual subtlety, Bill is floating above his desk, occupying what had been previously stuffy and empty air. Ford jumps and slams his hand down flat, trying to cover up his idle sketches. It’s not very successful, as they are littered about the page, and if he looks down, heart hammering in his throat, he can see bits of them peaking between his fingers.

“Bill! Fine! It’s uh, fine,” Ford says.

“Let’s see what you got!” Ford can’t help but to grimace. Still, he angles his journal to let Bill get a better look. He fidgets in his seat and watches Bill’s pupil ticking back and forth across his work like a metronome. “Not BAD!” He lets out a held breath. “But you MISSED a step!”

All the thoughts fly out of Ford’s head and he pulls his journal closer, barely aware of the way his actions drag the physical object through his muse’s projection (and the subsequent indignant yelp of said muse). He… he did. He missed a step. He can see it now, and it’s a mix of pleasure and mortification to find that his problem is so simply solved.

Bill stays for a while and coos in his ears. How many humans could do what you’re doing here, Fordsy? I’ve been around a long time and I know the answer – none! His fingers are shaking by the time he is done. And after that, he doesn’t bother to hide away his doodles. Bill never comments on them, and Ford is certain it must be his own fancies, that he imagines Bill grins a little more after he sees them.

The dreams that fill the void between Bill’s visits are just as frustrating as ever, but now something looms constant in the periphery of his mind. Ford will dream of Bill speaking in numbers and watch the large struts and braces of some monolithic machine coming together cinch by cinch. Hands made from living darkness, their surfaces shifting and crawling as though swarms of parasites reside just below, they grab him and cradle him and aim his head towards a sky that spins in jerking, nauseating spirals.

“What is this supposed to be, anyway?” Bill – not Bill – asks him. Ford’s arms are tied behind his back, long curls of thick rope wrapped around and around each limb. When he shifts, they burn against his skin like he’s been wearing them for hours. “Student-Teacher? Muse-uh, whoever muses work with?”

Bill places one hand on Ford’s cheek, so that the claw of his middle finger rests over the thin flesh of Ford’s lower eyelid, and tap-tap-taps against the bulging curve of his eye through it. Ford shivers, his body going tense, but he doesn’t move away. He wants to answer but a hand closes his mouth, his teeth clacking together.

“No no, I wanna guess,” Bill says. The hand on his chin moves upward, and a cool palm rests over his lips. Bill’s finger taps against his eye. “Master-servant? Nah, not yet. Oh, I got it! Charming CON ARTIST and his lovable, DUPABLE MARK!”

Bill shoves his claw harder against his eyelid, harder, until Ford can feel a hot bead of blood welling up. When his muse takes his hand away, it dribbles down his cheek in an unbroken stream.

“Talk about foreshadowing, am I right? Ah, what would you know anyway. Actually Fordsy, you really should count yourself lucky – ALL SEEING isn’t ALL it’s cracked up to be!” Bill laughs. Ford’s head feels stuffed full of cotton, and he thinks he must not get the joke. “Well go ahead, open up! Let’s hear those innermost thoughts and FEELINGS!”

The hand across his mouth doesn’t move but cracks, fissures, and splits cleanly down its midline, strings of sticky black stuff stretching between the straight white bones of each half before reaching their limit and breaking. Its fingers seize and shake, and it’s only then that Ford realizes it’s got one finger too many.

“You are…” he begins, but stops. Words can’t encapsulate it. Bill narrows his eye, and Ford thinks of the statue in his den, the statues and tapestries slowly accumulating around it. Ford thinks of Bill offering him a sealed scroll, a gem, an all-seeing eye on a chain. Bill watches him, and then sprouts his extra arms, and they trail ghosting touches down his arms, across his chest, bury fingers into his hair and yank.

“Go on, Fordsy.” Ford is dragged upwards, lifted docile into the air, and he can hear the great, groaning sound of some engine rumbling to life. The edges of his vision quake. “Go on. GO ON.” The last words are preternaturally deep and resonate, and then like a laugh track spliced over itself again and again, Bill laughs and laughs and laughs.

Ford wakes up with a pounding – splitting – headache. He can only remember snatches of his dream, but he can still hear Bill whispering go on. His sheets stick to the sweat on his body and his pulse throbs through his veins. There is buzzing pressure inside him, building behind some dam. He clenches his fingers in the sheets and grinds his molars and wonders how long it will hold.

Nothing has challenged him like this. It makes sense, he supposes – this is the culmination of his life’s work. It doesn’t make it any less bitter of a pill to swallow. Everything has come almost naturally to him – 12 PhDs can attest to this – and what hasn’t, has been surmounted by hard work and indomitable will. And yet, no matter how he metaphorically bashes his brains against his journals, sometimes the things Bill tells him just don’t click.

It’s hard to say how many hours straight he has been sitting at his desk. His knees ache and the column of his spine that comes up between his shoulder blades flares rhythmically with heat. Muscles tight in broad, rock hard slabs, or bundled up like knots of tied cables. Eventually time doesn’t matter – and Ford realizes this after he sets his pen down to hunch over and rake both hands through his hair. When he looks back up, the pen is floating in midair, as are his desk and chair, and his lamp most of all, its shade titling crookedly upwards and its cord dangling behind it.

It’s not hard to guess he’s in the mindscape. There’s a warm weight on his head, and Ford doesn’t even have to catch the edge of a golden glow across the top of his line of sight to know that Bill has settled on him. Small hands fluff up his hair and then smoosh it to the sides, so Bill can lean forward and meet his eye. Ford knows what is coming.

“Fordsy,” Bill says.

“No.”

“What?” Is this really the first time he’s caught his muse off guard?

“I’m fine.” Ford stares straight ahead, at the constellations that have become a base, primal comfort. Bill laughs.

“It’s nothing to be-”

“I can do it!” he doesn’t mean to blurt it out, but he does, and his cheeks burn. The backs of his eyes prickle and he marvels at how pathetic he must be to his muse. His muse who has lived longer than human history itself, and has seen every manner of genius his species has taken. Ford shuts his eyes tight and chews on the fleshy inside of his cheek, and he feels Bill lift off his skull, and can feel the welcoming warmth that radiates from his form hovering before him.

“I know you can, IQ – I’m not doubting you here,” Bill says. Ford can’t open his eyes. “I was just thinking, maybe some ON-CALL tutoring wouldn’t be out of the question.”

“I-I don’t need-”

“No, no, no one is saying NEED, Fordsy! But I have to ADMIT, this POPPING in and out of your DIMENSION thing isn’t working for me!” It twists around like a knife in his chest but Ford opens his eyes to look at his muse. “Not to say I don’t LOVE bursting in unexpected, but let’s face facts here, about HALF the time I come around you’re IN THE SHOWER!”

“…What?” Oh god, has Bill seen him? Naked? Ford can feel his jaw hanging slack.

“Yeah! I usually just LEAVE, but not BEFORE-”

“Tutoring!” Ford interrupts, face and neck and ears all hot. “What are you proposing?”

Bill looks upward, and taps his finger along his surface, like he’s thinking. Ford’s gaze gets caught on his claw, each time it clicks against the gold plating of his form, and his right eye aches.

“Have you ever dabbled in MEDITATING?”

It’s like a direct line to him, Bill promises, and the first time Ford crosses one leg over the other, he feels ridiculous. But he tries to concentrate. On the slow, deep, even in and out of his breath. His thoughts drift, but he snaps them back. Concentrates on concentrating on nothingness, at first. And then concentrates on his muse. It feels strange to allow his thoughts to linger on Bill, after he’s spent so long trying to do the exact opposite.

Soon enough, Bill is in front of him.

“See? I’m at your BECK and CALL!”

And so it goes. Ford will get stuck, and Bill will come whenever he beckons. He works to keep it from going to his head. From wondering what it means, how he could even begin to express it - Bill, for all intents and purposes, making himself available for any question or whimsy Ford may stumble upon. He works himself ragged, until he looks in a mirror and doesn’t see himself, hollow, dark eyes and scruffy face. It’s worth it, he tells himself, and splashes water on his face. Goes to the kitchen and makes another pot of coffee, and neglects the dishes that have sat collecting in the bottom of the sink for the better part of a week that has turned into a month.

It’s worth it.

Devotion, he thinks to himself, and then thinks of the colleges that rejected him. Those faceless judges who will droop and sag to see his definitive triumph.

But there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Sleep is simultaneously a waste and respite, and Ford feels sick to his stomach every time the telltale creep of exhaustion bleeds into his bones. He remembers feeling this way when he was young, watching the sun set on the beach with Stanley, a long summer’s day ended in equally long shades. They used to sit so close that their shadows would blur together, and Stan would talk about where they would go one day, and Ford would drift and dreamily contemplate far off shores and untold wonders.

Far off shores – the farthest he’s ever known – are now one final mystery away. Untold wonders have already been dropped heavy into his lap, and so many more await him. He doesn’t need Stanley – he never did. This thought has blossomed, intrusively, into his mind more than once, and he doesn’t know why, but he works harder than ever.

Ford is getting used to finding himself in the mindscape, with no recollection of going to sleep.

“You’re burning the candle at both ends,” Bill says, right before he makes his latest offer, and his hand becomes wreathed in cerulean flames.

You pick the time – and the place; though I guess the place is always gonna be your fleshy meat sack, huh!

Just let me into your MIND, Stanford! And he has shaken his hand.

No matter how he has endeavored to disguise it, there is some raw and fragile part of Ford. Delicate, beefy red strings of emotion that regrow over and over. That leave him vulnerable and exposed, whenever he slips up. As he reaches his hand out, Ford is reminded of this piece of himself. Let me in, Bill says, let me in. The blue, shivering flame feels like ice over his skin, sharp pins that dig down to his bones and make his every nerve ending tingle to life.

Ford says, until the end of time.

The time and the place, and what better time than now? His choice for the place is his study. Not the one where he spends his days writing, that Bill is already intimately familiar with. He chooses the one he has sequestered away, has been careful not to work in lest his muse come calling. The one that he has filled with various forgotten treasures and weavings. An altar of sorts, that he has done his best to keep obscured from its object of worship.

The room shifts back and forth, timed with the flickering of candles strewn across its various surfaces. Ford drops to his knees and is acutely aware of the scratchy itch of his jeans. Of the force his body exerts on his knees and feet, just by resting on them. It makes him think of pressure ulcers, how they can form in just two hours of immobility, of soft, damaged, pink flesh. He lights the last two candles before him, and shifts his weight from one knee to the other and back and sighs.

He closes his eyes, and the tiny flames of the candles morph into orange-yellow blobs across the backs of his eyelids. A deep breath in, on the count of one, two, three, four, five, and a slow breath out on the count of six, seven, eight, nine. And again. Paying attention to the swell of his ribcage like the rising of a tide. And out. Paying attention to the ebb of his lungs, the receding waves.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

In.

And everything goes black.

Until he comes to again, and hears himself laughing. Ford can see, he can feel, but he can’t move, and panic thrashes wild in his stomach. His hands are moving. His right crouches like an insect around his neck, and he can feel the force of each fingertip along the column of his throat. And the left strokes up and down his stomach, beneath the bunched up layers of his shirt and vest.

“Stanford Pines,” he hears himself say. A shudder rolls along his spine, and something clicks in his mind. Bill. “That’s right. And I gotta say, this is not what I was expecting!”

Ford wishes he could swallow, he could fidget, he could pick at the fine fibers of his clothing, but there is no outlet for his nerves. His body – Bill – breathes in deep, without him.

“I’m flattered, Fordsy.” Bill looks around the room, his eyes stopping on each and every item, and Ford feels his body reacting. His only instinct is to hide, to curl into himself, but Bill arches his back and spreads his leg, and his hand drips down like honey to caress along the length straining against the zipper of his jeans.

Ford is a mess. He wants to hyperventilate, but Bill breathes evenly, huskily, and the thumb of his left hand flicks open his jeans. The fingers of his right hand tighten, pressing with expert precision against both carotid arteries, so he feels sick and lightheaded. Bill’s – his – left hand moves, slow at first, building to a frantic pace, and Ford finds himself unable to worry for the future.

When it’s over, Ford is thrust back in control, pearly white droplets hanging sticky from his fingers and stomach. He stares at his hand and wonders if he imagined it all. And then he’s watching himself again, unable to even grimace as he wipes his hand off on his good sweater.

“If you wanted to take this partnership to the next level,” he hears himself say, and his head is still swimming. “You could have just said something.”

The world collapses back in on itself like a dying star, Bill’s – his – voice a slim, glowing tether in the middle of pitch black that, without sound or fanfare, blips out of existence.

The thing about the world – or at very least, Ford’s perception of the world – blinking in and out again, is that it gives him no time to contemplate or compartmentalize anything that has happened. He jolts awake in his body, his mind still expecting the study, the candles, Bill’s hand-

Bill.

None of it is there. Lost time isn’t a concept he’s familiar with. Even if he may lose track of it, he doesn’t lose it. Studying, reading, sketching – all activities that have kept up him well into the small hours of the morning and sometimes beyond. But that time isn’t gone. He knows exactly where it went, what he was doing, even if he had, perhaps, gone a little overboard in the moment.

This is nothing like that. Fords wakes up in his living room, and the first thing that registers is a hot, painful tightness across his chest. He’s in his lounge chair, in just boxers and a thin undershirt. He looks down, hand already raised, fingers running over the white cloth, seeking out the strange irritant. His fingertips hit something damp and sticky and he frowns, wincing at the spark of pain his own touch inspires. There are random splotches where some liquid has seeped through the material of his shirt, yellowish and red tinged in some areas, all across his chest.

Ford lunges to his feet, and a book topples off his lap, landing with a soft thunk on the floor. Bewildered, he kneels down and carefully picks up the slim tome. It’s one of his journals, one of the few he hasn’t found occasion to use yet. But he turns it in his hand, and its spine is broken with tiny white hairline fractures that run up and down its length. He cracks it open, halfway expecting something to jump out at him, though he isn’t quite sure why.

This isn’t a cheesy horror movie, so of course, nothing emerges from its pages. Instead, he just sees page after page after page of equations and diagrams, all written in a singularly precise and unknown style. Bill, he thinks; this is his muse’s handwriting. It only takes four or five pages for the material to become unfamiliar, but he can already begin to see how everything slots together. He’s grinning heavily, too eager with the novelty to pay close attention to the information at the moment. His flipping through is put on pause when he catches sight of a very crudely drawn stick figure in one of the corners, with the succinct note thought I’d return the favor! scribbled next to it.

He laughs, which causes the, whatever-it-is on his chest to stretch and send fresh radiating waves of irritation scrambling along his nerve roots. It spurs him to set the book on the squat coffee table and proceed towards the bathroom. Ford looks around his house like he’s never been in it before. Bill has left all the lights on, and Ford notices with a frown, the refrigerator door open. He clicks them off, one by one, and closes the door, feeling almost as though he is cleaning up after an uninvited guest.

An unexpected breeze stirs his hair, its cool bite inspiring goosebumps to prickle out across his bare arms and legs. The chill makes a sharp contrast to the burning ache across his chest, and Ford’s not sure if it’s making things better or worse as he slams the window closed. It’s still dark outside, but he can see the faint purple and gold streaks of a sunrise on its way.

In the bathroom, Ford leans down and splashes water across his face, and then stares at himself in the mirror. He doesn’t… look any different. But he feels different. Misplaced, somehow. His hands rest on the porcelain edge of the sink and he leans his weight forward, shoulders hunching up. He sighs and drops his hands, and then lifts his shirt off. Lets off small hisses of breath as the fabric clings to damp spots on his chest, so that he has to peel it off of himself in agonizing slow motion.

Ford frowns as he exams the marks. Raw, bright pink splotches against his skin – some blistered, some just wet and open. Small puffs of white threads from his shirt stick like burs to their edges. They’re all shallow, superficial wounds, in strange globular patterns, and it isn’t until he spots a minutely raised oval of wax that he finally puts it all together. Bill poured candle wax on him.

He swings the mirror open, snatching some antiseptic out and beginning to liberally dab it over the burns. Now that he’s able to look closer, he can see that some of them are surrounded or scoured through with thick scratches – probably Bill trying to scrap the congealed wax off his skin. Ford isn’t at all sure what to make of this.

Curiosity is the simplest explanation. And according to someone or other’s razor, it is therefore the most likely. Ford, however, isn’t naïve; certain pictures come to mind when he thinks of hot wax dribbling down on skin, that send fresh waves of goosebumps cropping up over his body. It isn’t something he’s really given much thought to before, but apparently anything at all that involves Bill is capable of driving him to distraction.

Instinctively by this point, Ford redirects his thought process. He chides himself as inappropriate, just before he remembers what he woke into. His body kneeling in a candlelit room – a shrine – Bill speaking through his mouth, with his voice. And his hands, just the two of them, roaming over a scant section of his skin, each touch his own, familiar and yet newly electrifying. It’s still difficult to describe, even think about describing – the feeling of his body moving without his input, not quite an out of body experience. Not quite alone in his head.

Ford is quite alone now. A drop of water has been pooling quietly along the lip of the faucet, and it drips, a single syllable plop that disturbs him from his thoughts. He flicks off the light when he leaves but he leaves the door hanging open. Grabs the discarded journal from the living room and clicks the lamp once and twice and off. Descends to his study, where all the candles have burned low, become thick layered puddles with an ashy swipe of soot in their middle.

He sits at his desk. His fingers drum, uneasy, against the book’s smooth cover. For the first time in months (he tells himself), he wonders where Stanley is. And then he opens the journal, at the beginning, and starts to read.

#f!tag: GF #status!tag: WIP

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