#canvas of babel

[canvas-of-babel]

We're no strangers to love You know the rules and so do I A full commitment's what I'm thinking of You wouldn't get this from any other guy I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling Gotta make you understand Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you We've known each other for so long Your heart's been aching, but you're too shy to say it Inside, we both know what's been going on We know the game and we're gonna play it And if you ask me how I'm feeling Don't tell me you're too blind to see Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you (Ooh, give you up) (Ooh, give you up) Never gonna give, never gonna give (Give you up) Never gonna give, never gonna give (Give you up) We've known each other for so long Your heart's been aching, but you're too shy to say it Inside, we both know what's been going on We know the game and we're gonna play it I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling Gotta make you understand Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you

yep, it's a rickroll. of course

In other news, we are back to the original color scheme. Wonderful. The stripe of chaos down at the bottom slowly grows

[the-bone-theif]

sometimes it’s nice to just stop and stare into the canvas of babel, meaningless fuzz scrolling past from the innumerable, insurmountable random assortments, hoping in vain to see anything even slightly comprehensible

but the canvas shows me nothing, nothing of its impossibly vast collections, vague imprints of all which will ever be, sealed away beyond the sheer magnitude of incomprehensible forms and flavors of static and slag

[tprings-hair]

2x10: JOURNEY TO BABEL

[daryj]

figma vibes

feito em: 06/05/2024

[jareckiworld]

Zhang Gong — Tower of Babel (acrylic on canvas, 2011)

[towns-end-bindery]

Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence by R.F. Kuang

My second time rebinding Babel, this time for a commission! I was grateful to have been given creative freedom with the design.

It’s heavily inspired by The Locked Library’s special edition of Babel. The image in the gothic window is part of a steel plate engraving. It depicts a 19th century view of the City of Oxford which was drawn and engraved by William Westall A.R.A. and Edward Finden, and was published in Great Britain Illustrated. All other design elements come from Canva. The typeface used is called Lovelace.

I printed my design directly onto plain white Wooqu bookcloth using an inkjet printer. The case was made using the three-piece bradel method. The end papers are green marbled paper from Two Hands Paperie.

[mister-a-z-fell]

People often say to me ‘Aziraphale, what exactly is Firmament?’

And by ‘often’, I mean ‘twice’, and they don’t so much say it as send me little enquiries on the Twitters and the Tumbler, along with inexplicable demands to know whether Crowley or I go ‘on top’.

I’ll get to the point in a moment, but, since you’re here, I would like to make it clear that our sleeping arrangements are nobody’s business but our own.

In any case, we don’t own a bunk bed, so the point is moot.

The subject of Firmament first came up on a clear night a few hundred years after I followed Adam and Eve out from Eden. Seth — their third child — was lying on a stone outcrop near the settlement, watching the sky, and I was sitting a little way off, keeping an eye out for scorpions.

‘Ol-ah-kwa*?’ The boy was usually full of questions, but that night he’d been uncharacteristically quiet. ‘What are they called, the lights above?’ It wasn’t the first time he’d asked and he already knew the answer perfectly well, but that was his way.

‘Those are stars. Has your father shown you how to find your path by them?’ He shook his head, and I resolved to talk to Eve in the morning.

‘How are they there? Are they like flowers on a bush? Or spots on a lizard? How many there are.’

I wished Crowley had been there, just then. He could have explained it so much better. I did my best, although I think I left him with the impression that every star hovered high in the heavens like a hummingbird, and he took some convincing that they wouldn’t eventually grow tired, having nowhere to perch, and come crashing down around us.

‘But why are they like fires? If they were made to fly up there forever, why don’t they grow feathers and just be birds?’

‘Well, that would rather defeat the purpose, B-qa-lyl**.’ And that might have been the end of the matter, but the boy had long since learned my weakness.

‘Don’t you know?’

And this is what I told him:

‘They are stars, because God told them to be stars. If She ever decides that they should be birds, then birds they will become. She told your father and mother to be human, because there was a place made in the world for humanity. Your purpose in this life is to discover what it means to be human.’

‘What about the next life?’

‘Wait and see.’

And this is what I didn’t tell him:

In the Beginning was the Void. And God spoke into the Nothing -That-Was, and that word was the first Firmament.

Firmament exists without mass, without substance. It is the Almighty’s intent, Her design, Her love; it is a blueprint for reality, pure potential and the Universe is spun with its threads. In the hands of the Virtues, it takes on form, accretes matter — becomes Material, a mechanism turned with a key that sounds like ‘LET THERE BE’.

Firmament can only be seen by the shadows that it casts. Gravity. The way that particles converse. Electromagnetism. Slood. It moves in mysterious ways and it reaches everywhere that is not Void. One day, scholars will glimpse the outer edges of ‘omnipresence’, and call it ‘quantum entanglement’.

I should have found a way to explain that — while stars aren’t birds — they share their firmament as all the brush stokes of a masterpiece share their canvas, as the individual notes of a melody are carried on the same breath. Everything touches everything. ‘Look what ye have done unto one of the least of these my brethren, the same have ye done unto me.’

Perhaps if I’d taught Seth that all that lies between each of us and the furthest, strangest star is a triviality called ‘distance’, which only really has meaning inside the preserve of mortal dimensions, he might have understood. I tried to explain it to his descendants, but perhaps they were too old, too certain of themselves, to listen. I was never much of a teacher.

Later, in all the confusion of Babel, rāqīa (something beaten thin to form a surface) and rakhmyn (love) went their separate ways, and whenever I encountered the subject of… celestial scaffolding — for want of a better word — it came in the context of the former. A shell to support the stars, to hold back the upper waters. They forgot about the ‘love’ part.

Later still, Crowley got volubly drunk with a fellow named Copernicus and made some progress, but even his controversial model couldn’t let go of firmament as the pastry around the universal profiterole.

Then there was Giordano Bruno… but we don’t talk about him.

So, here I am, trying again. Hoping that I’ve explained myself better this time, because, after all, that’s what an angel is: Firmament imbued with mind, and grace, willed into life by words of purpose unique to each one of us. Wearing atomic fancy-dress so that we can speak to you in words you can comprehend (ideally without falling down and giggling while your hair smoulders gently).

We are, at base, figments of Her imagination, which is so powerful that it was necessary that She invent free will to stop all things yielding unfailingly to Her whim. As a consequence, reality tends to become malleable in our immediate vicinity.

What is Firmament? It’s everything. It’s Creation. It’s humans, and demons, and angels. It’s stars, and it’s the walls of Eden. It’s the bullet, and the finger pulling the trigger, the magician and the audience, and the shocked air expanding in ripples from the burning powder. It’s the scalpel, and the flesh. And inside, beneath the dancing atoms, it’s love.

Try to remember that part, because sometimes it seems very well hidden.

It’s love.

*Brother

**Something small

[steepedinink]

Page 2.

My Magnum Opus

Slowly, slowly, I am realizing the art of life and the artistry in living on this mysterious black canvas.

It is beautiful in one sense and haunting in another. With every sunset, I begin to lose this fragile identity of mine. It’s drifting farther and farther away from me. It often makes me question: What am I? Who am I? Where do I belong? Did I ever have an identity to begin with?

The more I try to understand myself, the more “I”

becomes hollow.

It comes to me at night. The ocean of musings, in friendship with sorrow and freedom. No textbooks or teachers can teach you this heavenly piece of art called life. We are all artists in strange ways. We craft this deeply personal masterpiece by the name Life.

In my artistry, I’ve come to understand: words are my weapon, the one that will help me craft my magnum opus. My organon, my sacred tool, touches souls with it, gives warmth, tears hearts, and shatters lives. I use my mighty strength more often for the latter than the former. Solitude floods my brain with bright light and casts the shadow of my past. The strokes of darkness shape my shadow from that light.

Now I understand the strength of my weapon, my tool: the words, the language, the expression. Like any other tool, it’s powerful enough to build a castle from scratch and to tear everything down to dust, like the Tower of Babel.

In this darkest bright hour, I see the shades. I hear the melodies. I touch the sculpture, and I feel the artistic vision. What stopped me from opening up my expressive heart all this time? Why did I keep the rusted chain tightly wrapped around it?

Misunderstandings. Rejections. The fear of being hated and left out.

What made me misunderstood?

The very art I crafted wasn’t authentic; my art was misleading.

Why was I rejected?

Because my organon tore everything down to the ground, rather than building, or even becoming, a tool of glory.

I met him, precisely speaking, last weekend. The core “me” I was searching for all this time. The one I thought I lost months ago. He filled and poured essence into the hollow, empty space within “I.” He talked to me. He never left me. I was the one who left him, abandoned him in the abyss. He was there all this time, like a shadow calling me, reminding me of what I’d become. Now I understand how we are both different, but the same.

Everything I did made me depart from me, and now made me arrive in “me.”

[majestativa]

How benevolent it seems, the Tower of Babel in Kafka’s canvas, yet how terrifying the silence between bricks...

— LILIANA URSU ⚜️ The Sky Behind the Forest: Selected Poems, to Emil Cioran, transl. by Liliana Ursu with Adam J. Sorkin & Tess Gallagher, (1997)

[kjzx]

Вавилонская башня/Tower of Babel

Ivan Pokidyshev, 2018, oil on canvas, 90x90cm

[canvas-of-babel]

The FitnessGram™ Pacer Test is a multistage aerobic capacity test that progressively gets more difficult as it continues. The 20 meter pacer test will begin in 30 seconds. Line up at the start. The running speed starts slowly, but gets faster each minute after you hear this signal. [beep] A single lap should be completed each time you hear this sound. [ding] Remember to run in a straight line, and run as long as possible. The second time you fail to complete a lap before the sound, your test is over. The test will begin on the word start. On your mark, get ready, start.

I just noticed how lovely a color that sky is when the color channels swap like that. Really reflects how I still feel everytime I hear that damn fitnesgram thing. Can't escape it even now that it's been discontinued in schools, fun memories

[hildegardavon]

Signed J. Boudin, late 18th Century

Susanna and the Elders, 1789, oil on canvas, 39x25 cm

Private Collection

The scantily clad Susanna sits at the edge of the pool, while the two splendidly dressed judges approach from behind and press her. Oval composition with a view of the Tower of Babel in the background.

[worldsandemanations]

Zhang Gong — Tower of Babel (acrylic on canvas, 2011)

[sentientballofpeas]

if you have a favorite copypasta, send it my way please! I'm running a new gimmick blog over at @canvas-of-babel where asks destruct an image

Ooooh sounds fun

[jareckiworld]

Olaf Bisschoff — The Library of Babel (Jorge Luis Borges, 1941) oil and canvas, on board, 2023.

[waspsinyouryard]

I just realized that house of leaves is one of the only books that wouldn't be in the library of babel since the formatting of the text is actually important to the story in a way that couldn't be re-created by the library unless you also allowed it to incorporate the canvas of babel

Not sure what to do with this half baked idea

hm...