#past and future superimposed on top of each other

[wonderer399]

Sebastian x Ciel 🥀❤️‍🔥🖤💖🌹👄 Astrology analysis (Synastry) Part 1a ✨🔮🌌

*⚠️Non Shippers PLEASE IGNORE MY POST AND STAY OUT! I don't want your negativity in my blog! If you don't like it, then don't engage with it...as simple as that!!⚠️*

I wanted to make a really unique, fun and interesting post related to sebaxciel. I have been studying astrology for the past 8 years now and I can tell you that its not a joke and actually can be very somewhat creepy like how do they know about me so much like wtf! stop exposing me!💀 Astrology is very vast and very in depth knowledge if you want to look at it further. So I thought why not lets make a synastry and composite chart about seba x ciel and how their relationship dynamic works astrologically and how their relationship is still evolving. I have also made their numerology chart and its fun! (I'm still learning astrology and numerology , so if I make any mistakes please kindly correct me!)

Out of my curiosity I just wanted to look at Seba x Ciel 's synastry, composite and numerology chart report and analysis and BOY !!!! I WAS SH👀K !! LIKE WTF!!! HOW!?!? HOW CAN THIS BE 💯% ACCURATE!! Now its giving me creepy vibes like did Yana purposefully picked their birthdays ?!?!? SO HERE I AM BLOGGING THIS ✨ ASTROLOGICAL MIRACLE ✨ and you are reading it!! GET READY TO GET SH👀K !! CAUSE YOU KNOW SHARING IS CARING!!

In this Part 1, I will only discuss about the planetary and asteroid Synastry aspects ( synastry chart means that you take 2 different people's chart and superimpose it on top of each other to see how 2 different people act with each other between their relationship dynamic ) ( this part 1 is getting really really long, so I decided to break it down into many mini parts ( like part 1 a,b,c..I don't even know how many mini sub parts of part 1 I will write, but it is more than 2 ) , Its like writing an AO3 ...you can never stop writing lmao! In part 2 I will go further into the Synastry and the details of the House placements and how the house overlays gives their relationship dynamic more definition! Part 3 and Part 4 will be based on composite charts! ( composite chart means you combine 2 different people's chart to see how they work together as a team or as a 1 person ) Part 5 will be about Numerology and if I'm able to find out more interesting astrological facts about them then I may make part 6 ( mostly Natal analysis )...I'm gonna expose everything about SebaxCiel dynamic and their real personality and how their relationship works and how its evolving and what do we expect to see in the future especially in the manga chapters! *EXCITED*

The birthdays, time and location I used :

Sebastian : 18th January, 1886 ( 6:30 am ) London,UK

( I was extremely skeptical about Sebby's date, however after doing lots of research and some analysis, I have come up with this birthday as it is very accurate...at least I tried to make it accurate! , also I used this bd for sebby because whenever a demon a manifested in this 3d human realm, it is 'reborn' again...obviously he a thousand years old I'm not using that B.C. date lmao! )

( okay I know none of them were actually exactly born in London,Uk however I do not really know where the mansions located...so I used London as a general location and England isn't that big enough like the states lol ..so it wouldn't affect the reading and analysis much at all I think! lol )

Ciel : 14th December, 1875 ( 7:30 am ) London,UK

Synastry Chart below! I'm going to explain now what planetary and asteroid aspects creates their LOVING, STEAMY , SEXY AND IRRESISTIBLE synastry !

✨ Ciel is Deep Blue and Sebastian is Deep Orange ✨

Just like their Eye colors! *GASPS* that was a coincidence! SH👀K !!

✨KEY ASPECTS ✨

Their positive aspects :

Their negative aspects :

( these two images illustrates their dynamics of both positive and negative sides of the same coin )

I'm gonna talk about *positive aspects only ( mostly conjunctions, as trines and sextiles are very watered down version of conjunctions, its still positive though )* cause I don't wanna ruin the *rose-colored glasses* mood we all sebaxciel shippers have it on right now! I don't need to talk about *negative aspects* cause they don't really fight much...its just the power chokehold they have it on each other kinda like BDSM not physicially but psychologically and I kinda find that really really hot! *negative aspects* ( Oppositions and Squares ) aren't necessairily that bad they are just 'necessary evil' for realtionship to grow, improvise, evolve, survive and thrive . If you guys find more aspects you can reply or reblog!

*Website used : Astroseek.com*

Jupiter - Juno ( 👰🏻🤵🏻 ) : *HAPPILY MARRIED, THE ULTIMATE HUSBAND - WIFE DYNAMIC*

Jupiter, the planet of expansion, faith, hope, good luck, opportunity, wealth, philosophical and spiritual values and financial gains. It's also known as the Great Benefactor because it's larger than all the other planets in the solar system. Jupiter the god and husband of Juno according to the greek mythology. Juno, the asteroid of loyalty, intimate, serious and long term relationships and partnering. Juno is the goddess of marriage and protector of women, who was known for her loyalty and protection of women. Jupiter and Juno were a married couple. Juno is Jupiter's most prominent wife and is often depicted as a beautiful queen-consort. Juno is the queen of the gods and is worshipped as the protector of marriage and homemaking. Jupiter is also known for his infidelity and he had many other affairs lol.

When Jupiter and Juno tightly conjuncts in a synastry like this, both the juno and jupiter person wants to have a strong and powerful commitment towards each other. Jupiter brings happiness in juno person's life. Jupiter's optimistic approach in life boosts the ego and confidence of juno person. They both think they have found their 'ideal match' as Juno is extremely loyal, supportive and devoted to Jupiter person's interests and goals. Jupiter helps juno through expanding Juno's vision for their future goals and Juno helps Jupiter by grounding themselves in practical day to day life. Jupiter person also helps juno to succeed in careers to achieve BIG GOALS. Juno is tolerant of Jupiter just like a loyal, devoted and faithful wife!

Its a very stable and long lasting and perfect synastry for marrige! Jupiter brings out Juno’s desire for marriage and commitment in a big way. Juno wants to get married to Jupiter right away, like juno wants to make the 'OFFICIAL CONTRACT' immediately ! or Juno wants to desperately have a family with the Jupiter. Juno's characteristics is very protective, possesive, loyal and devoted in nature, and jupiter expands or amplifies juno's these qualities or characteristics on each other and jupiter can feel its effect.

According to this synastry, Sebby's Jupiter tightly conjuncts Ciel's Juno in libra. Libra is zodiac of relationships, ruled by Venus , the planet of Love, Beauty and Harmony! Their main focus would be their relationship with each other is their #1 priority! They prioritzie to make their relationship more lovely, harmonious, compatible, diplomatic, graceful and beautiful from both inside and outside. Sebby is very important for ciel's career and his BIG GOALS in life and they are both very loyal and devoted to each other. And Sebby helps Ciel by expanding Ciel's future vision and plans!

Venus - Mars ( ❤️‍🔥 🥵🛏️👄) : *BAD BOY ON A BIKE MEETS THE SEXY VICTORIA'S SECRET MODEL, PASSIONATE, MAGNETIC AND IRRESITIBLE ATTRACTION AT 1ST SIGHT*

'Let's fuck'....This conjunction is like a ticking time bomb 💣 💥 and the explotion of the excitement would be the bed breaking session! They can't help but to get pulled by each other to do that deed...THEY LOVE TO FLIRT WITH EACH OTHER 24/7! There is no other way to describe this dynamic! Its a great synastry to have a very , BED BREAKING LOUD SEX. ( Conjunctions and Oppositions will mostly feel this, but in oppositions fights will be frequent, trine and the sextile won't be that strong ) Especially if the man is mars and the women is venus...the bed breaking session will go on all night long! their passion is just stronger..if its the other way around the 'man' in this relationship may feel emasculated or may even feel slightly uncomfortable by the women, but the passion is still there but the women might be very forceful sexually towards the man.

This synastry doesn't give enough stability for relationships to last, but this synastry is perfect for a quick fling and passionate romance. Mars, the planet of ( very masculine energy ) Aggression, Power , Temper, hot headed, SEX, impulse, War, Aries and Scorpio ruler and Fiery planet meets the Venus, ( very feminine energy ) planet of Beauty and Love, Peace, Harmony, Joy, Luxury, Riches and Diplomacy ruler of libra and taurus.

Mars can't help or stop thinking about the passion and they also want to have Venus in their life even if its for a very short fling type thrilling relationship, MARS WANTS TO HAVE THE UPPER HAND ( like controlling or owning Venus ), MARS WANTS TO MAKE THE MOVE 1st AND IMMIDIATELY AS IF VENUS IS THE SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION STUFF WHICH WON'T STAY FOREVER IN THE MARKET ! MARS WANTS TO MERGE WITH VENUS TO FEEL THE PASSION AND THE RAW BURNING DESIRE THEY CRAVE DEEP INSIDE FOR EACH OTHER. And if Venus wants Mars as well, Venus will let Mars do whatever Mars wants...venus also secretly wants to get dominated by Mars! You know the saying goes, 'Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus'..its the merging of masculine and feminine energy we are talking about.

Even if it is between platonic relationship rather than a romantic one, the 'platonic' friends will still feel some tension...and their other friends might notice it and will tease them by saying 'u guys r so gay/lesbian for each other' lots of inappropriate touching going on between these 'platonic' friendships even if they already have a bf/gf....if its the dynamic between parent and child, they will show lots of passion and affection through touching all the time.

In this case, Sebby's Venus tightly conjuncts Ciel's Mars in Pieces. If noticed carefully Ciel always wants to have the upper hand and they are becoming very 'touchy touchy' by each manga chapter, especially it is more noticeable in the Emerald witch arc...like after waking up from the psychic trauma Ciel compensated his lost touching time with sebby as Ciel and Sebby both were excited to be able to stay 'near' each other again! Also, Mars do love get bathed by Venus!!... They were constantly flirting with each other with Victorian aesthetics in Emerald witch arc, especially when ciel was in a dress and sebby called him 'my lady' while fighting with Germans! and also the train date!...Mars CRAVES the touch of Venus!

Don't let Ciel's 13 old appearance fool you, he is very forceful and demanding towards sebby ( Its an Order SEBASTIAN! LMAO ) and Ciel CRAVES sebby's affection, excitement, passion and touch! Ciel as being a Mars in Pisces is drawn to more romantic and sensitive partners who are compassionate, creative, spiritual and will listen to him and Sebby as being a Pieces venus, he wants passion, true love, and a partner that is emotionally invested in the relationship. And Ciel exudes his passion and desire for 'revenge' and very much invested in Sebby! And we got to see the constant flirting going on between them on the lastest 212 🌹 train date🌹 chapter!

Pluto - Neptune (❤️‍🔥 🥀🖤) : *ALWAYS EVOLVING, LOOSING & FINDING EACH OTHER AGAIN THROUGH THEIR DEEP & INTENSE SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION : A THRILLING ROLLER COASTER RIDE OR A CONSTANT DEATH & REBIRTH CYCLE?*

Rarest conjunction EVER!!! It takes around 250 years ( more or less ) for Pluto to even complete 1 cycle and it takes around 165 years for Neptune to complete 1 cycle. Pluto and Neptune conjuncting like this happens only once in around 500 years!! Last time it happened in 1891 , and the next time it will happen in 2385. And it is even more rare to observe it in the synastry! Therefore, its really hard for astrologers to even describe such synastry dynamics! Both Pluto and Neptune are considered generational outer planets and they are extremely slow moving...Pluto the planet of the underworld ,the mafia boss, the thug you don't wanna mess with, always Schemeing and Plotting, death and rebirth, power to control, deep dark secrets, intense earthly desire and transformation..( lmao I always think if pluto was a person that would be that anime character from jjba Goirno Giovana like Italian mafia boss ) ...sounds very scorpionic in nature as pluto co-rules scorpio with mars...on the other hand, you have Neptune the planet of illusion, delusion, manipulation, confusion, dreams, fantasy, out of this known earthly realm ( Isekai world in anime term ), spiritualism and psychics etc etc is the theme of Neptune...Neptune rules Pisces.

When these 2 planets are in conjunction with each other in a synastry like this, Pluto person will try to dominate and control the Neptune person, Pluto wants to transform the neptune and its theme...Pluto will breakdown and destroy Neptune and will help rebuilt Neptune back better than before...now this transformation can be very painful if the Neptune person resists...the annoying thing about this transformation is that it just constantly occuring , the cycle never stops...and if the Neptune person stops the 'evolution' or does not want to transform spiritually, mentally or psychologically...they will end up having very dissapointing 'reality check' which can be very devastating and life threatening to them because Neptune is the 'Illusion' Neptune can't see past the delusion they are living in...In other words, Neptune has no other choice but to listen to pluto no matter what...if Neptune wants to transform and wants to stay committed to pluto...Pluto is very protective over Neptune person and have a very strong mental and psychological and sometimes emotional attachment to Neptune. Pluto doesn't and won't let go off the Neptune person, pluto's grasp on neptune is very tight as it wants to hold onto it desprately...it can also be other way around as well if the pluto person doesn't do what they are supposed to do, like help transforming Neptune into realigning with their reality, pluto person might get into a big trouble as the confused neptune will try to manipulate and the pluto will retaliate as pluto is very grounded into the reality and will not tolerate neptune's manipulation and psychological warfare...eventually either pluto will leave neptune alone or Pluto can stay strong keep staying 'grounded' into the reality so that it can help evolve and transform neptune as much as it is needed for neptune's realigning with the reality.

Another positive side of this synastry conjunction is that there are always a space for forming an extremely strong mental, psychological and emotional attachment with each other. Overtime they will both feel the extreme affection and empathy towards each other, if both pluto and neptune do their spiritual work and transformation and don't resist the process, instead they should trust the process, as they are both transforming spiritually. And only then they will be very affectionate and empathetic towards each other. They will also have a sense of compassion, will be able to sync with their emotional needs, they will eventually learn how to be emotionally vulnerable with each other...

In this synastry Ciel's pluto conjuncts Sebastian's Neptune. Ciel had to transform sebby mentally, psychologically, spiritually over and over again throughout their journey so far..so many trial and error going on..still the good thing is that sebby is committed...even though he was somewhat injured in the book of murder and book of atlantic...both times when he got injured, he wasn't expecting he was overconfident and slightly delusioned of his demonic superpowers...he underestimated undertaker and it cost him a lot of trouble for both ciel and him...and in the emerald green witch ark , ciel being the pluto person temporarily stops functioning due to his trauma and sebby being the neptune person tries his best with his dangerous manipulation and psychological warfare on ciel and it worked as ciel being the pluto did not tolerate his disrespectful act and retaliate back asap which was very much needed at that time...also, at the book of circus at the asthma scene ciel was embracing his own transformation and managed to overcome his fear at the end that's why sebby looked so excited... so as long as they are with each other, transformation like these will keep occuring!

Also, through that transformation, their bond keeps getting stronger through each transformation and they have gained enough empathy, affection, emotional and psychological attraction towards each other as it shows how proud ciel was when he acknowledged sebby's dedication at the end of the book of atlantic on the boat when ciel said 'You did good work today, when we reach the manor I want you to rest to serve as phantomhive butler properly'...and also when ciel woke up from psychological trauma in the green witch...they both were extremely affectinate towards each other as if its their one of the big relationship transformation...

Also, on the side note, both their pluto and neptune conjuncts at the zodiac Taurus, Taurus in pluto will be obsessed with their material possesion, finance, money, will be determined and enduring and Neptune in taurus will be very artistic, being good with food, will have a natural talent for creating beauty like pleasure seeking...both their planets conjuncting in taurus would challenge and transform their view on material possesion, pleasure seeking tendencies, money, loyalty and determination...this is exactly what we see happening during the blue revenge arc when R!ciel came back and took away everything from our ciel! And as a pluto in taurus, our ciel was extremely mad and his reaction at lau's place was extremely valid.

Juno - Ascendant (✨ 💘 ) : *ARE YOU MY HUSBAND/WIFE?*

Most common synastry among married couples!!! Its a love at 1st sight connection! When one partner's juno conjuncts the ascendant of another partner...the juno person sees the ascendant person as their ideal mate like their entire exsistance is perfect for the juno person to be considered at their significant other. Juno, as I mentioned earlier, the asteroid which is like a very loyal and devoted wife can be very possesive of their partner at well. Juno ( sebby ) person knows very well that ascendant ( ciel ) person will be very important in their life and juno dreams and even fantasies about having a life with ascendant person and how exiciting it will be...the ascendant person will immidiately realize that the juno person needs to be in a commitment with ascendant person...its a inner calling which the both juno and ascendant person realizes from deep within..both juno and the ascendant works together to succeed and accomplishing their mutual goals. Juno person is happy to provide a solid support in order to nuture ascendant person's future goals...Ascendant sees Juno as the stable and committed source of love and asc uses it to their advantages in order to achieve their desired goals...This synastry can show that the asc person feels like a wifey/hubby material to their juno partners and the juno probably proposed to them a lot or talk about marrying them every now and then. The juno person can be overly possessive and controlling over their asc partners as well.

In this synastry Sebby's juno conjuncts Ciels ascendant very tightly! And sebby shows all these possesiveness towards ciel and their small flirting here and there is a huge indicator!

Moon - Saturn ( 💏💍 ) : *I'M BOUND TO TAKE THE RESPONSIBILITY THAT COMES ALONG WITH THIS MARRIGE*

Another really common marriage indicator between most couples...Moon the planet of emotions meets the saturn the planet of restiction, authrority and strcuture. Saturn is like a benevolent restrictive father figure and the moon is that inner child. Saturn may sometimes think that moon is really childish...Saturn isn't complaining though they are happy to take the responsibility that comes along with the moon...Saturn is very mentally and emotionally mature...and moon is very moody...which can sometimes annoy saturn....moons is always emotionally ups and downs like they are always in an emotional wave of 'feelings'...They both want the same thing in terms of commitment...Moon approaches with the commitment very emotionally and Saturn with a sense of responsibility, maturity, or practicality. Doing anything in their power to keep the bond secure. Its a really stable and long lasting synastry between married couples. This synastry is very solid and strong and provides a solid base for mutual understanding, respect and commitment between couples..

In this synastry Sebby's saturn is in conjunction with ciel's moon...even if the orbs are wider, the energy is still felt and..the moon can have wider orb in conjunction...it is very evident that how bratty can ciel get from time to time and how childishly he tests sebby just so that he can annoy him...and sebby quietly endures everything ciel throws at him along with his bratty tantrums...and how sebby is very strict with his learning lessons later on how ciel took revenge by pouring the hot tea on sebby's hands LOL so petty of being cancer moon!

Juno - Sun ( 💕💖 ) : *I WILL PROTECT YOU NO MATTER WHAT*

Devotion, loyalty and possesiveness to the maxxx!!! As I said earlier that Juno, the goddess of marriage is also very possesive, loyal and devoted.... In this synastry, juno conjuncts with the sun ( which is the ego the core personality )... Juno is very protective, possesive, loyal and devoted to the Sun person...Juno sees the sun person as their ideal mate ....the one and only...Juno's ideals and Sun person's ideals are matching with each other...They have deep understanding of each other's desires...Sun person's ego is ideal for juno person...juno finds it very attractive...Juno will do anything to protect the sun person from any harm...They have similar ideas about family, home, career and children. They are always there for each other. There is a strong sense of admiration, mutual respect and attraction towards each other. They see themselves in a committed and fulfilling relationship with each other. They have strong foundation to build a life, family and home together. This is a very strong and stable relationship for marrige..one of the common placement found in most married couples...Juno is everything the sun person could wish for to find in their ideal mate...

In this synastry, sebastian's juno conjuncts ciel's sun. Sebby would go in extra length to devote himself in order to protect ciel and there are many small small indications in the manga that sebby is possesive , loyal, devoted to ciel. Sebby will do literally anything to protect ciel like and his possesiveness shows that how panicked he gets when he sees ciel is injured ...in the green witch and the blue cult arc! Sebby so protective that he even forgets his own injury to protect ciel...that's how deeply devoted and protective this synastry aspect between juno and sun can be.

THIS IS SOO LONG!!! I did not want to make it into a huge thesis LMAO!! sorry for wasting your time! thank you for reading though😭😭😭 my other parts won't be that long...it took me 3 days to write lol...I just got carried away by their dynamic! I LOVE THEM SO MUCH!!! AGHH!! I felt like I had to explain astrologically!

[instanavigationapps]

Unlocking InstaNavigation: The Ultimate Viewer for Seamless Journeys

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[look-at-the-stars-tonight]

Anyone else feel like they’re repeating their life over and over again but just in different settings or is that just me

[beemusik]

How David Bowie Invented Ziggy Stardust

Jason Heller’s book Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded is the story of how science fiction influenced the musicians of the Seventies. Out now in hardcover via Melville House, Strange Stars also examines how space exploration, futurism and emerging technology inspired the sometimes-cosmic, sometimes-mechanistic music the decade produced. In this section, Heller delves into the creation of Bowie’s most-famous alter ego, Ziggy Stardust.

A small crowd of sixty or so music fans stood in the dance hall of the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth, a suburban neighborhood in southwest London, on the night of February 10, 1972. The backs of their hands had been freshly stamped by the doorman. A DJ played records to warm up the crowd for the main act. The hall was nothing fancy, little more than “an ordinary function room.” The two-story brick building that housed it – “a gaunt fortress of a pub on the edge of an underpass” – had played host to numerous rock acts over the past few years, including Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, and Fleetwood Mac. Sci-fi music had even graced the otherwise earthy Toby Jug, thanks to recent headliners King Crimson and Hawkwind, and exactly one week earlier, on February 3, the band Stray performed, quite likely playing their sci-fi song “Time Machine.” The concertgoers on the tenth, however, had no idea that they would soon witness the most crucial event in the history of sci-fi music.

Most of them already knew who David Bowie was – the singer who, three years earlier, had sung “Space Oddity,” and who had appeared very seldom in public since, focusing instead on making records that barely dented the charts. His relatively low profile in recent years hadn’t helped his latest single, “Changes,” which had come out in January. Despite its soaring, anthemic sound, it failed to find immediate success in England. But the lyrics of the song seemed to signal an impending metamorphosis, hinted at again in late January when Bowie declared in a Melody Makerinterview, “I’m gay and always have been” and unabashedly predicted, “I’m going to be huge, and it’s quite frightening in a way.” Bowie clearly had a big plan up his immaculately tailored sleeve. But what could it be?

Before Bowie took the stage of the Toby Jug, an orchestral crescendo announced him. It was a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, drawn from the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange. To anyone who’d seen the film, the music carried a sinister feeling, superimposed as it was over Kubrick’s visions of grim dystopia and ultraviolence. Grandiloquence mixed with foreboding, shot through with sci-fi: it couldn’t have been a better backdrop for what the pint-clutching attendees of the Toby Jug were about to behold.

At around 9:00 p.m., the houselights were extinguished. A spotlight sliced the darkness. Bowie took the stage. But was it really him? In a strictly physical sense, it must have been. But this was Bowie as no one had seen him before. His hair – which appeared blond and flowing on the cover of Hunky Dory, released just three months earlier – was now chopped at severe angles and dyed bright orange, the color of a B-movie laser beam. His face was lavishly slathered with cosmetics. He wore a jumpsuit with a plunging neckline, revealing his delicate, bone-pale chest, and his knee-high wrestling boots were fire-engine red. Bowie had never been conservative in dress, but even for him, this was a quantum leap into the unknown.

Then he began to play. His band – dubbed the Spiders from Mars and comprising guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Bolder, and drummer Woody Woodmansey – was lean, efficient, and powerful, clad in gleaming, metallic outfits that mimicked spacesuits, reminiscent of the costumes from the campy 1968 sci-fi romp Barbarella. The Jane Fonda vehicle had been a huge hit in England, and it became a cult film in the United States, thanks to its titillating portrayal of a future where sensuality is rediscovered after a lifetime of sterile, virtual sex.

In the same way, Bowie’s new incarnation was shocking, lurid, and supercharged with sexual energy. Combined with his recent admission of either homosexuality or bisexuality, as he was then married to his first wife, Angela, Bowie’s new persona oozed futuristic mystique, which Bowie biographer David Buckley described as “a blurring of ‘found’ symbols from science fiction – space-age high heels, glitter suits, and the like.”

But what bewitched the audience most was the music. Amid a set of established songs such as “Andy Warhol,” “Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud,” and, naturally, “Space Oddity,” the Spiders from Mars injected a handful of new tunes, including “Hang On to Yourself” and “Suffragette City,” that had yet to appear on record. Propulsive, infectious, and awash in dizzying imagery, this was a new Bowie – cut less from the thoughtful, singer-songwriter mold and more from some new hybrid of thespian rocker and sci-fi myth. These songs bounced off the walls of the Toby Jug’s no-longer-ordinary function room. The audience, whistling and cheering, was entranced. A show eye-popping enough to dazzle an entire arena was being glimpsed in the most intimate of watering holes.

Although the crowd was sparse, people stood on tables and chairs to get the best possible view. The stage was only two feet high, but it may as well have been twenty, or two million – an elevator to outer space designed to launch Bowie into an orbit far more enduring than that of Major Tom in “Space Oddity.”

At some point, amid the swirl and spectacle of the two-hour set, Bowie announced from the stage the name of his new identity: Ziggy Stardust.

Like an artifact from some alien civilization, Bowie’s fifth album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, was unveiled on June 16, 1972. By then, Ziggy had become a sensation. After the Toby Jug gig in February, concertgoers embraced Bowie’s new persona in music venues around the UK. Attendance swelled each night, as did a growing legion of followers who dressed themselves in homemade approximations of Bowie’s outlandish attire.

Just as the album was released, he and the Spiders appeared on the BBC’s revered Top of the Popsprogram, performing the record’s centerpiece: the song “Starman.” For many of a certain age, watching Bowie on their family’s television that evening was tantamount to the Beatles’ legendary spot on The Ed Sullivan Show in the United States eight years earlier. “He was so vivid. So luminous. So fluorescent. We had one of the first color TVs on our street, and David Bowie was the reason to have a color TV,” remembered Bono of U2, who was twelve at the time. “It was like a creature falling from the sky. Americans put a man on the moon. We had our own British guy from space.”

Musically, “Starman” was an exquisite and striking slice of pop songcraft, exactly what Bowie needed at that point in his career. Lyrically, he smuggled in a sci-fi story that centers around Ziggy Stardust, who was both Bowie’s alter ego and the fictional protagonist of the Rise and Fall concept album, as loose as it was in that regard – it is more a fugue of ideas that coalesce into a concept. Through the radio and TV, an alien announces his existence to Earth, which Bowie describes in lovingly rendered sci-fi verse: “A slow voice on a wave of phase.” The young people of the world become enchanted and hope to lure the alien down: “Look out your window, you can see his light /If we can sparkle, he may land tonight.” But that alien is reticent, and his shyness makes him all the more magnetic.

Bowie sang the song on Top of the Pops clad in a multicolored, reptilian-textured jumpsuit, which Melody Maker called, “Vogue’s idea of what the well-dressed astronaut should be wearing.” In that sense, “Starman” is a self-fulfilling prophecy: before he could truly know the impact the song would have, he used it to describe its effect on Great Britain’s young people in perfect detail. He was the starman waiting in the sky, and the kids who saw him on TV soon began to dress like him, hoping to sparkle so that he may land tonight.

If Bowie intended “Starman” to be an overt reference to [Robert A.] Heinlein’s Starman Jones, the book he loved as a kid, he never publicly confessed to it. But the admittedly sketchy story line of Rise and Fall parallels another Heinlein work: Stranger in a Strange Land, the novel that had influenced David Crosby in the ’60s and, later, many other sci-fi musicians of the ’70s. The book’s hero,Valentine Michael Smith, comes to Earth from Mars; in Rise and Fall, Mars is built into the title. And both Valentine and Ziggy become messiahs of a kind – androgynous, libertine heralds of a new age of human awareness. Bowie claimed he’d turned down offers to star in a film production of Stranger in a Strange Land and had few positive words to say about the book, calling it “staggeringly, awesomely trite.” Be that as it may, he clearly had read the book and developed a strong opinion of it – perhaps enough for some of its themes and iconography to seep into his own work.

The opening song of Rise and Fall, “Five Years,” elegiacally delivers a dystopian forecast: the world will end in five years due to a lack of resources, and society is disintegrating into a slow-motion parade of perversity and moral paralysis. It’s a countdown to doomsday, with the clock set at five years. The song’s ominous refrain, “We’ve got five years,” is sung by Bowie with increasing histrionics, his voice sounding more panicked and deranged as he repeats the phrase. “The whole thing was to try and get a mocking angle at the future,” Bowie said in 1972. “If I can mock something and deride it, one isn’t so scared of it” – with “it” being the apocalypse.

“Five Years” set a chilling tone, but Rise and Fall didn’t entirely wallow in it. The coming of an alien rock star named Ziggy Stardust is relayed in a multi-song story that’s equally melancholy and ecstatic, tragic and triumphant. On tracks such as “Moonage Daydream,” “Star,” and “Lady Stardust,” Bowie wields terms such as “ray gun” and “wild mutation.” He also claims, “I’m the space invader,” as though he were channeling the ideas of his sci-fi heroes Stanley Kubrick or William S. Burroughs, particularly the latter’s 1971 novel, The Wild Boys.

As Bowie explained, “It was a cross between [The Wild Boys] and A Clockwork Orange that really started to put together the shape and the look of what Ziggy and the Spiders were going to become. They were both powerful pieces of work, especially the marauding boy gangs of Burroughs’s Wild Boys with their bowie knives. I got straight on to that. I read everything into everything. Everything had to be infinitely symbolic.” The photos of the Spiders from Mars inside the album sleeve of Rise and Fall were even patterned after the gang of Droogs of A Clockwork Orange; Droogs are mentioned by name in the Rise and Fall song “Suffragette City.” Furthermore, Bowie posed on theback cover of the album, peering out of a phone booth – just as though he were that other cryptic British alien who regularly regenerates himself and is often seen in a phone booth (specifically a police call box), the Doctor from Doctor Who.

Bowie also drew from work of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Born Norman Carl Odam, the Texan rockabilly artist released a twangy, oddball 1968 single titled “I Took a Trip (On a Gemini Spaceship)” that Bowie wound up covering in 2002; it was from Odam that Bowie borrowed Ziggy’s surname. And after going on a record-buying spree while touring the United States in 1971, he bought Fun House by the Michigan proto-punk band the Stooges, whose outrageous lead singer was named Iggy Pop. He jotted down ideas on hotel stationary while traveling the States, resulting in a name that was a mash-up of Iggy Pop and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Ziggy Stardust was a fabricated rock star, one whose sleek facade flew in the face of the era’s reigning rock aesthetic of laid-back, unpretentious authenticity. Instead, Bowie wanted to puncture that illusion by taking rock showmanship to a previously unseen, self-referential extreme.

When it came to Bowie’s urge toward collage and deconstruction, Burroughs remained a prime inspiration. A pioneer of postmodern sci-fi pastiche as well as the literary cut-up technique, in which snippets of text were randomly rearranged to form a new syntax, Burroughs straddled both pulp sci-fi and the avant-garde, exactly the same liminal space Bowie now occupied. Rock critic Lester Bangs accused Bowie of “trying to be George Orwell and William Burroughs” while dismissing him as appearing to be “deposited onstage after seemingly being dipped in vats of green slime and pursued by Venusian crab boys” – a description that sounded like it could have been cribbed straight from a Burroughs book.

In 1973, Burroughs met Bowie in the latter’s London home. The meeting was arranged by A. Craig Copetas from Rolling Stone, and the resulting exchange was published in the magazine a few months later. In the article, Copetas observed that Bowie’s house was “decorated in a science-fiction mode,” and that Bowie greeted them “wearing three-tone NASA jodhpurs.” The ensuing conversation ranged across many topics, but it circled around science fiction – and in particular, the similarity Bowie saw between Rise and Fall and Burroughs’s 1964 novel Nova Express, a surreal sci-fi parable about mind control and the tyranny of language.

In an effort to convince Burroughs of the similarity, Bowie offered one of the most revealing analyses of Rise and Fall as a work of science fiction:

“The time is five years to go before the end of the Earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of a lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have all lost touch with reality, and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock & roll band, and the kids no longer wanted to play rock & roll. There’s no electricity to play it.”

Bowie went on:

“[The environmental apocalypse] does not cause the end of the world for Ziggy. The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I’ve made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole onstage.”

Curiously, it took him another twenty-six years before casually revealing in an interview that a sci-fi song called “Black Hole Kids” was recorded as an outtake during the sessions for Rise and Fall. He called the song “fabulous,” adding, “I have no idea why it wasn’t on the original album. Maybe I forgot.”

But Bowie dropped the biggest revelation about Rise and Fallin the 1973 conversation with Burroughs. Ziggy Stardust, according to his creator, is not an alien himself; instead, he’s an earthling who makes contact with extra-dimensional beings, who then use him as a charismatic vessel for their own nefarious invasion plan. But like Frankenstein’s monster being erroneously called “Frankenstein” to the point where it seems senseless to quibble with that usage, Ziggy Stardust continues to be widely considered the alien entity of Rise and Fall. Considering the shifting identity and gender of Bowie’s most famous alter ego, that ambiguity may well have been his intention. Talking to Burroughs, he ultimately labels Rise and Fall “a science-fiction fantasy of today” before reiterating its similarity to Nova Express, to which Burroughs responds, “The parallels are definitely there.”

Rise and Fall has always been as fluid as Bowie’s facade itself. Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion cast a shadow over Ziggy Stardust, especially the glammy incarnation of the many-faced character known as Jerry Cornelius – who was adapted to the big screen in 1973 for the feature film The Final Programme. It coincided with Ziggy’s own ascendency, not to mention the New Wave of Science Fiction and its preference for fractured narratives and multiple interpretations over linear stories and pat endings.

During their mutual interview, Burroughs brought up the then-current rumor that Bowie might play Valentine Michael Smith in a film adaptation of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Bowie again dismissed it. “It seemed a bit too flower-powery, and that made me a bit wary.” For his part, Bowie’s fellow sci-fi musician Mick Farren of the Deviants later admitted he always thought Michael Valentine Smith was a major influence on Ziggy Stardust. “I was certain someone would call him out for plagiarism,” Farren said. “Nobody did.”

Bowie may have denied his affinity for Stranger in a Strange Land by his boyhood go-to author Heinlein, but he was not shy about professing his love for one of the authors Lester Bangs compared him to: George Orwell. Almost as a footnote, Bowie told Burroughs, “Now I’m doing Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four on television.” That project would never come to pass, but it would lay the groundwork for his next, less famous sci-fi concept album – a jagged, atmospheric song cycle that plunged Bowie into the darkest extremes of dystopia.

[chrysalispen]

upon pale dawns, prologue: “ardent for some desperate glory” (PREVIEW)

A brief peek at what I’ve been drafting for my next longfic, set during ARR. 

More under the cut.

========

Castrum Abania, 9th Sun, Second Astral Moon, Year 5 of the Seventh Umbral Era

 The room was cold and the silence sterile, broken only by the sounds of a dry ticking from the digital wall chronometer and the soft and regular sighs of a sleeping man.

The quiet itself was no surprise. Research and development floors were always kept clear of unnecessary chatter in favor of the sound and rhythm of industry, small gears turning amidst the well-oiled machine of imperial conquest. Standard procedure, that- particularly when the work that took place away from prying eyes was exacting and often hazardous. But the relative dark and the ambient cycling of the console's processor had for several bells now been interspersed only with the low rumble of the central air unit and the rhythmic rattle of footsteps without the corridors, and Nero tol Scaeva had at this point been awake for most of the past thirty hours.

Thus when the chiming began, it went unheeded at first. 

He had finally fallen asleep waiting for one of his processes to run and lay half-sprawled over the metal surface of the table: limbs immobile and lashes fluttering against cheekbones as he drowsed at the empty work station he’d appropriated upon his arrival in the lower levels. The small timer long ago affixed to his personal aetherometer had been set in this instance to ring without cessation, to ensure he would waken. 

After a few minutes had lapsed the sound began to send him off-course from his dreaming state by ilms, a rudderless ship caught in deep currents. His transition from sleeping to wakefulness felt incredibly reluctant: heavy and sluggish. 

Nero blinked slowly, once, then twice, attempting to reorient himself.

The noise was aggravating an incipient headache. He righted his posture and smacked the damned thing until the room was silent once again before reaching for the cold mug he had left on a borrowed coaster. Sipping at its contents with a distasteful grimace - whoever had brewed the coffee, they had added too much water and the result was something weak and listless and far too bitter - he turned his attention towards the old Allagan testing module and its compiling readout. It appeared to be reaching the end of its cycle. 

So he thought, until the activity scrolling across the screen flickered in place, pulsing like a heartbeat. Nero swore under his breath when a brief error message superimposed itself over the readout in black-bordered white- one he’d seen with far too many of these devices recently. 

[Unable to read file. The current application will be terminated.]

His annoyed sigh escaped in a hiss between his teeth.

Brow wrinkled in thought, he stared at the screen and its bland error message for a few beats. Although Ultima’s original hardware was in surprisingly reasonable working order, several of the tomestones they had found in the same space had not proven to be nearly as resistant to the vagaries of time. Thus far only a handful had relinquished their secrets without issue. Not unexpected, given their age and the conditions in which they’d been found, but unfortunate all the same. 

The tribunus laticlavius of the XIVth Imperial Legion was given to rather more direct methods of approach by nature. His patience, as a man of thirty-four winters with a good fifteen of them spent in the service of the imperial army, was very much a learned skill: one developed through years of trial and error and the innate understanding of those traits his chosen craft required.

Magitek was not ineffable. It was parts and pieces that fit together neatly like a puzzle in the absence of human error, mathematics and sequencing and carefully collected data. To guide and to create with these tools required a methodical mind and observant eye and a certain degree of acceptance that on occasion, one simply could not rush the desired results. 

This was one such occasion. The end result, of course, would be worth the tedium- or so one could fondly hope. 

He leaned forward and compressed the small button until the module had powered down and all that was left was the rumble of the air unit. 

A gentle tug freed the small tomestone from its moorings and he held it aloft to study the detailing, periwinkle-blue eyes squinting and straining against the red-tinged light from the fluorescents. The small grooves caught the ambient lighting from the walls with each idle spin between his fingers; they seemed to mock him with each little shimmer, ancient secrets so painfully close to discovery that they lay mere ilms from his grasp. 

Secrets which promised a long and tedious process if he wished to claim them.

...Well. He’d do it, of course he would. 

This was but the least method at his disposal. He'd have to look into a few other options, something that might extract the data into some readable format that he could put to use. While the old datalogs were fascinating, he wasn't spending his time reading them for a history lesson. No, what he sought was a bulwark of preliminary information, a bare framework upon which he planned to build. Ideally, he'd end up with a dossier of sorts which he could use to catalogue the Weapon’s original abilities, and enough code to piece together a system that was more or less analogous to that of Allag. One powered by ceruleum, rather than aether. 

What the solution perforce lacked in elegance, it should compensate with efficiency. Tangible results.

A functional Weapon.

If he could just- 

A much lower-pitched sound than his desk alarum - this one a harsh, flat buzz - cut through the quiet of the lab. His first inclination was to ignore it in favor of his study, but a second followed quickly on its heels, and a third. 

That, unfortunately, was a sound he could not ignore. With a barely suppressed yawn he toggled the small red switch next to the wall’s built-in communications device.

“Scaeva. Engineering," he said, keeping his tone clipped and curt- the voice of a man who would brook no trivial disturbances. "State your business.”

The response he received was a very audible swallow followed with a hoarsely uttered, “Lord tol Scaeva?” 

“Speaking."

"My lord?"

He managed, only just, to suppress his impatience. "Speaking. As in 'with whom do I have the pleasure.' Name and rank." 

“Oh. Terribly sorry, my lord. I, erm, Quintus pyr Blasio. Lord, uh. Tribunus. Sir.”

Seven hells. Not a name Nero recalled, though he rarely had reason to trouble himself over memorizing the personnel that manned every garrison between Ala Mhigo and the Velodyna fringes. Some poor bastard who had likely been the first man flagged down for runner duty by his direct report, no doubt. 

Some poor bastard who was also either too dazzled or too shit-scared of speaking to the legion's top brass to string three words together. Just what he needed.  

“...Go on,” he prompted when the man said nothing further. 

“Lord Sc-”

“I daresay we’ve both established our identities at this juncture," impatience and lingering drowsiness rendered his response a sardonic drawl, for all its erstwhile civility. "The message, if you please.”

“Message, my lord?”

“Yes. The message. That is why you’ve called to interrupt my current litany of scheduled tasks, or so I would assume?”

“Ah... y-yes. Yes, my lord.” The speaker at the other end of the connection paused, and on its heels came the sound of a clearing throat. “Ah, Lord van Baelsar asked that I, er, that is, he requests your presence to discuss-”

“He wants me to attend a meeting,” Nero cut in. “When and where?”

“Half four, my lord. Ah- in Sector VI. The administrative complex south of the new hangar.”

Half four- it was five minutes past now. With the identification checks and elevators that gave him about ten minutes' leeway. A bit tight, but doable.

For a moment the only sound he heard was nervous, ragged breathing and the flat drumming of his right hand’s fingertips upon the metal surface while he mentally rearranged the next hour he’d dedicated to other tasks. It was an annoyance but the summons still amounted to an order, and hardly one he could countermand, secret project or not. “Understood," he said. "Inform the legatus that I will be along presently."

"I will, Lord tol Scaeva. I-"

"In future, do make some bare attempt at brevity when delivering messages, tessarius- for your own sake.”

Another gulp. “Of course, my lord. I’ll pass alo--”

Before the man could waste more time stammering out another response, the tribunus laticlavius flipped the switch and cut the connection. The line went dead with a static click.

[theexistentialeasel]

The Cut, The Tear, and The Remix: Re-imagining Spaces for Art in a Covid Struck World

Week 2 | July 14th, 2021

In an exhibition entitled the cut, the tear, and the remix: contemporary collage and black futures presented by the McMaster Museum of Art and the Nia Center for the Arts's virtual exhibition the white cube is dematerialized to create a space for Black artists of the diaspora envisioning an Afrofuture.

The exhibition, curated by Stylo Starr during her curatorial internship with the McMaster Museum of Art, features eight Canadian artists of the African and Caribbean diaspora. Their works, each grounded in a different form of a collage, centers around their experience as immigrants. In this sense, collage is quite a fitting medium as it works with themes of construction and deconstruction, contextualization and decontextualization. The platform itself was created by the artist SPATIAL-ESK and is set in outer space with colourful planes carving out colour-coded rooms for each artist. The exhibition is removed from any familiarity and is without any floors or ceilings, instead exposed to the galaxy surrounding it. Once entered you can click and drag your mouse through the exhibition. Different icons lead you to a secondary webpages to get more information on the artist and their work or in certain cases to watch the artwork.

For example, after entering Sonya Mwamba's room in pastel blue, you can click on an icon to be redirected to the McMaster Museum's website where you can watch her short films. They reference the Kodak test photos and Hollywood movies where the white cultural canon reigned supreme. Mwamba thereby challenges the white default by superimposing the black bodies to recalibrate these films, thus taking back Black narratives and ways of being. Another artist whose work we are redirected to see is Kofi Oduro's hypertext code as an alternative to the performance of poetry. His works speak volumes about the creative potential of basic technology and hints at how the black and immigrant experience is often moved beyond physical space. Digital art can be understood to embody this state of being as it is at once a physical and imaginary space.  

Yung Yemi, “Nothing Real Can Be Threatened”, 2020

In another room, Yung Yemi's (also known as Adeyemi Adegbesan) black and white collages  refer to what he calls "the duality of blackness"; that is to be both infinitely diverse and singularly monolithic. Thinking about a future where blackness is freed of oppressive colonial rule, each collage is stripped of context and hung in white space. They are also simultaneously draped in detailed and decadent armour, expressing the need for protection even in an Afrofuture. In a yellow room, FEZA focuses on what she calls the 'middle space;' where reconciliation between the past and the present becomes possible. Her collages deconstruct and reconstruct her memories by tiling segments of photographic images together like pieces of a broken mirror that create an alternate reality.

Next, originally presented as an immersive exhibition, Anna Binta Diallo's work resembles portals using images of landscapes, space, or maps within the silhouettes of bodies that merge with the background of the exhibition. Themes of displacement emerge through the juxtaposition of different landscapes within the singular vessel. In a red-coloured room, Emkay's Adjei-Manu similarly collages into silhouettes focusing on hands and eyes signifying the search for one's own identity and history, and how they might speak to one's own future. Finally, in a brown room, Ghislan Timm's plays with GIFs and Marcel Camus' 1959 film Black Orpheus to bridge the past and the future by juxtaposing and assembling the fate of the two lovers with imagery of the joyful festivities of the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, thus inserting black and brown bodies into Greek mythologies. Her space is more furnished than most, with brown columns blending into the rooms' background.

Overall, the cut, the tear, and the remix: contemporary collage and black futures is successful in its two goals. Its first, presenting a diverse selection of collage artists that engage in the discussion about the Afrofuture. For example, although all the artists addressed feelings of non-belonging through their common language of collage, some like Sonya Mwamba or Anna Binta Diallo addressed their displacement and search for identity by creating a sort of an alternate reality where they would belong, while others like Kofi Oduro or FEZA offered more contemplative experiments of what it means to be a migrant.

As for its second goal; offering an alternative to the white cube, both Stylo Starr the curator, and SPATIAL-ESK the designer of the platform, were able to capture the experience of going to an art gallery within the comfort of our own home away from the 'snobby' art world. They were able to do this by taking what was important; scale, accessibility, and order, and discarding the rest leaving us in this space between the physical, and the immaterial. This makes the space itself its own kind of artwork which blend in really well with the theme of the exhibition. For example, one aspect that often gets lost in virtual spaces is the sense of scale, as we can be left to zoom in and out infinitely. However, because the viewer can't actually walk around the platform and is constrained to a clicking on a single marker, the collages never lose their sense of scale as seen in Anna Binta Diallo's series of collages where we can stilll grasp how big the works would have been in their original installation setting.

Having said this, there were two things that could have been improved. First, is the creation of a space where you could do everything, like see Sonya Mwamba's short films or Kofi Oduro poetry without being redirected to another webpage. Second, the work of interpreting the pieces somewhat on our own has been done for us. In every artist's individual page is a statement giving us a reading of the work on top of the artist's statement which isn't necessary as it almost robs the viewer of their imagination when looking at the art. In the end, the cut, the tear, and the remix bridges the gap that the pandemic has left us with this past year and a half by bringing together an interesting departure from the white cube to possibly offer a more inclusive space that isn't limited by the audience's distance or time.

Link to the exhibit: https://museum.mcmaster.ca/the-remix-virtual-exhibition/

[tomasorban]

Mystical Qabalah: The Ayn, Vast Face, and Small Face

The Ayn The Mystical Qabalah describes the roots of the Tree of Life as an ultimate, negatively existent substratum of pure Being that is Self-conscious and all blissful. It is described as "negatively existent" in relation to the "positively-existent" four worlds of the Tree of Life. The three roots of the Tree are named: Ayn (lit. Nothing; pronounced "ai-n" as in 'nine'), Ayn Sof (lit. Without End, or Endless; pronounced "sof" as in 'sofa'), and Ayn Sof Or (lit. Endless Light, or Light of the Endless; pronounced "or" as in 'oar'). But these are only distinctions in human thought. The negatively existent Absolute Being, or shall we say "Mysterious Unknown at the Roots of All Things," alludes to a depth of consciousness beyond Name and Form, and beyond the finite and supernal aspects of the Tree of Life. Individual consciousness cannot usually sustain this experience at length. In fact, most souls do not return from the experience in the roots. Their shells of embodied existence (qlifoth) dissolve completely, and they pass from their physical sheath (i.e. die). In Qabalah, the negatively existent Absolute Being is also called the "NOT" (Heb. Lo, pronounced "lo" as in "below"). The experience of the "NOT" finds Its counterpart in every mystical tradition. The Sufis refer to the experience as fana 'l fana (fana means "extinction"). The Hindus call it nirvikalpa samadhi. The Buddhists call it nirvana, sunyata(emptiness), satori, and anuttara samyak sambodhi (full enlightenment). The Qur'an refers to the Mysterious Unknown by the same terms used in the Torah. In Arabic, the word for the NOT is "La": this is written , which is virtually identical to the Ezra letter Ayin. The shape of the Sinatic letter Ayin is also suggestive--it is a circle. Within qabalistic literature, the foundational concept of the negatively existent "NOT" is most strongly and directly portrayed in the Sifra Detzniyutha (Book of THAT Which is Concealed). The main body of the text begins: "The Book of THAT Which is Concealed is the book of the balancing in weight. Until NOT (Lo) existed as weight, NOT existed as seeing Face-to-Face. And the Earth (HaAretz) was nullified, And the Crowns of the Primordial Kings were found as NOT. Until the Head (Rosh), desired by all desires, Formed and communicated the Garments of Splendor. That weight arises from the place which is NOT Him. Those who exist as NOT are weighed in YH (Yah). In His body exists the weight. NOT unites, and NOT begins. In YH have they ascended; who NOT are, and are, and will be." The first chapter of Lao Tze's Tao-Te Ching opens with verses that address the Mysterious Unknown and Its two aspects: "1.1 The Tao that can be trodden is NOT, the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is NOT, the enduring and unchanging name. 1.2 Conceived of as having no name, It is the originator of Heaven and Earth; conceived of as having a name, It is the Mother of all things. 1.4 Under these two aspects, It is really the same; but as development takes place, It receives the different names. Together we call them the Mystery. Where the Mystery is the deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful."

Vast Face In all mystical traditions, the "Mysterious Unknown at the Roots of All Things" is spoken of as having both inactive (impersonal) and active (personal aspects). These two aspects are called "Faces" in Qabalah. When referring to the inactive aspect, represented by the letter Ayin, the Zohar speaks of "Vast Face" (Arikh Anafin, also Arikh Afim). It is also known as Al (lit. upon), Shomer (Witness, Guardian), Atiqa (Hidden One), Supernal Israel, the Ancient of Days, and other Names found in the Sefer HaShmoth and the Torah. In the Sefer Yetzirah, the Ayin is alluded to as the "Organ of Nakedness." "Head" (Rosh), a word that occurs in the fifth line of the first verse above, is also a Name of Vast Face. Ayin means "eye," and in the Idra Rabba Qadusha it says: "This is the tradition: Were the Eye closed even for one moment, no thing could subsist. Therefore, It is called the Open Eye, the Holy Eye, the Excellent Eye, the Eye of Fate (mazal), the Eye which sleeps not nor slumbers, the Eye which is the Guardian of all things, the Eye which is the substance of all things." (Idra Rabba 136,137) Also, "And He Himself, the Most Ancient of Ancient Ones, is called Arikh Anafin, Vast Face, and He who is more external is called Ze'ir Anafin, or Small Face, in opposition to the Ancient Eternal Holy One, the Holy of Holy Ones." (Idra Rabba 54) And, "The Ancient One is hidden and concealed. Small Face is manifested and NOT manifested. The manifested is written in the letters. The NOT on its level is hidden in the letters, And He (Hu), the NOT, is settled in YH, The upper ones and the lower ones." (Sifra Detzniyutha 4) On the Tree, Vast Face is associated with the uppermost center at the crown of the head called Sefirah Crown/Above. Sefirah Crown/Above is a condition of Pure Being, a supernal station of superconsciousness that witnesses the singular modification "I AM" or simply "I." Even this singular modification disappears in the negatively existent roots of the Tree. The Sefer Yetzirah teaches that the spheres (Sefiroth) of the Tree emanate in pairs. Sefirah Crown/Above emanates with its polar opposite Sefirah Foundation/Below. The tension between these two Sefiroth manifests the descent of the Central Column of the Tree. The unmanifest Pure Being of Vast Face in Sefirah Crown/Above is reflected in the abysmal mirror of Sefirah Foundation/Below as veils of illusion appearing as planes of existence (see Diagram). These planes are unmanifest in the most sublime World of Atziluth (Emanation). The attributes of the Ayn are reflected in this mirror as the immense I-ness of Small Face as the Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer of the universe. These attributes appear as finite in the consciousness of the embodied soul ensnared in the illusion of separation. The energy of consciousness of Small Face manifests the planes of existence in the lower three worlds of B'riyah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formation), and Asiyah (Making, Activity). Like Sefiroth Crown/Above and Foundation/Below, the two central Sefiroth Knowledge/First and Beauty/Last emanate as a pair, and represent two opposite stations in the consciousness of this Small Face I-ness. When the immense I-ness is centered in Sefirah Knowledge/First, It has the singular awareness that "I am Nothing;" when centered in Sefirah Beauty/Last that "I am All." The composition of the Tree and the four worlds are discussed in other pages of this site.

Small Face When referring to the active aspect of the NOT (Lo), the Zohar speaks of "Small Face" (Ze'ir Anafin, also Ze'ir Afim), represented by the letter Alef. Small Face is the power of the Ayn to superimpose billions of illusory universes (and their apparent sustenance and dissolution over time) upon the Vast Face of the Deep. The generation of universes is brought about by the balanced tension between Vast and Small Face, or between the Ayin and the manifest Alef of Unity. In the Sifra Detzniyutha, this tension in the Tree is called "weight" and the "balancing in weight." The relationship between Vast and Small Face is depicted in the Tree of Life ( see Diagram). Some of the most important Names of Small Face are YHVH , El (pronounced "ale," opposite of Lo), and Adonai (Lord, Master). Each universe has its own Small Face who-like a dreamer who knows he/she is dreaming-creates, sustains, and dissolves the Creation moment by moment by moment. Our sense of time is formed by our imperfect perception of the higher planes of existence. Our hopes for the future and our memories of a past (also created, sustained, and dissolved moment by moment) instill the impression that time is onflowing. To access the consciousness of Vast Face, one must renounce Small Face (in whose dream you are a creature) for release from the dream universe. Hence, it is "only through the Son (Small Face) that one can know the Father (Vast Face)."

Relationship Between Small and Vast Face in the Tree of Life The Small Face Alef is known as the "manifest Alef of Unity." Qabalists (and Sufis and Tantrikas) take the allusion of the alphabet quite literally, and see the universe as built from combinations and permutations of the letters that emanate from and return to the Alef of Unity. In Sanskrit, the Alef of Unity is called the Omkara . The Alef a of Unity/Omkara has unmanifest (Vast Face) and manifest (Small Face) aspects. As it is written: "By the First It created Elohim Eth (i.e. the twenty-two Hebrew letters in the Upper Worlds) the Heavens and VuhEth (i.e. the twenty-two letters in the Lower Worlds) the Earth." (Torah B'reshith 1:1)

In its unmanifest, inactive aspect in the roots of the Tree, the Alef a of Unity/Omkara is the undifferentiated source from which emanate the supernal Hebrew/Sanskrit letters in the uppermost center of the Tree of Life (Sefirah Crown/Above). At this point, the unmanifest letters stand alone and have not combined into Names. The letters vibrationally differentiate when the Alef of Unity becomes manifest in the throat Sefirah Knowledge/First. Each letter bears a characteristic root vibration or seed sound (Sans. bija). The Alef of Unity/Omkara is therefore called the "Seed of Seeds" (Bija of Bijas). Vocalization of the seed sounds is enabled by the vowels in the throat Sefirah Knowledge/First. The vowels also empower the undifferentiated Names in the supernal Sefirah Wisdom/East to become manifest with a characteristic vibrational signature in the World of Creation (see Diagram). The Sinatic Alef is written by scribing the vertical line first (Central Column), from the top point (Sefirah Crown/Above) downwards. Then the horizontal line is scribed from right to left (Column of the Right). Finally, the diagonal line is drawn from the left end-point of the horizontal line upward to the right across the vertical stroke (Column of the Left). The Columns of the Left and Right are opposite reflections in the clear mirror of the Central Column. In the Etz HaChayyim (Tree of Life), the vertical stroke is called the Line of Light (Kav). The Alif in Arabic uses only this vertical stroke, reflected in the principal Working Tree in the Sufi tradition that only uses the Central Column. The Cross is the Christian Alef +, with the diagonal stroke of the Column of the Left removed.

Evolution of the Alef of Unity The second line of the first verse of the Sifra Detzniyutha (Book of THAT Which is Concealed) says, "Until NOT (Lo) existed as weight, NOT existed as seeing Face-to-Face." This is the condition where Small Face is turned toward Vast Face and therefore is not active in manifesting a universe. We find this condition further described: "And when Ze'ir Anafin looks back upon Him (Arikh Anafin), all the inferiors are restored in order, and His Countenance is extended and made more vast at that time. But not for all time is it vast like unto the countenance of the More Ancient One." (Idra Rabba 55) The "weight" referred to in the first verse of the Sifra Detzniyutha is the single combination of all the Sefiroth on the Tree. Weights are the individual Sefirah. The Primordial Kings allude to the unmanifest "Alef Worlds" or witness states of Vast Face in Sefirah Crown/Above. The "Crowns of the Primordial Kings" are the Sefiroth in the supernal World of Atziluth (Emanation), and the "Garments of Splendor" are the manifest Sefiroth in the successive three worlds. In the Torah, "Earth" (Aretz) is a synonym for the Sefirah Malkuth/Kingdom. Hence, the phrase "And the Earth was nullified" infers that matter was absorbed and disappeared. The Sifra Detzniyutha, and in smaller measure the Idra Rabba Qadusha (Greater Holy Assembly) and Idra Zuta Qadusha (Lesser Holy Assembly), also contain some wonderful verses pertaining to the allusions of the "beards" of the two Faces. The hairs of the beards are the Atziluthic letters convoluting into Divine Names in the World of Creation. The beards are said to each have nine formations i.e. strands manifest in Small Face, with four more inside the Skull of Vast Face as the Hidden Brain. The strands of the Names of Vast Face (see Diagram) generally convolute to the Atziluthic letter Ayin, and those of Small Face (see Diagram), to the Atziluthic letter Alef. "The Beard of Faith, NOT (al), is mentioned because it is the most precious of all. It egresses from the ears round about the face, The white locks [strands of Names] ascending and descending, Separating into thirteen of that most splendid of splendors." (Sifra Detzniyutha 2) "The formations of the Beard are found to be thirteen, That is the upper one [Vast Face]. In the lower one [Small Face] they are beheld in nine." (Sifra Detzniyutha 3) "Each hair is said to be the breaking of the hidden fountains that issue forth from the Hidden Brain [Vast Face]." (Idra Rabba 74) "And all those threads [i.e. convoluting Names] go out from the Hidden Brain and are disposed in the weights [i.e. Sefiroth]." (Idra Zuta 63)

Conclusion In speaking of two "Faces," it must always be remembered that we are talking about an absolute unity that is only differentiated by human thought, and can only be directly experienced in higher states of consciousness. Generally, mystical traditions are very fluid and flexible in assigning gender to Vast and Small Face. In most mystical traditions, both Vast and Small Face can take either the masculine or the feminine gender. Within a particular tradition, one may find Vast Face referred to in the masculine and Small Face in the feminine, and/or vice versa. The two Faces may also be both masculine or both feminine. In the Qabalah, for instance, we find many references to the white-haired ancient father and the raven-haired youthful king. We also find the ancient mother and the maiden Shekhinah. In virtually all traditions, we can also find many impersonal names and references to Vast Face that are neither masculine nor feminine. However, Small Face, as the active principle, is always named and referred to personally as masculine and feminine. It is cogent to note that the Torah commands us to "Honor thy father and thy mother." While this is commonly understood to refer to one's earthly parents, its higher meaning enjoins us to honor our Divine Father and Mother. The great and beloved nineteenth century Bengali saint Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa offered several useful analogies to the relation between Vast and Small Face (static and active aspects of the Divine). These included the relation between milk and its whiteness, a gem and its sparkle, a flame and its power to burn, and the Sun and its rays. An old Vedic analogy compares God to a spider that spins a web from and retrieves it back into its own body. An analogy in Qabalah cites the relationship between the letters of the alphabet and the vowels: without the vowels (active aspect), the letters (inactive aspect) cannot be pronounced. In the Tantra, it is said that "without the vowels, Shiva's bones can't dance." Another analogy that illustrates the nature and relation of the two Faces is presented in the parable of the rope and the snake: "A man was walking down a road in the country at dusk. Just as he turned a corner, he encountered what appeared to be a large snake. His whole body gripped with fear, and without thought, he jumped back to avoid getting bitten. As he looked at the snake, he noticed that it wasn't moving. He picked up a rock and threw it at the snake, and still the snake didn't move. He thought, 'Perhaps the snake is dead.' This thought diminished his fear, and he inched closer to the snake to get a better look. As he neared the snake, he was amazed and relieved to find out that it wasn't in fact a snake at all: it was a rope that he mistook for a snake." In this story, there had to be a rope in the first place for the man to have mistaken it for a snake. The "snakiness" was a superimposition upon the rope that only existed in the man's mind. Such is the nature of the Creation, which is a collective illusion. The "snakiness" of Small Face is an illusion superimposed upon the reality of the "rope" of Vast Face. This illusion of a "difference within Itself" is a play of the Divine arising from an unfathomable whim.

[blatherkatt]

Title: The Mockingbird of Whitestone [Critical Role]

Chapter 2: Old Wounds

Summary: Twenty years later, Vox Machina–or as much of it as can get to Whitestone at the time–reunite. It’s not their first time doing so, and they don’t plan on it being the last. It should just be another reunion.

But something completely unexpected throws everything into chaos, and leaves Vex’ahlia struggling with emotions she’d thought buried, and Percy trying to piece together the fragments of a very confusing puzzle.

Canon pairings, focusing on Perc’ahlia; warnings for minor blood in a later chapter and a whole lot of ruminating on a canonical major character death.

Rating: T

FIRST | NEXT

For years now, Percy and Vex had only used the earrings for simple, everyday things. Finding each other in a crowd, letting the other know that dinner was ready without having to search the entire castle. The most urgent use of it had been when a then-seven-year-old Crispin had wandered off during a trip to Emon, and that was nearly a decade past.

It was for this reason that Percy’s initial reaction to Vex’s cry was one of confusion. The look was mirrored in his friend’s faces, as was the sinking dread as they all processed what she’d said. He saw Scanlan’s eyes take on the fierce coldness they always did whenever they’d come across goblins, saw Pike look at the children with a growing look of the same fear Percy felt, saw Keyleth take in all the visitors and civilians just passing through the town square or setting up their stands.

Of all the worst possible settings for an attack—

“Where?” Percy said, grasping his own earring. As if his voice had been a sign, the others sprang into action, Grog and Pike rushing to fetch their weapons from respective bags. Percy pulled Tiffany off of Trinket’s back as the bear stood, and handed her off to Crispin, who’d been staring with trepidation at the adults in their sudden stillness. “Take your siblings and get into an inn, tell them to brace for a fight,” he said.

Whitestone had learned from the Briarwoods and the Chroma Conclave. They’d made plans for future attacks, the people needed only to be alerted and they would react as needed.

(Except they hadn’t actually needed such strategies in decades, and those strategies had assumed that the threat would come from outside, not from the very heart of the city, and they didn’t account for all these visitors, they needed more time to prepare, how in the Nine Hells did goblins get into the heart of Whitestone—)

“There’s one in the storeroom, I’ve got it trapped!” Vex’s voice drew Percy out of his thoughts. Fuck it, they’d have to trust that those who remembered those dark times would guide those who didn’t or couldn’t.

“I’ll stay with the kids and help direct people to safety,” Pike said, wrenching her mace free. Then, at the top of her lungs: “Everyone get inside, hurry! Keep your kids close! Goblin attack!” Crispin, who had looked ready to ask his father for a further explanation, turned white at Pike’s call and nodded mutely at Percy, grabbing Arthur by the hand and hoarsely telling the other two to stay close.

Keyleth grabbed Percy’s arm. “I’m gonna get in the air and see if I can’t keep an eye on things, maybe signal to the guards where the rest of the attack is,” she said.

“Right,” Percy said, “Stay safe.” She pulled away, her form effortlessly shifting into the familiar golden feathers of a giant eagle, and launched herself into the air. Percy looked to Grog and Scanlan and gestured for them to follow him; he didn’t have any weapons on him, but they didn’t know where the storeroom was, and as sure as he was that a single goblin posed no threat for Vex, even unarmed, it was never just one goblin for long. Trinket seemed to agree, the bear already rumbling past.

The storehouse wasn’t far, but the journey was made difficult by people rushing past in a panic, despite the best efforts of one or two guards and the normal townsfolk to usher them to safely. Word was spreading quickly, it seemed. Trinket, focused purely on coming to Vex’s rescue, cleared enough of a path just by charging past that they still arrived quickly enough.

Upon rounding the final corner, Percy spotted two guards rushing to help his wife, who was holding the door closed. Another bit of movement caught his eye, however; something small and dark was pushing itself through the small, high window on the opposite side of the storehouse from the door.

“There!” he shouted, pointing. The creature turned two huge yellow eyes toward the sound and yelped, struggling even more to squeeze through. “It’s climbing out the window!”

Scanlan launched a blast of lightning the goblin’s way just as it managed to slip out of the window, the bolt crashing by it harmlessly and striking the stone wall of the storehouse. The goblin scrambled to its feet and dashed in a headlong sprint down the alley, Grog and Scanlan both rushing in pursuit. The two guards who’d run to Vex stopped by her for a moment, but her angry gesture sent them joining in the chase.

Percy grabbed Vex by the arm, trying to keep terror from turning his grip into a vice and failing entirely. “Are you hurt at all?” he asked, frantic. “Did it attack you, are you—“

(He’d seen the aftermath of goblin attacks. Parents devastated by watching their children dragged away screaming, houses ransacked, bodies mangled and in some cases eaten, he’d seen what goblins could do to people who were caught unawares, and for everything he’d seen with his own eyes he’d heard dozens of stories about even worse deeds. In his mind he could see all of it, all the horrors and violence, superimposed over Whitestone, over the visitors, over his own children—)

“I’ll be fucking fantastic when we’ve killed a few bloody goblins,” Vex snapped, pushing some hair out of her face. Trinket pressed his head under her free hand and moaned. “Yes, darling, I’m fine, I’m okay, it never got the chance to so much as touch me. Gods dammit, how’d the little bastards get this far in past our defenses?!”

“I don’t know,” Percy said, “We’ll have to investigate after we’ve repelled the initial attack. Hopefully we don’t have too many casualties, but with this many strangers in town—the kids are safe, at least, they’ve got Pike with them, but—“

“Right, the kids,” Vex said. “I—good, that’s good. Gods, of all things to go wrong today…”

“We should fetch Scanlan and Grog, for now, and regroup. They’ve probably dealt with the one you spotted, and we need to help the town brace for the full attack.”

“Right,” Vex nodded. Her eyes focused and hardened. “Gods damn them for attacking when I’ve left Fenthras at home, but we can deal with that, I can make do with any bow in a pinch.” Trinket grunted his agreement.

Instead of the expected bloodbath, however, what Vex and Percy found in the intersection of two alleys was the guards scratching their heads, Grog looking disappointed, and Scanlan looking livid.

“What’s going on?” Vex asked, looking around.

“I dunno,” said Grog. “It got away. Not sure where it went.”

Percy stopped and stared at the goliath. “I’m—you were outrun by a goblin?”

“Hey.”

Trinket sniffed the air, growling softly before lumbering toward a stack of half-broken crates someone had discarded.

“I don’t mean to imply anything bad, Grog, I just—that’s really surprising,” Percy said, holding his hands up reassuringly. “I’m sure you’re just as fast as ever, maybe you just got unlucky.”

“To be fair, it was a pretty damn quick little runt,” Scanlan grumbled. “Probably got spooked and ran off to rejoin the rest of them.”

“Trinket, darling, don’t eat that,” Vex said absently, as the bear pawed at one of the crates.

Percy nodded, then turned to the two guards, who stood to attention. “Organize a search,” he said. “Can you send the word out, too, as you go? Tell any stragglers to get inside? Quickly, please, there’s no telling how much time left we’ve got.”

The guards nodded, and sped off. “I’m sure Keyleth’ll make lots of noise if she spots the main force,” Vex said. “And I don’t care how fast this goblin is, none of them are going to outrun her when she’s in the sky—Trinket, I told you, there’s nothing to eat in there, stop that, you’re going to get a nose full of splinters.”

The bear grunted, but ignored Vex, continuing to push aside some of the partly rotted wood. There was a crack in the wall behind the pile of crates, now that Percy looked. “Of course he’s looking for food while we’re under attack,” Scanlan grumbled, tail lashing. “Fuck, we don’t even know which way the little devil went! I can’t believe we lost it, the blasted—”

All at once, Trinket went entirely stiff, his occasional grunting replaced by a low, rumbling growl that seemed to vibrate through the very ground.

…In fact, if he looked closely, the crack might just be big enough for someone very small to squeeze into, should they need to disappear from sight.

“…Good bear, Trinket,” said Vex, slowly. All four of them changed their stances; Grog stood, a grin splitting his face at the prospect of a return the hunt. Magic swirled around Scanlan’s fingertips, shimmering violet smoke beginning to form into fingers beneath him. Vex and Percy, unarmed, braced themselves.

Trinket shoved his face into the crack as hard as he could, his jaws audibly snapping, only to then pull back with a roar, a thin line of blood dripping off his muzzle as he reared up. The goblin was a blur of shadows as it took the brief opportunity to zip past, narrowly avoiding the bear’s claws as he thudded back down onto the ground. Percy and Vex both lurched in an attempt to grab the goblin as it sped past, but it dodged away out of reach, narrowly darting under Grog’s axe by fractions of an inch and speeding past. Scanlan sprang up on Bigby’s hand, but the goblin had somehow gotten all the way past them, and was scrambling over a fence between two buildings.

“If you think you’ll get away that easily, you’re in for a shock!” Scanlan shouted, magic crackling around his hand. Lightning slammed into where the goblin should have been, blasting a hole in the fence and setting it ablaze, but somehow, the goblin had shifted, narrowly avoiding what seemed like all of the damage from the strike. With a panicked yelp, it disappeared over the fence, the sound of its retreating footsteps almost inaudible over the crackling flames.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” Scanlan shouted, soaring on Bigby’s hand over the fence. With a bellow, Grog followed suit, knocking a hole in the fence with his axe rather than bothering with climbing over it.

Vex moved to chase as well, but Percy grabbed her arm. “Vex,” he said, “Vex, we need to deal with things elsewhere—we don’t even have our weapons, there’s not much we can do, leave them to it.”

With a frustrated noise, Vex tugged her arm away and gestured at Trinket, who was attempting to lick at the thin scratch across the bridge of his muzzle. “Look at your poor face, gods dammit—let’s just…go help where we can, I suppose,” she said.

Another blast of magic burst audibly some distance away. “Sounds like they’ve got that one squared away without us, anyhow,” Percy muttered.

‘Nervous’ was not often a word applicable to the members of the Grey Hunt, but right now, anxiety lingered on all of their faces as they silently watched Vex’ahlia pace in front of them.  Percy had joined some guards to investigate the storehouse, Scanlan and Grog were still off helping in the search for the main force of the goblins, Keyleth and Pike remained as they were, and Vex was doing some investigating of her own.

Well, more of an interrogation than an investigation. Percy had his way of seeking answers, and she had hers.

“So,” she said, pausing, arms crossed. “Would any of you would like to explain to me how this happened, exactly?”

The hunters looked at each other, and one spoke up. “My lady?” he said, and Vex felt cold fury rise within her at the tentative, yet genuine confusion in his voice.

“The bloody goblins!” she snapped. “You all have one job, one fucking job—to keep watch over the damned Patchwood. There should have been no way that we find out about goblins only when one breaks into a storeroom in the heart of the fucking city!” Several of the hunters cringed at the outburst. Was the guilt she saw sincere or imagined? Who cared, who cared, they should feel guilty—“Why didn’t I hear any reports about goblin clan movements in the area? We should have heard about this before they reached the fucking farmlands, nevermind the center of town!” It never should have gotten the chance to fool me into—

“Lady Vex’ahlia,” said one of the hunters, holding out her hand. She was the only one who’d been around longer than Vex at this point, actually; she’d been a hunter even before the Briarwoods had come, and had helped her greatly with settling into the position of Grand Mistress. “My Lady, I understand that you’re worried—we all are, and with fair reason. However, I assure you, no one here would dare slack off under your watch. You’ve trained this lot well. If there were no reports of goblins in the area, it’s because none were observed, and we have observed the Patchwood as carefully as ever.”

“There was a weird burst of magic a couple weeks ago, but all we found when we checked was a bunch of angry bluecoats,” one of the youngest hunters mumbled.

“Aye, and that a fair distance from the city,” said the eldest of the hunters. Vex huffed, but took a deep breath. This was true—she’d remembered that report; she’d not been part of the team that investigated, but she knew that it had been handled carefully and turned out to be nothing. “I don’t know how these goblins got in, but we will find out how they slipped past us,” she continued.

“See to it that you do,” Vex said, dismissing them with a frustrated wave of her hand. “If you can’t even find a bunch of bloody goblins, then we’ve got a real problem on our hands.”

As the Hunt dispersed, Vex pinched the bridge of her nose. Bloody goblins, of all things to have to deal with—

Trinket nudged her arm and moaned softly. Absently, she patted the top of his head. “It’s alright, buddy,” she said, “it’s only goblins. Nothing we can’t handle. Just have to find the bloody things…”

Shaking herself, she moved towards the tavern Pike had taken the kids to; they’d agreed over the earrings to meet up here again to compare notes in about ten minutes. Not that she’d have much to offer, just the word of a toddler and the news that the Hunt had apparently missed an entire tribe of goblins. Gods.

What a nightmare.

The others trickled toward the rendezvous point slowly, Pike coming first after Cassandra stopped by to pick up the kids and usher them all towards the castle. Percy joined them next, looking very thoughtful; Keyleth swooped down and landed next, her own face worried.

“Did you catch sight of them?” Percy asked her.

Keyleth shook her head. “That’s the weird thing,” she started, “I only—”

A loud, gruff stream of swearing cut her off, as Grog stomped up, Scanlan looking irritable at his side.

“Little fuck got away again!” Grog griped, swinging his axe up to rest on one shoulder. “I nearly ‘ad it one second, and the next, it was just gone!”

“It ran between your legs while you were busy overswinging,” Scanlan scowled. “And then it disappeared.”

“You didn’t even get the first goblin?” Pike asked, genuinely confused. Percy paused in whatever thoughts had him distracted long enough to fill Pike in on what she’d missed whilst guarding the kids.

“It was really fast, Pike!” Grog whined.

“And very strange,” said Percy. “The storehouse was full of all kinds of food, albeit not as much as there was before winter, but there was plenty of dried meats, and none of it very well hidden. Yet as far as I can tell, this goblin was evidently only interested in a bunch of herbs, for some reason. The bags they’d been stored in had been ripped open, and there were scraps of them everywhere.”

Scanlan gestured questioningly at Percy. “So it made a mess,” he said. “It’s a goblin. They do that.”

“Yes, but what use do goblins have for cooking herbs?”

“Maybe they’re getting tired of only putting salt and pepper on their grandma stew.” “Scanlan!” Pike hissed.

Vex was barely processing most of the conversation, staring off into the distance and letting the words fly around her. The first goblin’s escape grated on her nerves. The thought of the little impost—intruder getting away untouched burned her. Sweet Sarenrae, it was one bloody goblin, surely they could at least track it to wherever the rest were hiding? They’d all brought down a would-be god, but goblins were giving them this much trouble?

“Well, Kiki, you can still point us toward the rest, right?” Grog’s hopeful voice brought her marginally back to the present. No doubt he was looking forward to the chance to fight something. For once, Vex found herself in similar shoes.

“That’s what I was saying when you guys got here,” Keyleth said. “I scanned the whole city as best I could several times, but I only ever saw the one goblin. I don’t know if there are any others here.”

Scanlan rolled his eyes. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “It’s never just one goblin, there’s got to be others!”

“Well, I didn’t see any,” said Keyleth, leaning forward with a worried stare.

“And you didn’t get distracted by anything?” Vex said. “Nothing caught in your eye?”

Keyleth looked hurt. “I was—I tried to be really thorough, and I’m telling you, there was only one goblin!”

Vex sighed. She’d really meant to keep the scorn out of her voice, there. Keyleth didn’t deserve it, she was just—angry. “No, I’m sure you were, I’m sorry, darling. I’m just…stressed out.”

“Did you at least see which way the first one went?” Scanlan asked.

Keyleth shifted and shook her head. “I was searching a different part of the city when you two lost track of it, I think,” she said. “I’m really sorry, guys.”

“Fuck’s sakes,” Grog growled, letting the head of his axe thump down.

Scanlan scoffed. “Didn’t see where the first one went, didn’t see the others, maybe you were distracted! Were you paying attention at all?”

“Scanlan,” Percy said, a warning in his voice.

“Guys, hey, don’t do this now,” Pike cautioned.

“Yes!” Keyleth snapped. “I didn’t fly up to just fuck around, guys, I was really searching hard! There was only one goblin, I’m sure of it!” said Keyleth.

“It must have been a scout, then,” Vex said, rolling her eyes. “Right? It was very quick, and, Scanlan, you said before that it was a small one?”

Scanlan shrugged. “Hard to tell under the cloak, but it seemed like it was on the small side for a goblin, yeah.”

“And we found it where we keep the food. There you are, then, it must’ve been a scout,” Vex continued. “It was sent in ahead of the main force to find out where we keep everything, since it’s quick and good at disappearing, evidently. Explains everything.”

“Almost everything,” said Percy. “Except for the herbs, which I still don’t get…”

“Does it really matter why it was digging around through something weird?” Scanlan groaned. “It’s a goblin, Percy, who knows what it was thinking.”

“…I suppose it probably doesn’t,” he said, still looking thoughtful. He shook his head. “Well, if this was a scout, then the main attack is yet to happen. We’ll have to ask everyone to do a head count on their families, check that their kids are safe, and brace to be hit at a later date…Probably tomorrow, now that I think about it. During a festival would be the time to attack. Although…whether or not the goblins actually know that we’re having a festival is another question entirely, but…regardless, we’d all best make sure we’re rested up tonight.”

“The guards will probably have tracked the goblins down by next morning,” Vex said, waving her hand irritably.

“Right, but if they don’t,” said Percy, “We’ll all want to make sure we’re at the top of our game. Anyone who can fight will need to be ready to defend those who can’t.”

“We’re not…we’re not going through with the festival with goblins nearby, are we?” said Keyleth.

Percy sighed. “I’ve been talking with the captain of the guard, and the guards have all been checking in with the townsfolk. A lot of the visitors are scared, but most of the residents are all of the opinion that they’re not about to take this without a fight. They’re determined to celebrate, whether we in charge like it or not, and plenty of people have already volunteered to act as a militia to help bolster defenses.” He shot Keyleth a tired grin. “Some of those old enough to remember the Briarwoods have been especially vocal about not hiding away from a threat, and I can’t find it in me to tell them they’re wrong.” His smile faded. “We’ll…just have to do the best we can, and hope they do track down and destroy the main force before it strikes.”

Keyleth bit her lip. “I don’t like this,” she murmured.

“Has anyone been reported missing?” Pike said. “That’s my first worry, that maybe these ones are sneaky enough to take people quietly, since they’ve avoided detection so far.”

Percy shook his head. “Not everyone’s done a head count, mind you, but so far everyone seems to be accounted for.”

“They better fuckin’ attack tomorrow,” Grog grumbled. “Got all worked up for a fight and then the fuckin’ goblin got away.”

Pike patted his knee. “Aw, buddy,” she said, “We’ll find you somebody to spar with, I promise.”

“It’s not the same,” Grog complained. “I was hopin’ for a proper fight and some killing and everything, and the stupid slippery little goblin got away!”

“Well, maybe we can’t do any killing, but you and me can go visit Vasselheim soon, maybe, go defend our titles?”

“…I guess,” Grog said, scuffing the ground.

“Who knows, maybe the guards’ll miss a few and we’ll get to clean up the mess,” Scanlan muttered, darkly.

“Yeah, maybe!” said Grog, beaming.

Pike sighed.

“Whatever, let’s just—it’s getting late, let’s get inside and leave it to the guards,” said Vex, heading up the path. More to herself, she added, “Pelor willing, the Hunt will follow through on their fucking jobs and find the rest of the little devils while we’re all asleep.”

Aside from a brief pause for Percy to fill the leader of the guard in on what they’d discussed, and to confirm that they were going to spend the night seeking out the invaders, the trip back to the castle was blessedly uneventful. After checking in on the kids (who were various levels of shaken, but all unharmed), filling Cassandra in, and getting themselves dinner, they all said their goodnights and headed to bed.

It was while laying in bed, staring at nothing, that the storm Vex had been fighting for hours finally threatened to break.

With the day’s stress behind her, grief threatened to overwhelm. It had been waiting in the wings all day, and she hated that it had come so easily, after so long, over something so stupid…She didn’t want to think about that now, she didn’t want to feel this, she was supposed to be over it after twenty blasted years!

Groaning softly, she rolled over on her side, as if the action would somehow physically force the old feelings away. It didn’t, but it did give her a view of her husband, framed in the soft glow of moonlight, the top buttons on his shirt undone, staring thoughtfully out the window over the city. He had that look about him, the one that spoke of wheels turning furiously behind his eyes, thoughts flying a mile a minute. No doubt, whatever was on his mind was eons more worthwhile than anything plaguing hers. Just about anything had to be more productive than getting worked up over old wounds.

“A copper for your thoughts, darling?” she said, shoving her grief and a stray pillow out of the way.

He shook his head. “I just…” he said, “I still can’t—I feel like we’re missing something. Something about the goblin’s behavior felt…off, in ways we can’t explain even by saying it’s probably a scout, I…”

Ugh. The fucking goblins were the last thing she wanted to think about right now.

“Percy,” she said, slipping out of bed, “It’s just goblins. It’s strange that it slipped past our defenses, sure, but we know it’s here now, and I’m sure the guards will have dealt with it by morning.”

He sighed. “I…you’re probably right, I know, but something just…I can’t explain it, but something just isn’t…”

Padding on nearly silent feet, she crossed to him, pressing herself to his back and loosely wrapping his arms around him. “Everything’s a puzzle with you, lately,” she murmured, quietly reveling in the way she could feel tension leeching out of him at her touch. “Whatever strangeness there may be here doesn’t really change things, does it? Unusual goblins are still goblins, there’s no point in staying up all night thinking about it…”

Percy hummed, thoughtfully, leaning back slightly against him.

A playful grin spread across her face. Slowly, with so little pressure as to feel almost like a ghost, she traced a finger down his arm, all the way down to where his own hand still clutched the windowsill, watching a trail of goosebumps break out behind her touch. “There’s so much more…interesting ways we could spend our time, in any case,” she whispered, right next to his ear. Her grin widened as she felt him shiver. “Much more worthwhile uses for that scheming mind and those clever hands.” She let her fingers tangle with his.

He swallowed, hard enough for her to hear, and she had to bury her mouth against the back of his neck to hold back a laugh. Twenty years, and it was still so easy to bring that clear flush to his cheeks, gods she loved him so much.

“I…suppose you’re right,” Percy said, curling his hand in hers.

“Come to bed, darling,” she whispered, gently tugging him away from the window. Unresisting, he followed.

There’d be time to worry about goblins and old wounds later. For now, they were alone, spring was upon them, and there were far, far better uses for their time.

[eleiszon-blog]

Extradimensional Chess (2/3)

Following is an analysis of Cooper’s journey, concerning the moves made by MIKE, Phillip Jeffries, Dale Cooper and Expi (the synthetic Experiment duplicate created by the Glass Box) in Part 17. The previous entry (Extradimensonal Chess 1/3) is >>> here. We pick up after BOB’s defeat and Mr. C’s return to the Waiting Room. Cooper retrieves the Great Northern key #315 from Frank Truman. He glances at Naido. He pauses. At this point, his face is superimposed upon the scene. The clock hangs upon 2:53 -- the time in which the worlds interface, when portals can open and the Lodge can try to pull its denizens back. At this point, his memory of Naido from back in Part 3 is sparked and with it, his revelation: “We live inside a dream.” --- Not a literal sleep-vision but a layer of reality conceived by higher entities, removed by degrees from the ‘true’ reality. Picture an onion: If the Eternal/Infinite Ocean is the core piece of the onion, this mortal reality is some outer layer from that. ‘Dream’ here is but a figurative term to suggest an illusory quality. The ‘dreamer’ can be anyone potentially (within the Theatre) but the one we know is the Fireman.

Cooper says many things in this room. He speaks of how Garland Briggs foresaw these events. He talks of change. He hopes he will see each and every one of them again. He knows very well what he is about to do...And we will know shortly as well.

Darkness takes the room. Dale calls out for Gordon. Gordon calls to Cooper. I believe this last fleeting connection is what allows Gordon to come with Dale and Diane - who are themselves both touched by the Other Place - into this dark.

They move through a room to a locked door. Dale’s key, Great Northern #315, unlocks the door. He tells them he must enter---they must not follow.

“See you at the curtain call.” - This references both what Dale is about to do regarding the shift of reality (as of dropping the curtain on a play, only to open on another), and the fact that he will indeed see Diane again at the red curtains of Glastonbury Grove.

Dale enters a black space. This is a space “between two worlds”. MIKE arrives and recites the old poem. In this instance, I believe the poem is inferring that Dale has become “the magician”. ‘Through the darkness...of future-past...’ - Note the hyphen. I think it’s accurate to write it that way as the old ‘Is it future or is it past?’ question blends the two into a muddled singular. Hence ‘Through the darkness...’ - Dale has sought to navigate this muddled sprawl (through the darkness) of disparate-yet-singular time and spaces (future-past). And with MIKE’s aid, he has done quite well.

Light and noise give way to a traversal of a transparent forest. Mr. C took this between-world path with a Woodsman earlier. Indeed, their destination is the same. (Regarding the alternate route, MIKE has direct access. Mr. C needed a door unlocked. He was a rogue element stripped of privileges.)

The two ascend the stairs of the Dutchman’s. Light and noise. The Dutchman races down the same stairs. Its place at the top infers its dominion of this space. Why does it flee? The Dutchman, as I’ve written here, is a twisted tool and avatar-extension of JUDY. JUDY is arranging countermeasures.

Jeffries requests specificity. Cooper is prepared. February 23, 1989. The last night Laura Palmer was seen alive. Jeffries was clearly waiting for this. As I’ve noted before, he was touched by the Other Place long ago and sees across temporal possibilities just as Briggs and the Lodge spirits have done. ““I’ll find it for ya. It’s slippery in here.” - Refer again to future-past. Time in this other-world is indeed ‘slippery’. Jeffries mentions that Gordon will remember the “unofficial version”. That is the version Cooper is about to strip away. This is why and how Gordon walked through the dark with Dale and Diane. All three will remember...Somewhat.

“This is where you’ll find JUDY. There may be someone.” Jeffries remarks are a minor misnomer here. Dale has already found JUDY before. JUDY encompasses and embodies many things. This will however bring Dale nearer to the ‘true’ JUDY. The someone he refers to is Alice Tremond. Jeffries knows the plays being made here but he also sees the possible counter-plays. Hence, Sarah ‘may’ be absent from her house and so there ‘may’ be ‘someone’ else instead.  He emits the ‘JUDY’ symbol. It morphs into a double-diamond. Finally an ‘8′. A bead on the lower right curve. The 8 slims to a line then swells back to form. The bead within has swapped sides and now rolls back to the lower right. Essentially what Jeffries is doing here is setting the ‘date’. Think of a control panel on a time machine. The move from right-side-to-left dictates reversal (travel to the past). The roll back to ‘starting position’ indeed sets the destination back to the ‘starting position’ of the series.

“You can go in now. Cooper...Remember (the unofficial version/the Fireman’s tips)!”...MIKE cries out ‘Electricity!’ and, as if summoned, electricity fills the place. Dale is alone again in a black space ‘between worlds’.

We are treated now to revisited scenes from the film, Laura’s final night. Depicted in monochrome, as of JUDY’s creeping influence "in our house now”, per the Fireman. Cooper phases into being in a tree. Laura, conversing with James, spots Cooper and SCREAMS. (This scream occurs in FWWM proper but we don’t see why then --- I believe in that instance, she saw BOB.)

A brief note: Given what we might infer from The Final Dossier, Laura goes missing. Indeed, speaking with James, she tells him as much before it happens. While originally, this may have been feverish delirium, here it suggests that Dale has already rapidly upped the quantum-possibility of the ‘Odessa’ line (my quantum-mechanical take on Lodge time is detailed in my entry on the owl cave map and also my entry on Briggs’ arc in The Return) to the point that its already even encroaching upon Laura herself.

Laura flees from James into the woods. Approaching Dale, she is apprehensive. Who are you...I’ve seen you in a dream...She is referring to her ‘Don’t take the ring’ dream from FWWM. She does not seem aware that this dream was Dale attempting to see her inhabited (I believe he was playing a well-intended but ignorant long game then, banking on staying free of the Lodge to someday free Laura from BOB after the fact).

When she takes Dale’s hand, color returns to the scenery. Rather, to be more accurate, monochrome retreats. JUDY’s influence gets a big kick backward by Dale’s actions here, removing Laura’s murder by BOB and warping events up to and including Mr. C’s long-time Earthly spread of negative energy.

In the Palmer house, amidst electricity and furious noise, an Expi-influenced Sarah Palmer viciously attacks Laura’s prom picture (which mirrors her Ideal Form per my entry on Part 8). Time becomes jittery during this event. I believe Sarah/Expi/JUDY’s actions here serve a sort of psychic-bondage effect to insure that JUDY can track Laura’s ‘ideal’ (which will be Carrie Paige) in the Odessa line. As with the Dutchman’s retreat, this is a hasty but effective counter-move.

As Dale leads Laura through the woods, she asks where they are going...And he answers ‘home’. He takes her toward Jackrabbit’s Palace and thus I believe ‘home’ here is a reference to the Fireman’s fortress where the ‘ideal’ of Laura was originally born from Dido’s essence. However, as they approach, Laura vanishes. Dale looks around, confused or troubled. Perhaps only apprehensive. Red curtains fade in to overlay the scene. Credits roll.

(Part three will cover the tracks of Dale, Diane, “Laura”/Carrie and JUDY through the finale up to the ending line.)

[digital-arts-etc]

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte 

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (French: Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte) painted in 1884, is one of Georges Seurat's most famous works. It is a leading example of pointillist technique, executed on a large canvas. Seurat's composition includes a number of Parisians at a park on the banks of the River Seine.

Background

In 1879 Georges Seurat enlisted as a soldier in the French army and was back home by 1880. Later, he ran a small painter’s studio in Paris, and in 1883 showed his work publicly for the first time. The following year, Seurat began to work on La Grande Jatte and exhibited the painting in the spring of 1886 with the Impressionists.[2] With La Grande Jatte, Seurat was immediately acknowledged as the leader of a new and rebellious form of Impressionism called Neo-Impressionism.[3]

Seurat spent more than two years painting A Sunday Afternoon,[4] focusing meticulously on the landscape of the park. He reworked the original and completed numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches. He sat in the park, creating numerous sketches of the various figures in order to perfect their form. He concentrated on issues of colour, light, and form. The painting is approximately 2 by 3 meters (7 by 10 feet) in size.

Inspired by optical effects and perception inherent in the color theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and others, Seurat adapted this scientific research to his painting.[5] Seurat contrasted miniature dots or small brushstrokes of colors that when unified optically in the human eye were perceived as a single shade or hue. He believed that this form of painting, called divisionism at the time but now known as pointillism, would make the colors more brilliant and powerful than standard brushstrokes. The use of dots of almost uniform size came in the second year of his work on the painting, 1885–86. To make the experience of the painting even more vivid, he surrounded it with a frame of painted dots, which in turn he enclosed with a pure white, wooden frame, which is how the painting is exhibited today at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Island of la Grande Jatte is located at the very gates of Paris, lying in the Seine between Neuilly and Levallois-Perret, a short distance from where La Défense business district currently stands. Although for many years it was an industrial site, it is today the site of a public garden and a housing development. When Seurat began the painting in 1884, the island was a bucolic retreat far from the urban center.

The painting was first exhibited in 1886, dominating the second Salon of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, of which Seurat had been a founder in 1884. Seurat was extremely disciplined, always serious, and private to the point of secretiveness—for the most part, steering his own steady course. As a painter, he wanted to make a difference in the history of art and with La Grand Jatte, succeeded.[6]

Interpretation

Seurat's painting was a mirror impression of his own painting, Bathers at Asnières, completed shortly before, in 1884. Whereas the bathers in that earlier painting are doused in light, almost every figure on La Grande Jatte appears to be cast in shadow, either under trees or an umbrella, or from another person. For Parisians, Sunday was the day to escape the heat of the city and head for the shade of the trees and the cool breezes that came off the river. And at first glance, the viewer sees many different people relaxing in a park by the river. On the right, a fashionable couple, the woman with the sunshade and the man in his top hat, are on a stroll. On the left, another woman who is also well dressed extends her fishing pole over the water. There is a small man with the black hat and thin cane looking at the river, and a white dog with a brown head, a woman knitting, a man playing a horn, two soldiers standing at attention as the musician plays, and a woman hunched under an orange umbrella. Seurat also painted a man with a pipe, a woman under a parasol in a boat filled with rowers, and a couple admiring their infant child.[7]

Some of the characters are doing curious things. The lady on the right side has a monkey on a leash. A lady on the left near the river bank is fishing. The area was known at the time as being a place to procure prostitutes among the bourgeoisie, a likely allusion of the otherwise odd "fishing" rod. In the painting's center stands a little girl dressed in white (who is not in a shadow), who stares directly at the viewer of the painting. This may be interpreted as someone who is silently questioning the audience: "What will become of these people and their class?" Seurat paints their prospects bleakly, cloaked as they are in shadow and suspicion of sin.[8]

In the 1950s, historian and Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch drew social and political significance from Seurat’s La Grande Jatte. The historian’s focal point was Seurat’s mechanical use of the figures and what their static nature said about French society at the time. Afterward, the work received heavy criticism by many that centered on the artist’s mathematical and robotic interpretation of modernity in Paris.[7]

According to historian of Modernism William R. Everdell, "Seurat himself told a sympathetic critic, Gustave Kahn, that his model was the Panathenaic procession in the Parthenon frieze. But Seurat didn't want to paint ancient Athenians. He wanted 'to make the moderns file past ... in their essential form.' By 'moderns' he meant nothing very complicated. He wanted ordinary people as his subject, and ordinary life. He was a bit of a democract—a "Communard," as one of his friends remarked, referring to the left-wing revolutionaries of 1871; and he was fascinated by the way things distinct and different encountered each other: the city and the country, the farm and the factory, the bourgeois and the proletarian meeting at their edges in a sort of harmony of opposites."[9]

The border of the painting is, unusually, in inverted color, as if the world around them is also slowly inverting from the way of life they have known. Seen in this context, the boy who bathes on the other side of the river bank at Asnières appears to be calling out to them, as if to say, "We are the future. Come and join us".

Painting materials

Seurat painted the 'La Grande Jatte' in three distinct stages.[10] In the first stage, which was started in 1884, Seurat mixed his paints from several individual pigments and was still using dull earth pigments such as ochre or burnt sienna. In the second stage, during 1885 and 1886, Seurat dispensed with the earth pigments and also limited the number of individual pigments in his paints. This change in Seurat's palette was due to his application of the advanced color theories of his time. His intention was to paint small dots or strokes of pure color that would then mix on the retina of the beholder to achieve the desired color impression instead of the usual practice of mixing individual pigments.

Seurat's palette consisted of the usual pigments of his time[11][12] such as cobalt blue, emerald green and vermilion. Additionally, Seurat used then new pigment zinc yellow (zinc chromate), predominantly for yellow highlights in the sunlit grass in the middle of the painting but also in mixtures with orange and blue pigments. In the century and more since the painting's completion, the zinc yellow has darkened to brown—a color degeneration that was already showing in the painting in Seurat's lifetime.[13] The discoloration of the originally bright yellow zinc yellow (zinc chromate) to brownish color is due to the chemical reaction of the chromate ions to orange-colored dichromate ions.[14] In the third stage during 1888-89 Seurat added the colored borders to his composition.

The results of investigation into the discoloration of this painting have been ingeniously combined with further research into natural aging of paints to digitally rejuvenate the painting

In popular culture

The May 1976 issue of Playboy magazine featured Nancy Cameron—Playmate of the Month in January 1974—on its cover, superimposed on the painting in similar style. The often hidden bunny logo was disguised as one of the millions of dots.[21]

The painting and the life of its artist were the basis for the 1984 Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. Subsequently, the painting is sometimes referred to by the misnomer "Sunday in the Park".

The painting is prominently featured in the 1986 comedy film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Such use is parodied, among others, in Looney Tunes: Back in Action and an episode of Family Guy.

In the Simpsons episode "Mom and Pop Art" (10x19), Barney Gumble offers to pay for a beer with a handmade reproduction of the painting.

At the Old Deaf School Park in Columbus, Ohio, sculptor James T. Mason re-created the painting in topiary form;[22] the installation was completed in 1989.

The painting was the inspiration for a commemorative poster printed for the 1993 Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix, with racing cars and the Detroit skyline added.

In 2011, the cast of the US version of The Office re-created the painting for a poster to promote the show's seventh-season finale.[23]

The cover photo of the June 2014 edition of San Francisco magazine, "The Oakland Issue: Special Edition", features a scene on the shore of Lake Merritt that re-creates the poses of the figures in Seurat's painting.[24]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sunday_Afternoon_on_the_Island_of_La_Grande_Jatte

[aquarianlights]

If I don't end up going to the hospital tonight, I'm going to have to go to the urgent care clinic as soon as it opens at 7am tomorrow. Idk if it will last through the night. . .but I'm keeping an eye on things. . .and if anything changes in any way or if they start burning even more. . .I'm going straight to the ER. I'd just really prefer to only have to pay 3 dollars versus anywhere from 5k to 50k added onto my already over 50k in medical debt. I'm trying so hard not to panic because if this is what I think it is, it is going to affect me for the rest of my life and change my whole life and world and future from here on out. Frankly, I'm not ready and I will NEVER be ready for the kind of monumental changes this could bring. I do not want to be right......but I don't know a lot about what I think it is...and I can't do any research online about it, because if I do I will start manifesting physical symptoms and feelings described by websites in correlation to this issue. That's how strong my mind is. If I believe I have something or if I am thinking that it's highly likely this thing could be it, I will read about it and symptoms that I didn't have before, ranging anywhere from as mild as a cough to as severe as hives, will manifest simply because my mind is convinced I have this thing and suddenly, I will have all the symptoms without actually having some of them. That's why I can never do research on things I'm suffering from or suspect I'm suffering from online. That's why I have to stay the fuck away from psychology and all that pseudo-science bullshit because I know what disorders I have and which I don't...and if I were to research the ones that I have, I will end up suddenly suffering from the symptoms that I don't have related to that disorder (minus BPD, because I'm such a textbook case of severe BPD that there isn't a single symptom that I don't have, even if they contradict each other. Yeah, it's complicated, but it's painfully true).

I'm ready to fucking off myself. I'm panicking. I'm ready to just die. . .if this is what I think it is, it will change my life so monumentally that I won't be able to go on.

But I'm utilizing what Grey's Anatomy has taught me..... And I'm giving myself until [x] time to panic. I am not allowing myself to panic or have a breakdown until I hear speculations from the doctor. And I'm not allowed to seriously consider suicide and weigh the pros and cons until I have gotten a verdict and my tests come back. Idk what kinda tests they're gonna do, but I'm positive they will do blood tests. So that could..take a bit. But I'm not going to consider or attempt and follow through with suicide until I hear the result of my tests. Because if they're positive for whatever I'm thinking... it will change my life in such monumental ways that I will have nothing left. Nothing to strive for. Nothing to work towards. My entire life will be taken from me. So there's just no point in living in complete agony and pain without any means of bettering myself or furthering my education and career advancements. I wouldn't even be able to go into any medical field. Maybe I should just drop out of med school right fucking now. . .

But, no, I'm not allowing myself to attempt and follow through with suicide until I hear the results of my tests (however many they do) and until they tell me the treatment plan. Well......not treatment. Coz there is no "treatment" for what I'm thinking of. However, there are tools for managing it. But it's a lifelong, uphill battle. And I can't do that. I just can't. My life and my body and everything about me is not important enough to me for me to be motivated enough to go through all of that and to be on my A-game for managing this every single waking hour. I can't. I just can't.

So. . . I'm not going home tomorrow like I planned. Which makes me want to die even more. But I do have to wait until the urgent care clinic opens tomorrow morning and not panic and overreact to paranoia and catastrophic thinking before then.

I guess I'm going to drug myself up on pain killers and coke until I can't feel anything anymore and lose track of my thoughts and time. . .and put on a documentary that will allow me to feed off of other people's misery and pain and, in turn, force myself to acknowledge and appreciate everything I have around me and all the opportunities I've been awarded in my life. Watching documentaries about really graphic, tragic stuff or about people who are locked up for a long time or life or whatever just makes me actively think about how good I have it and makes me appreciate everything I am able to do. And helps by allowing me to level up my happiness by feeding off of other people's misery. Idk why I get off, mentally, from strangers misery. And knowing I have more freedom, opportunities, and great non-material things in general than they will EVER have and could ever hope to have. Just makes me feel so much better for some reason.

So yeah. . .I’m gonna go drug myself up on pain killers that are stronger than I normally take and a bump more of coke than I normally do after snorting some small lines. I haven’t had coke in a long time, though, so I’m not gonna overdo it there. Pain killers? I’m back to popping 10-15 pain killers every 24 hours. Maybe more, I don’t really count anymore. I just take 2-3 more every time I feel like my high is fading. So I can overdo it with the pain killers as much as I want. I’m basically invincible when it comes to prescription drugs. Benzos, pain killers, muscle relaxers. . .I can honestly do as many of those as I want and not die. I can’t even tell you guys how many times I have done WAY over what “should” have killed me. Like, way over the lethal limit. I have such a high tolerance that I guess it makes me immune to that “limit”. I guess that limit is for people who aren’t addicts. Not that I’m an addict. It’s not a problem, anymore, like it used to be. I can quit anytime since I have gone through completely quitting successfully once before now. The reason I couldn’t quit whenever I wanted to before is because I had never done it successfully before, so I never knew all the steps it took to get there and what it was going to feel like during the process. Now that I know. . .I can literally just put the pills down whenever I feel like stopping or whenever I have to for whatever reason and I won’t even bother looking back. Just how I did with cigarettes years ago. Spent majority of my teenage years smoking a pack of camel crush every other day (a full pack split between two days basically) and then my young adult years. . .the same thing, as well as socially on top of that. And then I found out about beagle testing and I literally threw out my whole pack and never looked back. Never felt any withdrawals. Never felt any cravings. In fact, cigarettes. . .nicotine/tobacco. . .it fucking disgusted me from then on out because all I could see when I saw cigarettes or someone smoking was a superimposed image of someone “testing” cigarettes on beagles until they died, discarding their carcasses, and then moving on to the next one. I’m sure something like that will happen with drugs and I will actually WANT to get clean for good or just use recreationally weekly or monthly instead of recreationally daily. I’m not using them for anything other than recreation, so that’s another reason why it’s not a problem this time and why I can easily get off of them whenever the hell I want/need. I just certainly do not want to. And yeah, in this very instance right now, I’m using them as a coping mechanism. But it’s no different than someone having a panic attack and taking a k-pin. Or someone having an asthma attack and using their inhaler. Literally no different. There is something that is threatening my physical and mental health right now to the point of forcing me to kill myself/die in general (in these analogies: the panic attack and the asthma attack). . .I need something to help me get through it/make it stop (in these analogies: a PRN anti-anxiety medication and a PRN inhaler). . .and I’m going to use it to do exactly that (finally: using strong pk’s and coke to help me not die or hurt myself). So. . .no, it’s not a problem and anyone thinking I’m going back to who I used to be just because I’m doing drugs again and doing more than just the ones I was prescribed (which is honestly all I did for the past 2 or so years coz I was trying very hard to stay away from harder drugs that I had done in my youth). I’m not going to be that boy again. I promise.

And I’m not depressed. I’m not depressed in any way. Being suicidal does not always equal depression. Just like being depressed does not always equal being suicidal. You can be suicidal without being depressed. You can be depressed without being suicidal. (Just like you can experience panic attacks without having any kind of anxiety, aka Panic Disorder, which is what I have.) I don’t experience depression anymore. I’m not depressed in the slightest. Even when I’m suicidal. . .wanting to kill myself. . .and come to conclusion that I am most likely going to attempt. . I’m still not depressed. If I come to the conclusion that I AM going to attempt and I AM going to follow through. . .I may be depressed then, but it certainly does not influence my decision to commit suicide. That decision will be based purely on logic and the results of my test and consensus of the doctors. So don’t go thinking I’m turning into the boy I used to be. I am not Nickita. Or anyone that came before me. I am not them. I am Killian. And I don’t suffer from depression or anxiety or addiction of any sort.

I’m still gonna be the jovial, sarcastic, nihilist jokester that I always have been and always will be right up to the very end. I can promise you that.

[lorierosephotography]

Photomontages

after doing the mixed reactions workshop and researching David Hockney and Tom Pallant I really wanted to try out making some photomontages with some of my own images that I have taken recently.

I first started out with making photomontages in the style of Tom Pallants photomontages. how I done this was open a blank document in photoshop with the size of 4320x1080, I then imposted loads of photographs I had taken at a concert to match the style of Pallant, my photomontage docent quite match the style of Pallant because I could quite figure out how to create a mask on the image in photoshop so that the images could blend into one another so it was just loads of photos layer over the top if each other.

I then tried the same thing for some images that I had taken from the last project and because they were all shot in black and white they blend into each other more and make it look like it is one big image compared to the one above that, to me doesn't look as good and effective because I think it looks quite block because all of the images are just squares over the top of each other, for this black and white one I actually took one of the images and put it into an app called superimpose where I masked it so that the right hand side of the image and made that end slightly opaque so that when placed over the top of another image it looks like its blending into that image. this style of photomontage is definitely something that I want to experiment more with in the future.

after creating joiners in the same workshop I liked the idea of placing images of the same person over one another to manipulate the image to create a glitch style photograph, like above and all of the images below. I like the idea of swapping the eyes because I feel thats what people first look at and focous on more.

for all of the images above I done one in full colour and the others in black and white with selective colour to see what was more effective and I think that the selective colour ones were because it makes the layered pieces stand out more buss when they're against the colour background I feel as thought they get lost and blend into the image.

I then started experimenting with placing a different models eyes over a different person and tried to line the two images up as well as I could but I didnt like how it turned out because I feel that it doesn't look effective because it just looks too different, with the previous edits where I used the same person and manipulated their face and you could tell that its supposed to match but it doesn't, with this its too obvious that they don't go together.

colour select:

glitch:

after editing the other photomontages I wanted to try it again but instead of just placing the same copied and pasted and moving it slightly, I also change the bland mode so that it changed the colours and opacity of the layers creating a glitch effect on the image, changing it and making it more interesting. I liked how this effect looked and defiantly want to experiment more with this.

[chrysalispen]

upon pale dawns, prologue II: ardent for some desperate glory

AO3 Link HERE

=====

Castrum Abania, 9th Sun, Third Umbral Moon, Year 5 of the Seventh Umbral Era

The room was cold and its silence sterile, broken only by the sounds of a dry ticking from the digital wall chronometer and the soft and regular sighs of a sleeping man.

Silence in itself was hardly anything to be remarked upon, let alone a surprise. The research and development floors were always kept clear of unnecessary chatter in favor of the sound and rhythm of industry, small gears turning amidst the well-oiled machine of imperial conquest. Standard procedure, that. Especially when the work that took place away from prying eyes was exacting and often hazardous.

But for several hours, the relative darkness and the ambient cycling of the console's processor had been interspersed only with the low rumble of the central air unit and the rhythmic rattle of footsteps without the corridors, and Nero tol Scaeva had been awake for most of the past thirty hours. He had finally fallen asleep waiting for one of his processes to run and lay half-sprawled over the metal surface of the table: limbs immobile and lashes fluttering against his cheekbones as he drowsed at the empty work station he’d appropriated upon his arrival in the lower levels.

When the chiming began, it went unheeded at first. The timer had been set in this instance to ring without cessation, however, and after a few minutes had lapsed the sound began to send him drifting wide from his dreaming state by ilms. The transition from sleeping to wakefulness felt reluctant: heavy and sluggish, a pearl diver kicking against deep currents, breaking the surface tension of consciousness through brute force.

He blinked slowly, once, then twice, attempting to reorient himself.

The noise was also aggravating an incipient headache. Nero righted his posture with a tired grumble and smacked the damned thing until blessed silence reigned once more, before reaching for the mug he had left on a borrowed coaster (long since gone cold. His own fault, he owned). Sipping at its contents with a distasteful grimace - whoever had brewed the coffee, they had added too much water and the result was something weak and listless and far too bitter - he turned his attention towards the old Allagan testing module and its compiling readout.

It appeared to be reaching the end of its cycle. So he thought, until the activity scrolling across the screen flickered in place and pulsed once, twice, an arrythmia within the steady heartbeat of the machine. Nero swore under his breath when on its heels, a brief error message superimposed itself over the readout in black-bordered white. One he’d seen with far too many of these devices recently.

[Unable to read file. The current application will be terminated.]

An annoyed sigh escaped in a hiss between his teeth.

Brow wrinkled in thought, he stared at the screen for a few beats. This was but one of many datalog volumes his team had salvaged at the original site. The initial discovery had excited him - it had excited everyone, in fact, including the legatus - as it well should have done, but getting the godsdamned things to yield the fruit he sought was quickly proving to be an exercise in tedium.

Although Ultima’s original hardware was in surprisingly reasonable working order, several of the tomestones they had found in the same space had not proven to be nearly as resistant to the vagaries of time. Thus far, only a handful had relinquished their secrets without issue or delay. Not entirely unexpected, given their age and the conditions in which they’d been found, but unfortunate all the same.

The tribunus laticlavius of the XIVth Imperial Legion was not a patient man by nature, given to rather more direct methods of approach, but as a man of thirty-four winters with a good fifteen of them spent in the legions, he had very much learned the value of that particular skill. It was one he had developed through years of trial and error and the innate understanding of those traits his chosen craft required.

Magitek was not ineffable. It was parts and pieces that fit together neatly like a puzzle in the absence of human error. To guide and to create with these tools required a methodical mind and observant eye, as well as a certain degree of acceptance that on occasion one simply could not rush the desired results.

This was one such occasion. The end result, of course, would be worth the means. Or so one might fondly hope.  

Nero leaned forward and compressed the small button until the module had powered down and all that was left was the rumbling rattle of the castrum's central air unit (always running this time of year). A gentle tug freed the small tomestone from its moorings and he held it aloft to study the detailing, periwinkle-blue eyes squinting and straining against the red-tinged light from the fluorescents.

The small grooves caught the ambient lighting from the walls with each idle spin between his fingers. They seemed to mock him with each little shimmer: ancient secrets so painfully close to discovery that they lay mere ilms from his grasp. Secrets which promised a long and tedious process if he wished to claim them.

...Well. He’d do it, of course he would. Aught he deemed necessary - good, bad, or ugly - in order to see Project Ultima to completion. Even were it not his primary directive, he had always had every intention of plundering their contents at his leisure for the challenge of it and the knowledge to be had. This was but the least method at his disposal. There were some few other options he might employ, which might serve to successfully extract the data into some readable format that he could put to use.

While the old datalogs were fascinating, he wasn't spending his time reading them for a history lesson. No, what he sought was preliminary information, something upon which to safely extrapolate. Ideally he'd end up with a dossier of sorts which he could use to catalogue the Weapon’s original abilities, and enough code to piece together an operating system more or less analogous to that of Allag, albeit one powered by ceruleum instead of aether. If he could simply-

A much lower-pitched sound than his armor’s onboard timer - not an alarum but a harsh, flat buzz - cut through the quiet of the lab. Nero’s first inclination was to ignore it in favor of his study, but a second followed quickly on its heels, and a third. 

That, unfortunately, meant someone was expecting him to answer.

With a barely suppressed yawn he toggled the small red switch next to the wall’s built-in communications device. “Scaeva. Engineering," he said, keeping his tone clipped and curt- the voice of a man who would brook no disturbances. "State your business.”

The response he received was a very audible swallow followed with a hoarsely uttered, “Lord Scaeva?”

“Speaking."

"My lord?"

Nero sighed. "Speaking. As in 'with whom do I have the pleasure.' Name and rank."

“Oh. Terribly sorry, my lord. I, erm, Quintus pyr Blasio. Lord, uh. Tribunus. Sir.”

Seven hells. Not a name Nero recalled, though he rarely had reason to trouble himself over memorizing the personnel that manned every garrison between Ala Mhigo and the Velodyna fringes. Some poor bastard who was likely the first man flagged down for runner duty by his direct report, no doubt. Some poor bastard who was also either too dazzled or too shit-scared of speaking to the legion's top brass to string three coherent words together. Just what he needed.  

“...Go on,” he prompted when the man said nothing further.

“Lord Sc-”

“I daresay we’ve both established our identities at this juncture," impatience and lingering drowsiness rendered his response a sardonic drawl, for all its erstwhile civility. "The message, if you please.”

“Message, my lord?”

“Yes. The message. That is why you’ve called to interrupt my current litany of scheduled tasks, or so I assume?”

“Ah... y-yes. Yes, my lord.” The speaker at the other end of the connection paused, and on its heels came the sound of a clearing throat. “Ah, Lord van Baelsar asked that I, er, that is, he requests your presence to discuss-”

“He wants me to attend a meeting,” Nero cut in. “When and where?”

“Half four, my lord. Ah- in Sector VI. The administrative complex south of the new hangar.”

Half four- it was five minutes past now. With the identification checks and elevators taken into account, that gave him about ten minutes' leeway. The timing would be somewhat tight to work in, perhaps, but it was perfectly feasible.

The man’s nervous, ragged breathing crackled across the link; the only other sound was the flat drumming of Nero’s fingertips upon the metal surface as he mentally rearranged the next hour he’d dedicated to other tasks. It was an inconvenience to be certain. He was going to have to run the process once more after some adjustments were made, and clearly, it would need closer supervision. Meaning the sleep he knew he needed was not going to be an option.

But this summons still amounted to an order, and hardly one he could disregard or countermand. Heavily classified weapon project or no.

“Understood," he said at last. "Inform the legatus that I will be along presently."

"I will, Lord tol Scaeva. I-"

"In future, do make some bare attempt at brevity when delivering messages, tessarius- for your own sake.”

Another gulp. “Of course, my lord. I’ll pass alo--”

Before the hapless soldier could waste more of his time stammering out another response, the tribunus laticlavius flipped the switch and cut the connection. The line went dead with a static click.

Nero was a practical man, one rarely wont to let trivial annoyances linger. As he set the artifact aside to reach for the fountain pen at his elbow and drew a small leather-bound planner from the desk drawer, a habit he’d kept since his Academy days, he could already feel his focus shifting, moving onwards.

He rolled the pen thoughtfully betwixt index and middle fingers, eyes flickering away from the planner to linger briefly upon the blank console screen. No doubt there was also more useful information to be ascertained from the old Meteor Project dossier; he’d request another copy of the relevant files through the proper channels once the meeting concluded.

In the meantime, it seemed a progress report was likely to be expected upon his timely - and fully conscious - arrival. Strict self-imposed schedule notwithstanding, it wouldn’t do for him to be the only one empty-handed.

He flipped the notebook open to a fresh and empty page, tilted the ink nub, and began to write.

[harmonicatabs]

The Harp Reference: Motivated Note

New Post has been published on https://harmonicatabs.net/the-harp-reference-motivated-note/

The Harp Reference: Motivated Note

Motivated Notes

A “motivated note” is a note that is played for a reason.  All notes are motivated to a certain extent, but the degree of motivation is a big part of how well the note will work in the music.. how good it will sound.

What motivates the selection of the next note to be played?  Why do you pick that particular pitch at that particular time, and why do you hold it as long as you do?  That depends on what motivates you.. what your reasons are.  What motivates you depends fairly heavily on what you know about, as well as your attitudes, and even what you don’t know. Learning new things can enhance your motivation, giving  you better reasons for playing a particular note a certain way.  One new idea can take your improvisations in new and interesting directions.

Many times we are unaware of our actual reasons for what we play.  We are normally at a different level of awareness and have difficulty peering deep down into the underlying and overriding motivations that meld into our judgments and determine our decisions.  This is particularly true when improvising.  Playing by ear, we say.  Just going with the flow and playing what works, what sounds good.  We get an aural image of the music, look around, and see where we want to go.  But what do we see?  How do we think about what we see, and how do we decide which way to go?

There is a vast array of different notes and note combinations that can be played at any given time, in various combinations, different ways.  The context of the music provides a probabilistic limiting to what things will work, musically.  You’re probably not going to play a classical motif while performing Chicago Blues.  Certain notes in certain contexts can be practically guaranteed not to offend the ear.  Certain notes in certain contexts will be almost guaranteed not to work.  Most notes fit in between, with varying degrees of “working”, consonance, dissonance, and not working with the rest of the music.  To understand how to use notes, we have to understand what they are.

A note is:

a particular pitch

played at a certain moment

for a particular duration of time

with a certain timbre

at a certain volume

that changes over time in a certain way.

So a single note has many aspects.  Each of these aspects has to be considered as to how it fits in the context of the music.

A phrase is:

A related sequence of musically motivated notes and silences with an associated

Sequence of note time-value relationships and rests that constitute the melodic rhythm.

A melody is a sequence of musical phrases.

The musical context is an evolving “state” of the music that depends on three basic things:

What has come before (the past)

Meter and rhythm

The groove

Melody

Harmony

Timbre

Motifs

Themes

Verse

Chorus

Phrases

Chord progressions

The melodic rhythm of note-value phrases

What is going on now (the present)

Current harmony (underlying chord)

Nearby notes and silences

Whether on or off the beat

Which beat you are on

Where you are in the music’s chord progression, motif, melody, phrase, or theme

What will come later (the future)

[same elements as what has come before]

Music is built with these patterns upon patterns upon patterns of notes and silences.  The musical context sets the framework for these patterns–a pattern cannot be fully realized if the whole pattern has not been exposed–played yet.  For example, the pattern of patterns that is a song or piece of music is not complete until the piece has finished.

The meter is perhaps the most fundamental pattern associated with a musical theme.  The time signature defines a repeating pattern of note-value (time duration) relationships that often remains inviolate through out a piece–the most common example is 4 beats per measure.  No matter which pitches you choose, you have to make them fit in a 4 beats per measure pattern (though often the end of one measure will extend through the beginning of the next).  The most elementary motif is normally no shorter than one measure, one bar.

The number of 4 beat note-value combinations (melodic rhythms) in one bar is not extremely high.  Considering that the sixteenth note is usually the smallest time value extensively used, basically only a half dozen different note values are available (sixteenth, eighth, quarter, half, whole, triplet).  The number of patterns available from combinations of these time values in a beat pattern like 4 beats-per-measure-quarter-note-gets-one-beat is reasonably manageable.  However, as the number of bars increases, the number of combinations increases exponentially.  Patterns of bars emerge, and patterns of bar-patterns are built on top.  These can be phrases or sub-phrase patterns, motifs, themes, verses, choruses, A-sections, B-sections, songs, or symphonies…  The development of patterns and adhering to them are fundamental motivations for playing particular notes.

Chord progressions are repeating sets of bars with a defined pattern of chords associated with each bar.  For example, the blues format is a pattern of 12 bars with the I, IV, V chords played for 4, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1 bars.  Within this pattern there is obviously another pattern lurking.. it is divided into 3 groups of 4 bars.  In the first group the chord does not change.  In the second group of 4 bars, the chord changes once.  In the third group of 4 bars the chord changes 3 times.  The frequency of chord changes is a “superimposed pattern” that gives the music a sense of motion.  In the 12 bar blues form, the music starts out still, starts moving faster in the middle, and moves even faster at the end.  With this faster motion comes a feeling of “something happening” that is over and above the rhythm and the melody of the music.  When the blues progression repeats, there is another cycle of relative stillness giving the feeling that what was happening is over and something new has started, followed by the increasing motion again and a new sense of something happening.  So, another pattern is built out of repeating verses, a pattern of chord change frequency (even if the chords were different each verse, as in modulation to a new key).

What are possible reasons for picking a note?  What motivations are there?  How do we know which note to play (next)?

It has been composed and is predefined.

It works with the groove

ONE two THREE four ONE two THREE four

one TWO three FOUR one TWO three FOUR

ONE two three four ONE two three four

ONE two three ONE two three

ONE two ONE two ONE two three ONE two ONE two ONE two three

It fits with the selected musical style

It works with or establishes some musical theme of a song, like a

phrase

verse

chorus

bass line

chord progression

It works with or establishes some melodic rhythm pattern (note-value phrase)

It contributes to the musical feel

It comes from the harmony

It comes from the scale and mode

It borrows from a related harmony, scale, or mode

Chord substitutions

Mode/scale substitutions

It follows from the melody

It leads to upcoming harmony (chords)

It comes from the ear, motivated by the sound

It comes from the mind, motivated by the intellect

It comes from the body, motivated by playing technique

It comes from the instrument, motivated by its mechanical characteristics

It comes from memory

What has sounded good before

What has sounded bad before (so you don’t do it again in that context)

What theoretical relationships have worked before (in addition to what new relationships may work now)

What physical actions have been practiced before

Lick – A set series of physical actions (consisting of blows, draws, bends, overbends, and other effects) that result in a memorable pattern of notes with an action-associated note-value phrase (melodic rhythm) over a set of holes.  One lick can be played in different physical places, or on different key or tuning harps, to produce different melodic phrases with the samemelodic rhythm.  While the original musical phrase may have had “well motivated” notes, when captured as a physical action pattern of play rather than a musical statement the notes can become less well motivated.

Riff – The term “riff” is not used consistently by players.  Many players consider a riff to be the same thing as a lick.. two words with different origins that mean the same thing.  Other players think of a riff as a short repeated “lick” used in some thematic way, such as a song’s “hook”.  Some people think of a “riff” as something behind the solo, and a “lick” as something used in a solo, and others think something else altogether.  It’s good to make clear from the context just what you mean when you say “riff” to avoid confusion. Another definition for “riff” is: a physical-action based ornamentation of a note, or transition between notes or phrases.  As with a lick, the motivation of the resulting notes of an ornamentation riff is primarily due to the physical action, and not to play notes of particular pitches.

It is an accident; a mistake of the ear, mind, or technique

It tries to meet expectations

It tries to be unexpected

It acts in a phrase of related notes to contribute to a musical statement

Patterns upon patterns upon patterns of notes and silences form an integrated tapestry that is the music.

Turning Licks Into Phrases

As discussed above, licks are playing patterns that generate a melodic rhythm and associated pitches based on the physical characteristics of the instrument.  Phrases are associated musically motivated notes and silences with a corresponding note-value pattern, which is the melodic rhythm of the phrase.  So, licks generate musical phrases, but they aren’t themselves musical phrases.

One way to help turn a physical playing pattern into a musically motivated phrase is to use the melodic rhythm as a recurring theme or motif in your song.  As with most things, good taste includes not overdoing it.

To really turn the results of a lick into a musical phrase, you should be able to play the same notes wherever they occur on the harp.  In other words, if you play a lick on the bottom of the harp, be able to play those notes in the middle and top of the harp too.  Be able to play them in different positions so you learn the musical relationships, not just the physical actions you use when playing the lick in one place on one harp.  This will help your ear and mind get control of the musical phrase and help you minimize the reliance on muscle memory.  It helps your music break free of your technique, by extending your techniques to enable the music you want to play.  It helps improve your musical vision, and can help enhance your internal image “mind’s eye” view of the harp.

[premayogan]

22 Examples of Augmented Reality to Inspire Small Business Owners

The year 2016 witnessed the launch of Pokémon GO, a path-breaking innovation in the world of mobile video games, and the game earned tremendous acceptance globally with 100 million downloads on Google Play in one month. It is one of the top augmented reality examples among many more that have emerged in the past two years. Apple CEO Tim Cook said in 2016 that the augmented reality technology will become so essential that it will be as much a part of a user’s day as eating three meals a day. In the FIFA World Cup 2018, football fans got an engaging opportunity to extend their support for their favorite team by adding 3D face masks to photos and videos. This became the first international sporting event to implement Facebook’s augmented reality masks. Over the past couple of years, we have come across numerous augmented reality examples, either in the news or experienced ourselves. The world of augmented reality has finally become as real as peanut butter. Its capabilities which we have seen in sci-fi fictions movies like HER are now a science-backed reality in life. It offers an enriched experience by introducing elements of the virtual world into the real world using technology. From education to entertainment, healthcare to medical science, sports to tourism, product marketing to retail shopping, construction to telecommunication, engineering to manufacturing, environment to energy, AR has marked its presence everywhere. AR is here to stay and all set to become an indispensable part of our daily lives.

Augmented Reality and its types

Augment means ‘to add’ or ‘to enhance something’. Augmented reality is an enhanced version of the real environment by superimposing graphics, sounds, touch and effects for better user experience. The primary objective of AR is to ensure a superior audiovisual experience for the user. The implementation models and applications of AR are wide-ranging and unlimited. It can be applied to simple things like text notifications for better user experience as well as to prepare medical professionals to perform complicated surgeries. AR vs VR Both virtual reality and augmented reality are changing the way we perceive reality and set to have remarkable growth in the coming years. Although they sound similar, they are two different concepts. Augmented reality adds digital elements to an existing natural environment for enhanced user experience, whereas in Virtual Reality an imagined or real-world environment is recreated. AR aficionados classify Augmented Reality majorly into five categories, although the differences between each are not quite obvious. The different types of augmented reality are: Projection-based AR It projects digital images on physical objects in real space. Recognition-based AR You scan an image and it comes to life. Location-based AR It makes use of the location-detecting feature of the smart devices. Outlining AR It is similar to projection-based AR but uses object recognition to work. Superimposition-based AR It provides an ‘alternate’ view of a particular object. Therefore, it is used widely in healthcare and military AR applications.

The current “Reality” of “Augmented Reality”

The augmented reality ecosystem has evolved very quickly over the past few years and continues to grow at a rapid rate. The International Data Corporation (IDC) expects a five-year compound annual growth rate of 98.8% for AR and VR products and services during the period 2017-2021. Major industries have started exploring augmented reality for improving customer experience and interaction, workforce enablement, brand advertising, etc. The home furnishing market has already put AR technology into action to enhance brand experience for their customers. Siemens, the engineering company, has recently used AR to showcase the new range of magnetic valves. Major brands like Coca-Cola, Spotify etc., are using augmented reality applications to advertise their products. How tech giants are defining this new reality? Google and ARCore ARCore is the platform from Google for augmented reality apps. It enables developers to integrate virtual content with the real world and thereby offer numerous AR experiences for the users. The Expeditions AR, which was introduced to provide an augmented learning experience for students, is now free for all. Google Glass, the wearable augmented reality eyeglass launched in 2012, is often reviewed as a product far ahead of its time. Apple and ARKit The ARKit2, with an impressive list of additional features, was unveiled by Apple in 2018 at the Worldwide Developer Conference. It enables developers to build AR apps that ensure a deeper level of immersion for the users. Facebook and AR Studio Facebook introduced AR Studio, the augmented reality tool, for third-party developers in 2017. While Netflix used the AR Studio tools to launch its comic book series, Nike experimented with the Camera Effects Platform to employ AR with Messenger bots for its new line of sneakers. Amazon Sumerian and Amazon AR View Amazon has also stepped into the AR world with Amazon Sumerian and AR View. Amazon Sumerian lets anyone create AR apps quickly and easily using its tools. AR View is another amazing feature from the online retail giant which lets you view the products in your home before you buy it. Microsoft Hololens Microsoft launched Hololens in 2016 to mark its presence in the world of Mixed Reality. The release of the second version of Hololens is a much-awaited event in the tech world. It is expected to be launched this year with a custom AI chip for better performance. Magic Leap This highly funded Florida-based startup has come up with its futuristic pair of augmented reality glasses named as Magic Leap One. It is designed to enhance the real world with digital objects while you can interact with everything real that is going around you. Samsung Samsung Electronics has included augmented reality features in Galaxy 9, its recently launched smartphone model. The company has also used augmented reality tech features in Bixby Vision, the smart assistant in Galaxy Note 8, for better user experience. Well, the list is not complete as there are many other AR startups and tech companies working on AR-based products and services. AR is expected to revolutionize the way businesses operate in the near future. The global spending on AR and virtual reality technology will reach $215 billion in 2021. In the next couple of years, Apple and Google together will have 4.25 billion AR-capable devices. The AR industry is expected to generate revenue of $90 billion by 2020.

Major applications categories of Augmented Reality

Social Marketing and Retail Gaming Utility Education and Training

22 of the most interesting, inspiring and innovative examples of Augmented Reality

The history of augmented reality can be traced back to the beginning of the 21st Century when Lyman Frank Baum published the illustrated novel ‘The Master Key.’ The first augmented reality device, named ‘The Sword of Damocles,’ was invented by Ivan Sutherland. Fast forward to 1990, Tom Caudell coined the term ‘Augmented Reality.’ And in the same decade, AR tech has taken its baby steps as a commercial commodity. Acknowledge it or not, AR is slowly becoming a part of our everyday life now. With numerous applications, AR is all set to transform our lives for the better. Check out below a curated list of the best AR examples put into action. 1. IKEA Mobile App – Put furniture on the streets The Swedish home furnishing company IKEA is a pioneer in taking advantage of augmented reality technology to enhance customer experience. It launched IKEA Place, the AR-based app, in the autumn of 2017. This app enables shoppers to see exactly how furniture items in the product catalog would look and fit in their homes before they buy it. It makes use of Apple’s ARKit augmented reality platform to take shopping experience to the next level. 2. Project Color App From Home Depot – Which shade for your wall?

Will the wall paint make the bedroom look dull? Does the shortlisted bedroom furniture make the space jam-packed? Is the coffee table too small for the living room? These kinds of common shopping queries can become a thing of the past when home furnishing companies put AR into action. Decorating your home becomes a lot easier with the Project Color App from Home Depot. It shows the user how a particular paint looks in the wall before you actually finalize the shade. Similar to IKEA, the company has launched its dedicated AR app for home furnishing products as well. 3. Timberland – Say goodbye to fitting rooms Not many of us want to go to the fitting room repeatedly while we shop for outfits. Hence Timberland launched its virtual fitting room in a shopping center in Warsaw to offer a better retail experience. Launched in 2014, it uses Kinect Motion Sensing Technology to enable shoppers to try on different outfits virtually. You can see your face and similar-sized figure in various outfits before you buy it. 4. Sephora Virtual Artist – Virtual makeup anywhere, anytime Sephora Virtual Artist is an innovative and exciting AR feature available in Sephora’s app. It allows the prospective customers to try on thousands of Sephora’s makeup products to find the best-suited one. 5. MakeupGenius App – Unique virtual makeup experience The MakeupGenius App from L’Oreal Paris, one of the world’s top cosmetics manufacturers, gives you instant makeovers using real products and a real inspiration. By using the camera of your phone, it recognizes your facial features to offer a seamless virtual makeup experience. If you aren’t sure about which shade of lipstick or eyeliner suits you well, this app is what you need. 6. Pepsi Max, AR and the bus shelter in London A prowling tiger, a crashing meteor and an alien tentacle grabbing people in a bus stop! Well, this is not a scene from a sci-fi movie, but an astounding advertisement using augmented reality tech by PepsiCo. The company named the video campaign as “Unbelievable Bus Shelter.” 7. AccuVein for easier and safer IV insertion AccuVein is a leading example of how augmented reality application can be used to solve a real-world problem in healthcare. It uses projection-based AR to take away the guesswork involved in finding a vein. 8. AMC Theatres provides optimal convenience with AR The entertainment industry has already put AR into action in innovative ways. A perfect example is AMC Theatres which incorporates AR technology in their app to deliver the brand message at the right moment. Users can scan a film poster and receive relevant information about the movie using the app. They can go ahead and purchase the movie tickets as well. 9. Weather Channel’s AR entry to warn against winter driving hazards Weather Channel used AR technology to explain the hazards of winter driving innovatively and it garnered much attention in April 2018. The broadcast company used a virtual car through the studio to describe the hazards of driving on snowy roads. It had earlier used augmented reality technology to display a tornado in the studio. 10. AR Poser – Take a selfie with digital avatars Disney Research has recently started to use augmented reality technology to enable users to pose with, or as, a digital avatar for enhanced user experience. The app named as AR Poser takes only 2 seconds to interpret an image and project the digital avatar. The team at Disney Research had earlier developed technology using AR to project colored images from a book into 3D renderings using a smartphone. 11. Pokémon GO – The game that made AR a household name Pokémon GO does not need any explanation. Niantic surprised the whole world with its augmented reality video game Pokémon GO. The game enjoyed overwhelming success leading to the massive popularity of AR technology among consumers. The company will soon launch its next game themed on Harry Potter series and is named as ‘Harry Potter: Wizards Unite’. 12. Google’s Measure – Forget the measuring tapes Don’t have a measuring tape handy? Here’s the virtual measuring app from Google that is available on any device that runs ARCore. It lets you measure smaller dimensions quickly by just using your smartphone camera. 13. Find Your Car With AR – In case you forget Do you often forget where you parked the car and waste time over searching for it? Here’s the right solution. ‘Find Your Car With AR’ lets you see where you have parked the car, the street address, date and time of parking and much more. This AR-based app is most helpful when you park the car in crowded areas like stadiums, malls, convention centers, etc. 14. Taco Bell – Product packaging with an AR twist 

When Taco Bell released its new Doritos Locos Tacos, it placed an AR feature in its app. Users can scan the product box using the app to see product-related content in Twitter and Facebook. This way, the restaurant chain employed AR technology to create a sense of community. 15. Acura – “What a Race” in Augmented Reality Acura, the luxury vehicle marque of Honda, embraced augmented reality last year by hosting the world’s first-of-its-kind live augmented reality driving experience. Named as “What a Race,” it was broadcasted on Facebook Live as part of the marketing campaign of the new 2018 TLX from the Japanese automaker. 16. Volkswagen’s AR system for workforce assistance 

The German automaker, Volkswagen has introduced an AR system to guide its workers in navigating through a factory. This AR system helps the worker move anywhere in their massive factories to find a specific machine and then overlay the information they need for the task, on the spot. The company plans to use AR technology for autonomous indoor driving and guide visitors inside the factory in the near future. 17. StubHub’s AR feature for Super Bowl fans StubHub wanted to help football fans who are uncertain about the location of their seats in the stadium for the Super Bowl matches. They came up with an AR-based feature in their iPhone app to improve the overall Super Bowl experience of ticket-buyers. They can actually visualize the location of their seats, parking garages and pre-game events in the surrounding area. 18. Wikitude – The AR browser app Wikitude app is appreciated by travelers as it provides location-based augmented reality experiences and geographically relevant information. You can also get information regarding accommodation, hotel deals etc. using the app. It includes many amazing features like 3D model rendering, image recognition, tracking, and video rendering to name a few. 19. Tactical Augmented Reality for the military force Augmented Reality has been intelligently put into action by the United States Army. The technology called ‘Tactical Augmented Reality (TAR)’ is majorly used to improve situational awareness of soldiers. TAR uses goggles with night-vision which are wirelessly connected to a tablet that soldiers carry on their waists. The exciting part of TAR is that when a soldier points a weapon, the image of the target along with their details can be seen through the eyepiece. 20. Wiring worries of Boeing solved with AR Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer, uses an AR solution to speed up the wire repair process and eliminate wiring errors in the plane. This hands-free device, similar to a Google Glass, lets technicians see the wiring in the plane and gives step-by-step directions using voice commands. Additionally, workers can get expert advice from remote engineers as well, using a special feature in this AR-based solution known as Skylight. 21. Aecomis uses Mixed Reality for complex projects Architects and engineers at Aecomis work in collaboration from its Hong Kong, Denver and London offices using Mixed Reality. The company uses Microsoft Hololens Technology that projects 3D engineering models as holograms at multiple locations. The team members can walk through the visualized models of complex projects from their respective locations and thereby avoid architectural errors in the projects before construction. 22. SAVED – An oxygen mask with smart glasses Inflight smoke, fume or fire is the leading cause of emergency landing and delays. To solve this problem, FedEx Express cargo will soon introduce an oxygen mask that will include smart glass. The pilot will get the display of flight controls quickly in the mask and thus ensure safe landing of the plane immediately. ODG has come up with this AR-based technology and it is named as Smoke Assured Vision Enhanced Display (SAVED).

AR is the reality of our future

Augmented Reality is a technology in its infancy. The biggest benefits of augmented reality technology are yet to come. It has opened up tremendous possibilities. Your imagination is the only limit when it comes to AR technology. The above-mentioned examples will probably inspire you to use this new technology innovatively to grow your business. The power of AR tech is undeniable. If you are reluctant to embrace it now, your brand may be left behind in the race. Brands that acknowledge this and take necessary action will be well-positioned to capitalize on this transformation. Adding AR into your business strategy is slowly becoming a need of the hour. It can be cleverly put into action to improve the business processes, enhance customer experience and boost customer engagement, to name a few. The above-listed examples are just a tip of the iceberg. The imaginative concepts you have seen in science fiction movies can now be transformed into reality with the right AR technology. Read the full article

[phantomrose96]

Artificial Heart

This is my Final for my creative writing class. It’s over 10,000 words long so not the lightest read. But heck man it’s done and I’m pretty proud of it :‘D

Matt never saw the whole body.

Most of it was too buried to see, or charred to a black unrecognizable. It was only the right arm he saw, slung across the cement ground with its fingers curled in, nails cracked and peeling back from the heat. The palm was scorched ashen, splits in the skin leaking fresh oily red beneath the pyre of flame and the sweeping blankets of dark black smoke. The heat cracks ran like veins down the forearm, until everything became buried at the elbow. The forearm was half-submerged in the slick, oily sludge that built up a sheen at the bottom of the pile--a viscous, separated fluid which smelled of death in its own right. An ochre trash bag rested on top and molded to it. Then more sat atop that. They built the whole inferno—sickly flesh-colored sacks that split from the heat and spilled their guts of rotted food and plastic containers and diapers, napkins, dinner plates. The ochre bags were designed specifically to be environmentally friendly, that’s why regular citizens were allowed to burn them once the landfills had overflowed in 2030. It said nothing for the contents of the bags.

Matt stood, his own ochre bag in hand filled with nothing but take-out containers and soiled paper plates. He stared until his eyes burned with the smoke, and his throat itched with the particulate matter not trapped in the cotton mask over his nose and mouth. He considered getting closer purely out of curiosity, but it was in the air now, the parts of it that had burned. He pictured the ashy, feather-light flakes of it settling on his sweatshirt, on his mask, on his brow unprotected. He could never scrub that off, not fully. So he shuffled over to the conveyer belt, and he dropped his own garbage bag there, and hung around just long enough to watch it topple over the precipice and onto the pyre below, its fabric already crinkling in the flames.

Matt turned around so the air hitting him was fresher, and he considered for a single moment calling the police. The thought lasted only a second, and it was banished. Matt had called the police only once in his life, and he had thought it was brave at the time. He’d been fifteen, sitting on the front steps of a dense and warm summer night listening to the yelling inside roll and ebb and crescendo again. It was back when his dad’s affair was new information and his mother, small as she was, had become something heinous when given access to alcohol and kitchenware. The police fixed nothing after he called them, as he sat there, arm curled around their dog Lucky. They only took his mother off for the night, and his older brother had to drive to the station to retrieve her in the morning. And her court date two weeks later to dismiss the charges had ran late, so she arrived thirty minutes after tennis practice ended to pick up Matt, dressed in her Sunday best and saying nothing the whole ride home.

Matt learned to keep things private after that. He did not want to thread himself with the affairs of the police again—as a victim, or a witness, or a suspect. He would not call them, not even for a dead body.

…

Gray storm clouds rolled in with the humidity. They drove a tension into the air that crackled against Matt’s skin and made his upper lip sweat against the air mask. He walked the concrete-lined path back to his apartment, a full half-mile from the communal trash pyre. He lived with his girlfriend Lena, and luckily they lived upwind from the pyre, but days like these sent hot, bloated pockets of wind in all direction. The standing water that lined the streets and rimmed the cracks in the sidewalk turned pungent. Air clung to the skin like sweat, and in the distance the lone few leafless trees howled, the wind stripping their branches and slicing through like hot breath. Matt quickened his pace. He didn’t care to feel the air linger on his skin any longer. It stuck to his throat too easily, shortening his breath, pushing his heart through hiccupy bursts that would stutter until he coughed. The air was bad for you, everyone knew, but Matt had a feeling it was worse for him than most anyone else.

Matt was wheezing slightly when he made it up the last of the four flights of stairs to his apartment door. He undid the deadbolt to get in, and redid it for good measure when he had shut the door behind him. The air inside was cleaner, thinner, but not pure enough to warrant removing the mask. Matt removed his shoes instead, and rubbed his heels. He set his eyes to the sink to wash his hands of the lingering feel of the trash bag. He’d shower too, to wash the ash from his hair.

“Any trouble?”

Matt shut off the tap. He ran one dripping hand through his sandy hair and looked to the couch. Lena sat there, her legs curled beneath her, laptop propped against her knees. Her hair was wet, licking her collar bone with water beads like drops of sweat. The dryer parts of her hair had curled into a thick frizz, coiled by the humidity. Her cotton mask was pulled to the side. Matt wasn’t sure if she’d had it like that the whole time, or if she’d pulled it aside to speak to him unmuffled.

“No, no trouble,” Matt answered through his mask. His throat still felt smothered. He opened the cabinet in search of a clean glass.

“You took long today.” She stood, and carried her laptop over with one hand supporting it like a serving platter. Lena stretched to her toes to grab a different glass from the cabinet. She waited behind Matt, who quickly turned the tap back on to finish filling his glass.

“Did I?” Matt asked, benign in his pretend ignorance. He pulled aside his mask and tried not to cough as the water hit his throat. Lena filled her glass after him.

“What are you working on?” he asked.

“3-D designs.” Lena tilted her laptop so he could view it. A three-dimensional grid sat superimposed on the general model of a heart whose surface was broken up into thousands of matte polygons that wove together into bevels and dips and hollows. The left ventricle was still one flat surface, not yet constructed.

Matt stared until he felt tired looking at it, imaging the work behind the intricacies of its details. He set his glass beneath the tap against and refilled it. “Are you going to get it 3-D printed?”

“Eventually. It’s not done yet. I’ve kinda hit a block working on it.”

Matt nodded, and it was about the best he could do in these conversations. He didn’t understand her work, at least not at a level to contribute to these discussions in any way that didn’t leave him feeling foolish. Lena had been a senior at Holyoke Tech when Matt had been a freshman. She’d graduated with her degree in biomedical engineering and accepted the offer to stick around and do her PhD under her senior thesis advisor. She’d claimed it was the best choice financially, but Matt knew she’d turned down at least two job offers in California in order to stay. She’d been excited about those offers; she’d tried to talk him into transferring to some tech institute near one place or the other. He didn’t remember what institute—he only remembered that he hadn’t had the energy to consider uprooting himself after a whole year at Holyoke. He’d managed to tell her that, and that if long distance wouldn’t work, he thought it would be best they break up. Lena stopped talking about the job offers. She started acting excited about staying at Holyoke for her Ph.D. It could have been coincidence, Matt told himself, but deep down he was almost certain she’d stayed just for him.

The details in his mind were hazy; that had been nearly three years back, and Matt’s memory was a cracked and hole-ridden thing anyway. He wasn’t sure. Maybe she has had a different reason.

By the end of this year, Matt would be graduating with a degree in computer science. Pursuing a Ph.D. afterward didn’t interest him—nothing much did. His future remained empty, so he mostly listened to Lena’s explanations of her work, feeling just a bit stung that he could understand nothing past the graphics interface her modeling software used, and even then at nothing more than an amateur level.

“Do you still have to do a lot of work on that before it’s printable, or what?” he asked.

Lena nodded, her lips tight. “Yeah, but Farhid only wants to see the wireframe structure by Monday. These filled-in regions can be tweaked later. They’re all resting on a wireframe and that’s the only part I really need done by Monday. Farhid’s current model has got too flimsy of a scaffold. It’s gotta hold its shaped but when he gets to the phase of growing the cells around it they get too eager to bind across the gaps. Instead of dividing enough times they just heal across the gaps—extracellular matrices find each other and bind—and they squeeze the scaffold until it warps. Farhid’s given up on his design and wants me to come up with something that won’t do that. Usually he’s a lot more hands-off with my work but he needs this favor…” Lena trailed off. Her top teeth lingered on her lip, eyes lost out the window in thought. Matt followed her gaze but found nothing. He saw only tall brick buildings just like theirs stretching into the air, separated from them just by the street below. The smog sat between their window panes like water vapor.

“Lena?”

Lena snapped back, dark eyes suddenly alight. She set her laptop on the counter and raised her glass to her lips. “Right, I was just thinking if maybe my scaffold--pretty much I should have this part done by noon. Do you wanna watch a movie after lunch?”

“I shouldn’t—I’ve got work,” Matt answered. He did have work—three overdue labs and a fourth one on the horizon. Dread weighed his stomach down, to the point that failing seemed preferable to slogging through the programs he knew he’d not get completed before the end of term. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t graduate. And maybe that was fine. Maybe he’d take an extra semester here with Lena, and sort his life out…

He was too tired anyway. For work or a movie.

Or Lena.

“What about going out to dinner?” Lena followed up. She glanced to her laptop, a worried twisting of her brow, then shut her computer entirely. “There’s a new Thai place across the street from Bella’s apartment. She says it’s good. I’ve been looking for somewhere to go for my birthday.”

Matt’s lip curled slightly. He didn’t know Bella well. She was Lena’s friend, an ashen white girl of 22 with stringy blond hair and thin teeth. She talked too much and too long about nothing; her focus shifted too easily—between people and conversation topics and drivers on the road. He had been in the back seat, Lena in the passenger’s, three years ago when Bella T-boned another car through a red light. Matt had woken up in the hospital with a punctured lung and his breathing had never since been quite right. He hadn’t hung out with her since, and had no desire to.

“You don’t like Thai food,” Matt answered, because he knew that route would be easier.

“I don’t like the Thai take-out place. This one is new.” There was an edge to her words. It annoyed Matt just a bit, because it filled him with the sense that he wanted to reassure her, but his mind was too tired to come up with the words to do so.

“Maybe another night.” Matt passed from the kitchen to the livingroom—the two were separated only by a change in floor tiling, linoleum to wood. He settled on the couch, dragged his laptop across the coffee table, and glanced once more to the hazy gray sky through the window, pregnant with a threatened acid rainfall. Matt tried to remember just how many missing assignments had piled up. He couldn’t. His brain felt moth-eaten. He was tired.

“…Are you feeling okay?” Lena asked. She followed him, settled in beside him with her laptop angled away. There was something just too probing about her stare, clinical like a doctor’s. “Let me see your Fitbit,” she said, and reached for his arm.

“It’s fine. I’m tired,” Matt answered, shifting his arm out of reach. He was uncomfortable with becoming a specimen.

“You’ve been coughing. Your heart’s being weird again, yeah? You should maybe take a couple days off from classes to feel better.” Her worried face was ashen. Matt was reminded of staled chocolate bars that accrued gray, ashy dust on their surface from age.

“I told you I’ve got work to do. I need to go to campus tomorrow for class.” Matt paused, and he racked his brain. “…You’ve uh, you’ve got some kind of presentation tomorrow, don’t you?”

Lena pulled back, her cheeks filling with just a bit of color as she looked to her laptop. “Yeah… It’s a small thing. All the Ph.D. students have to present at the panel.”

A deep and low grumble shook through the house. The hot, humid air spiked, and the television-static hiss from the outside the windows followed the sudden deluge of rain from the choked skies.

“How about I come to that? For your birthday, instead of going out to dinner. And you can go out with Bella on your birthday instead.”

“You wanna hear me talk about my work?”

“Yeah, it’s cool stuff. I mean, making body parts? That’s cool.”

“It’s still—ah, there are a lot of failures in my work,” Lena answered, dismissive, though her cheeks flushed just a bit deeper, and she spoke through a suppressed smile. “It could be a long time before I’m able to make something sustainable.”

“Yeah but, eventually. And in the meantime I still want to hear about it. Even if I don’t get it.” He moved a hand out and reached around her back, placed it lightly on her shoulder, testing if it felt right. She eased into him, and Matt was reminded how soft she felt—her cheek against his shoulder, her arm wrapped to his chest. The tension inside him loosened. Shamefully, Matt wondered why he felt any tension toward her at all.

“I think you’ll be a bit disappointed. I won’t be pulling any fully-formed organs out of a vat at the podium. My slides are just going to be a lot of pictures of slimy half-formed organs and some charts about their constitution. The slides with the virtual models will look nicer.” Her wet hair soaked into his shirt, leaving paintbrush streaks and small damp blots. Matt was reminded of the charred flesh still likely clinging to the fabric. Lena’s hand tightened against his chest, and she lifted her head to look him in the eyes. “Oh, there’s going to be images of cadavers on some of the slides too. They’re donated to science so you don’t have to…feel bad, but if you’re uncomfortable seeing them.”

Matt swallowed once. Curled charred hand in the pyre. “…Cadavers?”

“Dead bodies. Like they use in teaching hospitals, med school. Farhid has a colleague at Holyoke General so he can file requests for cadavers that the hospital is finished with—that wording sounds harsh. Um, to put them to further use, I mean, is the better way to put it.”

Matt nodded. His chest felt heavy, his head just a bit light, like he was breathing in his own air. He thought about dead bodies, dead flesh, charred skin, how it burned black and peeled and split. He felt like it was in his lungs, and doubled over coughing.

“Matt!” Lena pushed off from him. She crouched on the floor in front of him, grabbed his chin, and worry was all he saw in her eyes, more worry than actual person. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Matt—“

“I’m fine.”

“Tell me.”

“I saw something in the garbage pyre.” Matt blinked, straightening, though he now stared only at the ground as she spoke, racking his memories. “There was a dead body in the garbage pyre. I saw it burning there, all buried underneath—just an arm but, it was a human arm. The body was somewhere. It was burning. Right in the garbage pyre.” He steadied his breath. He grabbed his mask and pulled it aside so he could suck air deep into his lungs—it felt better like that, clearer, and for a single moment his head cleared as well. “That’s ridiculous, right? There can’t be—there’s no way—I was seeing things. There’s no dead body in the garbage pyre.”

Matt locked eyes with Lena.

“That is ridiculous,” she said, and each syllable was well-enunciated. Her face had closed off, a dark and blank slate, with a piercing directness behind her eyes.

“That…is ridiculous,” Matt said again, as if to test the words. He looked at his hands which he had already washed, and felt he could see the residue of burnt flesh, scattered up in the wind, clinging to his slick and sweaty skin. He felt it on his shirt, dense around the collar and tight as if restricting airflow to his lungs. His heart hiccupped through a beat, and only caught its normal rhythm again when he coughed.

“Yes, it is ridiculous,” Lena echoed after him. “Crime around here doesn’t happen. It’s only other Holyoke students who share that pyre. If someone had been murdered and vanished then we would know about it.”

Matt rubbed his hands against his pants, until the sweat glistening in the lines of his palms vanished. He would wash this outfit. He would burn it in the garbage pyre, maybe. “Then what did I see in the pyre?”

“Anything. A lot of things can look like body parts.” Lena dropped her hands to Matt’s shoulders, grounding him. “I look at body parts and organs so much I start seeing them everywhere. It happens. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“What if it was there?”

“It wasn’t.” Lena paused. Then her grip loosened, and she leaned back against the coffee table. She lowered herself from her crouch, sitting now on the floor, her knees up and wrapped against her chest. “…But even if it was, it doesn’t affect us, Matt. It’s not either of us. It’s not our problem…”

“Okay… Okay.” Matt stood. He offered her a hand, and he pulled her up. The light that leaked through the pelting rain robbed the room of color, desaturated it. Everything had tinted gray, and just a bit yellow. The sensation still clung to Matt’s clothes, and he offered Lena a smile. “You’re right… You’re right. I’m uh… I still want to shower. Want to do take out? Afterward? Or in a few hours maybe.”

Lena nodded, though Matt still felt like a specimen beneath her eyes—worse, a specimen to be handled carefully. “Sure. Sure. Want to do the Chinese place?”

Matt waved a dismissive hand as he stepped around her. “Whichever. I’m not all that hungry today.”

Matt shut the bathroom door behind him, and he stripped his clothes and dropped them in the pocket of space behind the hamper so they would not mingle with the others. He showered too long, then fell asleep still-damp and in pajamas on the couch when he only meant to nap for an hour or so. Lena did not wake him, even for dinner, so he rose only to the sound of pre-sunrise birdsong some 14 hours later.

Matt checked the bedroom, and Lena was asleep in bed. He considered moving to join her, but he doubted he would fall back asleep. Instead he shrugged on a coat, and laced up his shoes, and grabbed an umbrella as he headed out.

The garbage pyre was muted under heavy rain. Its tall licking flames were reduced to wisps, smothered and buffeted about under a sheet of water the danced with the hot gusts of wind. Matt’s cotton face mask grew damp, the breath in his throat wet. He squinted through the sheets of rain to the bottom of the pyre.

There was no hand there.

Nothing sat where it had been. To its right, Matt was certain he saw the light imprints of boots in the sludge, shimmering visible because the rain water filled them in.

…

Lena drove them both to campus that day, her wipers churning through the slates of rain that washed her windshield. The black skies were blacker now. Thunder rumbled; pieces of the cloud cover flashed with light. The shallow sewer grates bubbled over so that the water flushing through the streets turned murky. The air tasted hot and sour against the back of Matt’s throat. His head ached with the lightness he hadn’t been able to sleep off.

She pulled into her parking spot in the lot just outside the biomedical building. It was rare for Ph.D. students to have their own spot, rarer still to have one right beside the building. As Matt understood it, it had been part of Dr. Farhid’s bribe to get Lena to stay for her Ph.D.

Lena did not switch off the exhaust. She did not unbuckle her seatbelt, so Matt did not either. He followed her eyes, distantly focused in the pelting sheets of rain against the windshield, the wipers that cut watery arcs over the glass that filled back in after each pass, incessantly, forever. She drummed her fingers along the steering wheel instead.

“…Lena?” Matt asked.

“I can still take you home,” Lena said. “I know you’re not feeling well.”

“I’ve been feeling weird for a couple weeks. It’s normal now.” He studied her, the tension in her body, the tightness of her fingers wrapped to the wheel as she only stared forward. “I can like, schedule a doctor’s appointment, or something.”

“You don’t need to come to my talk just to support me. It’s okay,” Lena said. She looked to him, smile pained, and Matt could tell saying so was a sacrifice. She wanted him here.

“I want to,” Matt answered. He looked away, because he felt that tension again clamping on his chest. He hated not knowing what about Lena made him so tense. “You do all this amazing stuff that uh, I think it’s like I forget. Or like, I forget that it is amazing, because I’m like ‘yeah, that’s what Lena does, creates body parts from nothing, like always.’ I should uh, I should see you talk about it and impress people. I wanna remember all over why it’s so impressive.”

Matt heard nothing but the sweep of the windshield wipers, the firm pelting of the rain. He finally glanced her way when the silence unnerved him.

She was just smiling.

It was a smile that brought out the little crook of dimples along her cheeks, and squeezed softly around her eyes, and brought a warm brightness to her face that lit what the smothered sun could not.

She used to smile like that a lot more, Matt realized. Years back when they first met. Most days now, she only seemed stressed.

Matt could say the same of himself, he supposed.

“Okay… Okay. Do you need to stay for your class after? If you’re not feeling well, I can just drive you home after my presentation. How about that?”

Matt shrugged. “I’ll let you know how I’m feeling.”

Lena nodded, satisfied. She twisted around in her seat to grab her backpack that had been tossed into the back. She unzipped it and pulled a pocket-sized umbrella from its depths, and she handed it to Matt. “Here.”

Matt grabbed it, then looked to Lena; she was significantly better dressed than he was: a stark and crisp blazer overtop a ruffled white button-up, a black pencil skirt and stockings, heels on her velvety dark shoes. She’d straightened her hair, and whisked her lashes with mascara, and touted a faint red artificial blush on her cheeks. He then looked out the window, at the torrential rain, and the thirty feet at least to the door.

“You need that way more,” Matt remarked.

“It’s fine. I’ll run. You need this way more. This weather is bad for you.”

Matt wasn’t sure what she quite meant, so he only nodded, and took the umbrella. Lena leaned across the divider between them a left a single, light kiss on his cheek. When she pulled away, it was the old Lena again, with the bright smile and the eyes like warm chocolate that Matt remembered falling in love with.

“Love you,” Lena said, and she killed the ignition, and popped the driver’s side door open.

“Love you…” Matt whispered back, and he watched her race through the rain, heels clacking, her backpack held just above her head for shelter.

…

The auditorium was a room he’d never seen. It was a brightly lit room whose seating rose a step at each row back, so that the very last row watched from the highest vantage point. The seats were plush green, and each had a small fold-out desk for taking notes. Dark wooden paneling lined the very back of the room, just behind the very last row of seats. The podium and presenter would seem small from back there, low to the ground and dwarfed beneath the enormous projector warming up against the lowered white screen at the very front.

The room was already about a third filled, and from the scattered number of audience members in well-ironed blazers and professional dark dresses, Matt assumed the presenters sat among the crowd while awaiting their turn. So he scanned the audience, and found Lena sitting in one of the backmost rows, all the way to the left, just against one of the rear exits. Bella sat next to her, one seat closer to the center of the row. Bella pointed to Matt, and Lena turned to follow the line. She waved when she spotted him.

Matt sidled in beside Lena, the last seat of the row, and set the wet, collapsed umbrella down at his feet. Up close he could see how the rain had thoroughly soaked her hair. Streaks from her fingers ran through it, where she’d clearly attempted to comb it back into submission. It had mostly worked, though a few loose coils spun free. Her make up remained mostly intact.

“Hi,” Bella said first, and the tight discomfort of her lips seemed to suggest she was no more happy to speak with Matt than he was to speak with her.

“Hey,” Matt offered back. He looked her over once; her corn silk hair had been pulled back into a tight bun. A floral patterned dress hung loose around her stocky frame. Her shoulders were covered by her halfway-buttoned cardigan, a muted pink against the vibrant violets and reds of her dress. She wore dark stockings and dark shoes not at all distinguishable from Lena’s

“How are you?” Bella asked.

“Good. How are you?” Matt returned.

“Lena says you haven’t been feeling that well. Um, I hope you get better.” Her eyes flickered around, either disinterested or uncomfortable, Matt could not tell.

“Yeah I’m sure I will. This thing comes and goes.”

Lena leaned forward, propping her elbows on her knees so that she cut Bella from Matt’s sight. “So you found the room okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’m here. There were signs. You sure you didn’t want the umbrella? I mean too late now but uh, you’re all wet.”

“It’s fine. Best you don’t stress yourself too much,” Lena answered. Matt leaned away just a bit on instinct.

“I’m fine…” he answered. The insinuation that he wasn’t had worked its way beneath his skin. It ignited that tension in him all over, fumbled his emotions until he settled on annoyance. He realized Bella had worn the same look too—some kind of anxious discomfort or pity that Lena now appraised him with. He wondered what Lena must have told her. He wondered more why Lena was so insistent upon him being unwell.

He said nothing about it. He only let it simmer while Bella and Lena restarted their conversation from earlier. Matt didn’t care to listen. He sunk into his plush seat, his breath just a bit too uncomfortably hot and damp beneath the face mask. So he loosened it from his mouth and nose. He shifted it to the side to just block the two girls out, and pulled himself up into his own mind.

The body… The body the body. Or the arm, just an arm, in the pyre, burning until someone had pulled it out sometime last night. It would have been easy enough to do, given some caution and a pair of thick gloves, since the rain dampened the fire to near non-existence. But to trudge through the oilslick underneath, through the miscellaneous soup of rotting and putrid and fetid garbage. Matt shivered, thinking how long a shower it would take to rid yourself of that taint.

The lights above dimmed. Some man in a suit stepped up to the platform. Applause met him; the audience stirred and shuffled. Matt blinked, adjusting to the new dimness, squinting at the harsh white glow as the projector caught, and displayed the Holyoke crest across the whole screen.

Matt didn’t catch the name of the man speaking. He was a bald and dark-skinned man whose voice was low and smooth enough to distract Matt from what he was actually saying. The man’s speech began with some remark about the advent of human discovery in medicine, and anything past that Matt did not hear. He only clapped when everyone else clapped, and stared on as the first Ph.D. student approached the podium to present.

He was a mousy little boy who introduced himself as Dylan something. Nerves seemed to raise the pitch of his voice, and he spoke too quickly as he flipped through slides detailing the design of some chip to capture circulating tumor cells out of blood draws. Or maybe he spoke at a perfectly fine pace, as everyone else seemed to follow along—Lena and Bella watched on, calm, looking neither lost nor confused. Maybe Matt himself was just too dumb to follow.

Spitefully, Matt elected to stop listening. He let the mousy boy Dylan-something keep on talking, and lost himself instead in his own mind again. Bella lived in the same designation of apartment buildings. She shared their garbage pyre. It was a slim chance, but she might know something. She could have taken her trash out the previous night. She could have seen something to explain what Matt himself could not.

He glanced past Lena, who was washed pale in the residual light from the projector, and she stared at Bella instead. He investigated her face as if he might be able to read off it if she’d seen a dead body or not. He had no such luck.

Lena felt his eyes, and she glanced over to him. Her smile was thin. Quietly she whispered. “Anything wrong?”

“No…” Matt answered.

“Okay. If you’re not feeling well…”

“I’m fine,” Matt asserted. He stared forward again, breathing deep so that he could stomp down his own squirming frustration. The presenters had switched in the meantime. The new girl was a redhead who opened her presentation with a slide filled with gratuitous shots of what seemed to be an eviscerated rat. Matt shuddered. He elected to zone out again. He racked his memories so that he could permanently stamp the image of the hand to his mind. He wouldn’t let this become another punctured hole in his memory. He thought about the way the skin shined, like pork skin on a spit roast, leathery and tight except for where it split to reveal the squishy pinkish oozing mess beneath. He thought about the splits in the fingernails, and the torn-away flesh at the wrist where bone was exposed, and how little blood seemed to coat it, and if—

“I’m up next. Let me scoot past you Matt so I can get to the front.”

Matt leaned back against his seat, and silently he let Lena step over him. Only her backpack remained in the foot-space of her seat.

--and if someone he knew really was a killer.

Applause echoed from all sides of Matt. Rat girl drew her presentation to a close, and bowed with a deep toothy smile. She unplugged her laptop from the projector, which fizzled out to a stark blue screen while Lena propped her laptop on top and plugged it in.

The empty gap between him and Lena felt suddenly loud.

“Are you uh…Are you excited to see Lena present?” Bella asked.

“Yeah,” Matt answered.

It was strange, experiencing a silence with Bella that was not immediately filled with her prattling voice. It had been three years since he’d spoken with her at length. He’d anticipated an apology for the accident and never quite got one, so he’d made no real effort to reconnect with her again. Maybe she’d just gotten quiet in that time.

“She does really cool stuff. We’re all jealous of her, you know. Okay not like we hate her, but we all know she’s doing the best work. She acts like it’s not but it is. She doesn’t even talk about most of it. You should be really impressed with her. And not in a mean way but you should probably be feeling really lucky to have her.”

Matt stared forward. He decided again that he didn’t like Bella. “Yeah, it’s impressive.”

“Some people think it’s just setting down cells in the shape of some organ, but no. It’s way way more complicated. That’s the reason scientists can’t make 3-D organs yet it’s because they fail right away, there’s too much complexity to a body. Lena’s on track to crack that. You should feel real grateful to her and not stress her out, okay? She’s doing so much.”

“Are you saying that I am stressing her out?”

“I’m not saying you’re doing it intentionally. Just please be nice to her.”

Matt shot her a withering glare, but she offered no response. She sat there, bony and lanky and wispy and like half a living human herself. He disliked her more than the carefree talker that lived in his memories before the crash, before his memory got bad.

“There was a dead body in our garbage pyre yesterday, did you know? Lena says nothing was there. I’m wondering if maybe you’d say differently.”

“Dead body?”

“Dead body. A hand, I saw. It was burning in the bottom of the pile. And then this morning it was gone.”

He met her level gaze. Her bright blues eyes seemed to wait for him to reveal more. He held out the silence.

“That sounds extreme. Maybe it was a mannequin hand.”

“The inside was flesh.”

“You said it was gone this morning. Maybe you just didn’t really see it yesterday.”

“I could report it to the police. We could see if there are surveillance tapes around—“

“Don’t—“

Matt lapsed into silence. Bella’s voice lashed and then died instantly. A momentary look of panic flashed and vanished from her eyes, and she pulled back into her seat.

“Don’t…?”

“Don’t stress Lena out anymore, okay?” Bella answered. “Don’t get her roped into some kind of crazy witch hunt with you. Lena has real things to do. Not all that should revolve around you, all the time, like it does.”

“It doesn’t,” Matt answered. Bella acted as though she hadn’t heard. She was staring forward. Too late, Matt realized Lena’s presentation had started.

He scanned the current presentation slide, mentally scrambling in an effort to catch up. Eight time-lapse photographs were lined up, four on top, four beneath, showing what seemed to be the thin, sturdy, almost plastic membrane in the shape of a heart progress into something fleshed and filled-out. The first image was a plastic shell suspended in some kind of saline solution. The next seemed to have developed a thin, slime coating. The next had been moved into a mold whose translucent outline bore the unmistakable negative space for a human heart. The next had two dozen hooks and needles piercing the flesh, seeming to weave and coax the direction of artery growth.

“Professor Fahrid’s design above… Disfigurement by stage seven… Beats under electric pulse… Constitution too weak to support normal blood flow…”

Matt caught only fragments of Lena’s voice. She flipped slides, and on it was the wireframe model she had shown Matt yesterday. Its left ventricle was constructed this time.

“Hope to implement… Full 3-D design… Stem cell cultures in hopes of…”

She flipped the slide again. This one contained two images, left and right. The left was a computer model, a lifeless polygonal human with its chest slit a few inches by the sternum and cracked ribs hinged back, the wire-frame heart, now fleshed in, secured in the chest cavity. The image was captured “Future implementation”

The left picture, with “Current implementation” captioned on top, was not a computer image. It appeared to be a simple cellphone photo, of a widely torn-back chest flushed white beneath the surgical lighting. The heart model Matt recognized as Fahrid’s from a few slides back was situated between the two lungs, both ghastly white and near indistinguishable from the bed of ribs that had been cracked back around it.

Neither the chest nor the heart caught Matt’s attention. Instead his eyes trailed to the bent arm, elbow just out of frame, and the fingers curled down near the hipbone where the image stopped. He stared at the cadaver’s fingers, all curled and white and bloodless, its nails like the nails in the fire but uncracked now, flesh still secured to the bone, except for near the wrist where a flap of skin had been cut away to reveal bone.

Without a word, Matt reached to the backpack Lena had left at the foot of her seat. He unzipped the front pocket and grabbed her wallet, flipping it open to see that her ID was tucked inside. He slid it into his pocket, and he stood, and he looked to the rear exit.

Maybe all dead hands looked identical. But he felt he was looking at the hand he’d seen in the pyre. The cut at the wrist, the flap of skin peeled away to reveal the protrusion of bone. He’d seen that. It was etched into his memory. He’d seen that exact cut in the pyre.

“Hey, where are you going?” Bella whispered.

He left the row. He quietly set a hand to the rear door and eased it open without a sound.

“Where are you going?” Bella hissed.

The door shut behind Matt. He clung to the image of the dead body on screen, its chest flayed and open, its curled hand filling just the edge of the frame. It reminded him all too much of… No, it was more than the hand in the pyre. Somehow, it reminded him of something worse, something more sinister. It filled him with some kind of aching familiarity.

(Lena did not want him focusing on the body.)

Matt knew the path to Lena’s lab, because he’d surprised Lena before in her PI’s office complex with flowers for her birthday. The secretary had found him endearing ever since, and she wouldn’t bat an eye if he entered.

(Bella did not want him pestering Lena about it anymore.)

He pulled Lena’s ID from his pocket and scanned it. The door unlatched. The receptionist, Margot if he remembered, saw him and smiled. Matt tried for a smile and a nod too.

(So he would just check it out alone. The itch became like a rash, if he could just understand what the cut had been. Just convince himself that the two bodies were separate…)

“Hey Margot, Lena needs me to grab something from her lab bench before her presentation, sorry.”

“Oh… I can’t let you down there,” Margot answered, blinking in surprise. She chewed her lip, chalky and cherry red.

“It’s very important for her presentation.”

“Still… You haven’t done any of the biohazard training, have you? It’s policy.”

“Is it…” Matt dropped his voice. “Is it because of the cadavers down there?”

“Cadavers?” Margot’s voice startled Matt. He jumped back a bit as Margot clutched the edge of her desk for effect. “Goodness no. Goodness no you cannot bring cadavers into this building! Are you crazy? No! Dead bodies in this building? You think I’m happily working here while there are dead bodies beneath my feet? Goodness gracious no. They’d arrest us for five different felonies I image. No… no all the cadaver work happens at Holyoke General Hospital. Only at Holyoke General Hospital.”

“Oh…” Matt answered, a bit taken aback, and a bit ashamed for having thought differently in the first place. “Okay then. Thank you.”

He turned on his heels, swallowing his disappointment. It was for the best, probably. There was no real logic in needing to see the cadaver body. He could ask Lena point-blank about the wrist. Maybe she would know, better yet, maybe she would finally believe him about the burning body. He had no real reason to trust Bella’s advice out of anyone’s.

“Well…” Margot spoke up, her voice lilting. “if she really needs it, and you can be fast…”

Matt paused. Margot’s words hung in the air. When he turned, her eyes were sly.

“Oh, um, it’s okay, Margot, she’s just—“

“Just don’t tell Fahrid I let you down there, okay? Can’t have poor Lena messing up her presentation, especially when you were sweet enough to come all the way down here.” Margot answered, and she motioned to the elevator just a bit down the hall.

“Oh…thank you,” Matt answered, his voice wavering uncertain. He had no good way to talk his way out of his lie, so he stepped into the hall, and he hit the down button. The elevator door pinged open for him. Matt coughed, and he vanished inside it.

He need only poke around the lab, and grab the first important-seeming notebook he could find, and resurface with it pretending it was what Lena had sent him to retrieve.

The temperature dropped with the decent and the door opened somewhere colder, dryer. Matt stepped out into a concrete hall. Matt coughed, and it echoed now in the hallway leading to Lena’s lab. The fit continued, until his heart stuttered sluggishly and tears beaded in the corner of his eyes. His footsteps echoed along with the coughs as he rounded the end of the hall to Lena’s lab.

He stepped up beside it and set his pocket to the scanner. It blipped. Lena’s card got him in, and Matt entered.

The lab was something he’d only ever seen once: a modest set up, white tiling and white walls and a white ceiling. Blue-topped counters lined each of the walls, and a single island in the middle bore shelves that stacked to the ceiling. Beakers, boxes of pipet tips, bottles of ethanol and dilutions lined the shelves, pipet racks sat on the counter—spotlessly clean—where the sink carved out a section in the corner. A water bath sat, set to 37 degrees Celcius, heating a bottle of red cell medium. An incubator sat opposite. Its shelves were like the shelves of a fridge lined with flasks of cell culture. On the opposite counter were several petri dishes, none with tops, all sporting different swaths of translucent flesh. A large heat lamp burned above them. There was a stop watch beside the set-up, ticking down.

Matt stepped forward. His shoes were still wet from the storm, he realized, and they squished leaving sponge marks with each step. He gave the lab another once-over, and a thin gray notebook propped on the middle shelf caught his attention. That would work. He grabbed it, flipped through it. It was filled with the documentation of experiments over the last couple weeks.

Matt…

His name flickered past at the head of one of the pages. Matt paused his flipping, and he sifted backwards until he happened upon the same page. It filled him with a strange twisting dread as he locked onto it, and read.

Height…

Weight…

Waist circumference…

Wrist circumference…

Hair length…

Shin measurements…

Thigh measurements…

Forearm measurements…

Matt skimmed the list. His name sat in solitude at the top, and down the entire page stretched a hundred or so different measurements, each penciled in with recordings to hundredths in their precision. His insides squirmed as he read the list again, his mind empty for any reason for having such detailed notes of him.

It felt violating, almost, to see himself deconstructed into hundreds of numbers. Like he was a specimen. Like he was something to experiment on.

The discomfort that filled his lungs was something difficult to breathe through. He flipped the page, and found the measurements continued.

Carotenoid artery diameter: …

Left/Right ventricle volume:…

Left/Right atrium volume:…

Depth of carotenoid vein permeation: …

The measurements became something Matt could not understand. The discomfort was violating. He felt suddenly in the lab of a stranger. He closed the notebook, and he looked around again, as if hoping something tacked to the wall might explain it.

He saw nothing tacked to the wall; Matt spotted only another door in back, leading to a supply closet of sorts, or something larger than that. There was a gauge beside the door that read -4C on it.

He stepped forward, and he jostled the door until it budged. Inside was dark. Inside was colder, chilled numbingly cold. Matt shuddered. He flipped the light on.

He froze.

A gurney stretched across the opposite wall. A body sat atop it.

The skin was sickly white, a pure milky unblemished hue robbed of all blood and life in the artificial casting of light. A simple tarp was draped across it for modesty sake, but limbs extruded from the edges. Toes curled up, their tendons taut and stiff beneath the skin. Light hair dusted across the skullcap, soft like snow, unbludgeoned, not knotted with blood, but so deathly still, so deathly stiff. A medical mask of sorts covered the nose and mouth, connected elsewhere. The right arm protruded from the tarp covered, slung out, fingers curled up and in, begging to mirror what had been burned.

Matt hadn’t noticed the tremble working through his system. The cadaver wasn’t the same as the one pictured in the slides. Matt knew that immediately from the intact right wrist hanging off the edge of the gurney.

The cadaver was, he realized, likely not even a cadaver.

Cadavers would never enter this building, Margot had said. This body, whoever and whatever it was, did not belong in the lab. This body was something Lena had brought here on her own terms, which she’d stashed away in the freezer room of the lab she shared with no one else.

Something cold, something dead, that existed in a place outside the realm of medical license. Lena’s discomfort with the dead body in the pyre resonated in him with new meaning. Bella’s fear of police involvement twisted in his gut. He knew he was staring at something heinous. He knew he was tightly wrapped, down to his every last measurement, in something that would terrify him to understand.

Silently, Matt dropped to his knees. He stared at the gurneyed body a little longer, and wondered what lifeless thing it was, and if his own fingerprints were now in the room, and if the body up there knew anything about the body in the pyre.

“Matt!”

His head shot up. Lena’s voice sent ripples of fear through him.

He did not turn though. He could only stiffen as the pounding of her feet approached, as she dropped down and grabbed him and held him, rocked him, muttering something through tears—

“No!” Matt yelled. He swung his hand out, throwing her off as he scrambled away. His back collided with the nearby wall. He swore he heard the gurney rattle. “Why is there a cadaver in the lab? He’s not one, is he? You brought it here.“

“Listen to me, Matt.”

Matt looked up. Lena inched closer, careful steps along with that same worried face. She looked as though he might fracture any second. She shouldn’t look like she pitied him. She shouldn’t look concerned.

“He’s dead,” Matt repeated.

“That’s not right.”

“The body! In the pyre! He was dead too.”

“Yes, he was,” Lena answered. Her words were sharp now, cutting in between Matt’s hysterics.

“Dead!”

“Yes! Yes Matt, the body in the pyre was dead, okay!? Dead! Stop saying it! I know. I know…”

Matt watched her approach with wide, hunted eyes. His hand shot behind him, to the drawer handle digging into his back. He opened it and plunged his hand in. It wrapped around the only thing he could grab, just a scoopula, which he brandished like a weapon for his own sake. Lena stopped, looking more hurt than threatened.

“You put it in the fire?” Matt whispered.

“Yes, I did,” Lena admitted through gritted teeth. “Now let me explain.”

“The whole body!? Was it there—just the arm—did you cut it up!?”

“Let me explain—“

“Was it a cadaver? In the fire?”

“Not—don’t call it—no, no it wasn’t.”

“Did you kill him?”

“I didn’t!”

“You did! Why would you burn it otherwise? You did.”

“I didn’t!”

“Who then!? Who did!? Who killed him!?”

“Bella did,” Lena snapped. Then she pulled back, and breathed once before whispering, “Bella killed him, three years ago.” Lena moved, and she was a smaller thing now. She stepped over Matt’s feet without his brandished scoopula reaching her, and she stopped by the gurney. She set a hand around the mask and lifted it. The body on the gurney had just a bit of color to his lips—sandy hair, bony frame. Matt stared at in in a momentary transfix of horror, then he touched a hand to his own burning face. “I’ve been trying to save him ever since.”

Matt didn’t hear. He stared at the body, his attention transfixed.

He stared at his own face, silently white on the gurney.

“It’s me…” Matt muttered.

“It’s you,” and it was an admittance of defeat. “It’s the next you I’m making.”

Matt shook his head. And he shook it some more, because it was all he could do. “Who was the body…? In the pyre? Who was it?”

“It was you, Matt.” She swallowed once. “The you who died last time. He’s been on ice, a few months now, because I needed to find a time when the trash heap was high and no one would notice but…you did. You weren’t supposed to notice.”

Matt shook his head again. “I’m me.”

“You’re one of you… So was he, in the pyre.” Lena looked to the gurney, and she nodded her head to it. “So is he, eventually.”

She placed the mask back over the body’s mouth lovingly, then she stepped away from it. She stopped in front of Matt and crouched, easing the scoopula away from him until it just dangled in his fingers, then she stowed it in her pocket. Her hand rose, the back of it skimming his hot cheek. “I keep trying, but I can’t get you right. It’s…they’re cadavers, at some point, the number of strings I pull with Fahrid to get them and not ask me why.” She looked around, agitated, then her manic eyes were back on him. “They’re only the framework though. I can’t make everything. I try to make everything I can—your organs, your mind, your face—I can make all the pieces of you now, and put you back together inside a cadaver’s body. But you just don’t last. Over and over—I’m doing something wrong. Your heart doesn’t keep beating in rhythm. The smog fills up with lungs with tar and it never filters out. Then something hits…a fever…pneumonia or…and you just don’t bounce back. I’m making you in a way that keeps on breaking, and it kills you again every time. It’s my fault, somehow, but I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

Horror blossomed hot and violent under Matt’s skin. Lena’s touch was like ice.

“That’s wrong. I’m me. Who did you burn?”

“So far, five of you… Five of you I’ve burned.” She looked away. “Including the real you… I’m sorry—I had to burn your real body and replace it. If I hadn’t then the hospital, the doctors, your family, they’d think you died.”

“…In the garbage pyre…?” Matt whispered.

“You were brain-dead,” Lena answered. She stood now, moving back to the gurney where her hands lingered above it, careful, loving. “The car smashed through you—not me and not Bella—it should have been me for dragging you out. …Should have been Bella for driving,” Lena said, a hint of malice in her voice. She reached beneath the gurney and grabbed a monitor and a pair of diodes. Then she moved back to Matt’s side and pressed them to the sides of his head. “But it was you. The doctors said you’d last only another two weeks after the accident. No part of you could recover from being so…so mangled up. It was just the machines keeping you alive, and only until the swelling in your skull finally killed you… They said to take you off lifesupport, Matt. I almost lost you. I almost lost you… ”

Lena tapped a button on the machine, cranked a dial up, and electricity seemed to burst behind Matt’s eyes. He blinked through it, confused.

“Everything I know is about modeling, scanning, printing organs. And I know you better than anyone. I just needed to model you perfectly, and build you up from scratch.” Lena tapped off the dial, and removed the diodes, and stood. She leaned over the body on the gurney and attached them to the sides of its temple. “Right down to your brain waves. Your memories.”

“…My memories?”

“Yeah,” Lena answered. The body’s eyes twitched, still shut, but suddenly alive with movement. “And you won’t remember this.”

Matt swallowed. His heart beat shallowly in his throat, fluttering and erratic. It sent stars through his vision. “Are you erasing my memory?”

“I’m just not transferring it to him,” Lena motioned to the body on the gurney. Then her eyes, wet with pity, set on him. “You’re the first clone to find out; is it okay to tell you I’m sorry? I’m sorry I let Bella drive. I’m sorry I can’t get you right. I’m sorry you have to keep dying like this every couple months. I want you to last… I’ll figure you out eventually, with no heart troubles and no breathing troubles. I hate watching you die. I love you, Matt.”

“Like this…?” Matt echoed. He tried to steady his breathing, but he couldn’t anymore. “What does that mean? What does that mean? What does that mean?”

“You always last the same amount of time. Before the complications set it. I’m sorry Matt, you—this you—you’re winding down.”

“No… No no no no no.”

“I’ll stay with you. I always do. I won’t turn him on until you’re gone.”

“What does that mean?” Matt asked, panicked tears cutting an edge in his voice. He understood though, as his skin tingled to numbness, and Lena dropped to his side. She wrapped him in a hug, rocked with him, as the numbness spread, as it washed through his body in bursts and Matt found himself too weak to move.

It lasted hours, or minutes maybe, he couldn’t really tell. Rasping hot breath into his lungs for the body he couldn’t feel as Lena rocked with him, crying lightly. And it lasted, and it lasted until a white hot fire cut through his chest and erupted outward, and his breathing was strangled through water, and oxygen wouldn’t reach his brain fading black and stuttering damp and dark and cold, numb, off…

in…

to…

nothing…

…

Matt sat on the couch Wednesday afternoon, his laptop open to a few half-finished labs and the tv switched on to ESPN. He rested a bag of potato chips in the crook of his arm and ate them absentmindedly, watching the clock time out on the last play of the game. The clouds had cleared. The sunlight caught in beams along the smog and lit the air a fiery orange.

“Matt, I’m taking the car out for about an hour. You good here?”

Matt glanced over his shoulder. His eyes flickered back and forth between Lena and the game, making sure the clock really was on track to time out. It did, and he let out a small whoop before dedicating his whole attention to Lena.

She shot him a small smile, and grabbed the ochre bag from the trash bin, tying it tight. Matt frowned.

“I can take the trash out in a bit. Nice day, so the walk to the pyre shouldn’t be bad.”

“No, it’s fine. I’ve got some old furniture I’m getting rid of there, so I’m taking the car.”

“You’ll stink up the car.”

“It’s a short ride.” She bit her lip. “And I’ve got other errands, might take a while.”

“It’s almost your birthday,” Matt remarked, unsure why he’d said it other than having been suddenly struck by the information.

Lena paused. “It is,” and she hefted the bag over her shoulder.

“There’s a new Thai place nearby. Do you wanna go there?” Matt asked.

“Where’d you hear about the Thai place?”

Matt paused, racking his brain. He screwed his brow in concentration and found the paths fizzling out, strangely empty. His memory had been so full of holes lately. “I dunno. Someone in my class probably. It wasn’t you who told me?”

“No…” Lena said, and some part of it was clearly a lie from the tightness in her voice.

“…I think Bella told me,” Matt said cautiously.

“I don’t really like Thai food.”

“You don’t like the take-out Thai place. This place is…” Matt trailed off, unsure how he’d meant to finish the sentence. Lena didn’t like Thai food.

“I should get going,” Lena cut in. She hefted the bag again, even though it was only maybe a quarter full. “I’ll be gone a while.”

“We can order take-out when you get back.”

Matt couldn’t explain the pained expression on Lena’s face as she left. He didn’t want to think too hard about it, because he was feeling fine for the first time in weeks and didn’t care to sour his mood with worry. He grabbed another potato chip from the bag and hoisted his laptop onto his legs, lab assignment open.

He’d gotten behind on his assignments, but it wasn’t impossible to catch up, not yet. Matt indulged for a moment in the idea of buckling down and working now, and not letting up until every last one was done. He imagined getting a passing grade in the class, and he imagined a diploma in his hands at graduation. He was giddy almost at the thought of getting out. Where? He wasn’t sure, but he could move on finally, get out on his own, get away and be himself somewhere away from—

He couldn’t finish the thought but, he knew what his mind meant by it. Lena was too good for him, really.

But the actual break up—that was a dour thought. It wasn’t meant for today. So Matt pulled up his assignment, and he skimmed the directions, and he coughed once. He kept going though, even as two or three more coughs racked his chest, because the coughing wasn’t all that bad.

Not yet.