REFRAMING ESTABLISHED and/or TRUSTED PERCEPTUAL FRAMES

IT JUST MAKES SENSE TO TRUST SOME FRAMING SYSTEMS even without absolute certainty; go ahead and trust that the sky is above although that above can be a little bit tricky, a little bit peculiar, as it is an above that applies all around our spherical planet —wherever we are, the sky is in a location that may be called above.

We are immersed in the atmosphere that rings the planet (as shown in this image from Nasa). In this continuous curve, the sky is always above every location. This status of sphere and sky can tell us something about space and some of what it means to inhabit the ups and downs of space.

I am very interested in a common depiction of a relationship between earth (ground) and sky in drawings of children. There is often a fascinating space in which there is nothing between them, No direct tether between the earth and its atmosphere. In the drawing from Doodle Boat by a 10-year-old boy from Panama, I'm fascinated by the short arc of a sky, like a blue ribbon, a prize —I guess I do consider the atmosphere a form of prize, a gift. And the arc is right, a piece of atmospheric ring is captured, an independent ring that is a part of the community rather than something that embraces the whole surface of the earth. I did draw trees that linked both sky and earth, but admittedly, these were very strange trees, much taller than any terrestrial trees now growing. Of course living trees and prehistoric trees both routinely touch sky and earth with branches and roots. There is no gap between the atmospheric skirt and the earth (land and water) that the hem of atmospheric skirt touches. Indeed; branches may be understood as a root system feeding from atmosphere just as a root system takes food from dirt. The bifurcating system of branches resembles the bifurcating bronchial subsystem of the human respiratory system (as shown in the image from Bailey Bio), and performs a related function, delivering oxygen into the atmosphere whereas our breathing delivers CO₂. A bifurcating pattern repeats in a leaf's signature veins (as shown here in a hydrangea leaf from Webster's online dictionary, illustrating an anastomosis: a network of streams that both branch out and reconnect, such as blood vessels or leaf veins, a feather, such as the one pictured here found by a patio grill. In the palm of the hand that picked up the feather is a forking pattern that reveals details about my life when the forking leads to the enterprise of fortune tellers and/or to various forms of traditional medicine. Though I may have felt something electrical stimulating never in my hand when holding hands with lovers, the lines did not glow; I lack some of the bioluminescence of fireflies and deep sea fishes, but the feeling did seem to bifurcate or radiate; to move in forks of passion.

With a feather, we fly into an opportunity to reframe an understanding of birds and dinosaurs, yielding when constructed with researchers' more informed understanding, a more domesticated T-rex, one that was feathered, a nesting ancestor of chickens who protected the eggs. Perhaps it's time for a remake of Jurassic Park, one in which T-rex might cluck. Watch an excerpt below, and below that excerpt, you can watch another excerpt (from Dinosaurs: Return to Life? a Science Channel [where I saw it] documentary) in which researchers successfully activate in a chicken embryo deeply embedded genetic memory of a distant past as a dinosaur. At particular stages in embryonic development, genetic information that would produce a dinosaur tail and dinosaur teeth are switched off, allowing the chicken to develop without dinosaur attributes that evolution has suppressed, but has not erased so that the chicken remains connected to dinosaur ancestry. Perhaps there is even more evolutionary marking than anyone can demonstrate at this moment, or that, in some configuration of ethics, should not be explored, especially regarding possible genetic memory in human embryos.


(Click here to watch the entire documentary)


FreeVideoCoding.com

This link takes you to Veoh where you may watch the entire documentary
—by the way, iPhone, iPod, iPad users; it's a link to a flash video

I wave my hands and bat about the air, so it's not as if I play no sports at all. I open a path in air, parting a sea of it, as I walk, disturbing molecules, ripping the air that closes around me —I like think of the temporary displacement as a form of fizzing in a little local frenzy of temporary disturbance. Is this a useful frame of an interaction with air beyond breathing? Is it practical? Useless or impractical for others framing what I've framed, it remains, for now, a personalization of what happened between me and some molecules that were mine to displace in the displacement. Something may happen to cause me to reconfigure what I've said, no matter how pleasing the poetry of it (to me). I can picture this displacement as fizz all around me, even under my feet as each foot lifts in a walk through displacement. I would think that fizz might offer an interesting model for a reframing of halo, one more dynamic, one that could approximate externally a configuration of what happens internally when an idea buzzes electrically in the mind, as if made of a swarm of the tiniest fireflies. This is a partial accuracy of how something was experienced, not of how something was observed, though metaphor may be used to help enhance the accuracy of observation, to help someone see what is being described or explained in a more particular way, closer to what the metaphor attempts to depict, the design of the metaphor meant to frame information in a way that excludes other configurations while the metaphor is being navigated. Sometimes facts and numbers alone do not create a picture that might be filed in the mind in a more complex manner, reframing a concept as a landscape or environment to inhabit and/or experience sensually. Metaphor [re]frames through what may be understood as attempts to clarify what is being experienced, extending aspects of something already understood to include, transforming both itself and what is being embraced, something momentarily outside of either understanding or, in its apparent newness, a way to reference it other than by linking it to similarities which can provide some confidence to continue.

I hope to find at least a smidgen of likeness on some scale for some duration of time everywhere —here a fork, there a fork, everywhere a forking frame. Smidgen after smidgen with their invitation to connect their dots into ever lengthening tines (the image of dots of stars connected into perceptual [only] configurations of astrological fortune and misfortune, big and little dippers emptying and filling with dreams and wishes, patterns we find again and again, hoping for a stability seldom pinned on more variable and more reachable clouds; these dots of stars are from physics.csbsju.edu)=)

MERMAID AS METAPHOR (a consideration from forkergirl's temporary fish eye lens advantage)

fish eye lens advantage image from forkergirl's photostream

In this consideration of Mermaid as Metaphor, a point of entry and a point of departure (bifurcation hub) are formed by two elements brought together (in a range of manipulations) forming a third element that is a composite of the two (1 element plus 1 element = a 3rd element [1+1=3], as Rima pointed out in a limited forked multimedia story class). At this hub is a common depiction of mermaids in which two unrelated biological segments of two organisms are brought together in (primarily visual) unification usually depicted as horizontally split halves forming wholeness: a mermaid.

This (visual) wholeness is a form of marriage, an easily imagined evolutionary progression or regression of marriage. Though the one mermaid outcome of wholeness formation is usually offered, there are at least two composites that would emerge from each union in this imagined evolution or regression. Human upper body + fish lower body, and human lower body + fish upper body. This is an answer to where's the other halves? —the human lower body and the fish upper body? An example of this more complete merger outcome scenario supplies the horror factor of The Fly (1958). The human/fly hybrid is created when a teleportation experiment meant to be an exclusively human teleportation experiment becomes a human/insect teleportation experiment when a fly is discovered inside the teleportation chamber with the scientist when the experiment is already underway and no one is there to stop the experiment. Though the human/fly hybrid is an unintended outcome, that the hybrid is an outcome indicates a form of successful, if horrifying, biological union. The film features both composite forms: human body with fly head/hand and fly body with human head/hand. Once the hybrids emerged, the assumption was that capturing the fly body/human head composite and repeating the experiment with both hybrid outcomes in the chamber, would restore the human and the fly to pre-composite forms though other possibilities would have been as likely had the fly body/human head variation not been snared in a web of spider for whom the genetic modifications of the humanized insect changed nothing.

A cautionary tale, to be sure. A scientist accused of playing God to be sure.

Though I hesitate the use the term, this serves, in part, as a, well, deconstruction of the mermaid metaphor. It is a closer look inside what is and isn't occurring in the architecture of the metaphor that a mermaid is, and simultaneously is an invitation to explore what can happen/is happening inside other metaphors, using the outcomes of those explorations to establish other opportunities and forms of expression: the making of other poams (products of acts of making).

In popular depictions of mermaids, biological segments contributed by the human and by the (unspecified species of) fish seem interchangeable, largely because each segment apparently remains intact with crossover of fish into human, human into fish. The fish and human portions of a mermaid hybrid system could be separated easily. It is obvious where to cut. The human and fish segments seem closed systems stitched together (or in some other way held in place) superficially. The forming of human/fish composites seems exceedingly neat with a well-defined boundary separating fish function and appearance from human function and appearance. No transgression of species apparently occurs; nothing, well, fishy in the merger. Mermaids, rather, seem models of respect for species purity despite their being linked. No tinkering with the actual DNA as human DNA and fish genetic code don't mix, but instead exist side-by side. Good neighbors who share much, but not everything. Good spouses who share much but not everything.

If a deeper connection is considered, the external division and separation of fish and human raises questions about function, form, and layout of internal organs. Just how is the mermaid metaphor creature mapped internally? Surely anatomical mingling occurs, or it is difficult to imagine viability of this trans-species as a species distinct from human and fish with its own biological frameworks and systems; the fish, in the more frequent ichthyological bottom half mermaid configuration, would have no heart, no brain, no circulation of human blood in fish areas. If the halves are stitched together superficially and not integrated into a single being, each half would then need separate and contained systems of respiration, systems of ingestion, systems of excretion, etc. A romanticized depiction (and why not such a depiction!) of mermaids does not support contamination of the beautiful, usually, woman, with fishiness. Indeed, the mermaid might even be a purer form of woman for rejecting genitalia in favor of fishtail; with breasts, she may suckle a child and could even seem, depending on who's constructing the idea system, nearly as wholesome and good as Mary, Mother of Christ. In this wonderful anatomical chart (to the right) of a mermaid from gearfuse.com, the internal revelation is still decidedly human in keeping with the biological structure of most mermaids; no doubt a common or typical mermaid is dissected in the well-imagined image of mermaid reality wherever it exists, in imagination, gaming, and/or virtual worlds, for instance. Mermaid Diaries is a blog all about a little mermaid named Natalia Zelmanov and her adventures in second life. Below is a video of a Spore mermaid followed by a video of a Second Life mermaid show:






The common mermaid is uncomplicated, unproblematic in biological terms. She (usually) looks good,
and, in keeping with her fish contribution, is an excellent catch.

Consideration of shared biological functioning is not meant to discredit the mythic or aesthetic function of mermaid systems, and certainly does not undermine an ability of imagination to overcome problems of mermaid existence within shared physical realities. That closed biological and chemical systems can align themselves without sharing structures or circulation, may give a nod to some of the power of imagination as part of the glue maintaining the human/fish alignment. Not that everyone can (or should) use imagination in tis manner; what I refer to as imagination may be referred to differently in other cultural and/or belief systems that configure reality differently, including religions in which what some might consider supernatural is real; prayer connects a human mortal reality with a divine system of existence; prayer and belief function as bridges between these configurations.

It is quite odd, I think, that more mingling apparently does not occur at the juncture of fish and human in a mermaid system of co-dependency to be one being, one creature; why not more raggedness as these halves struggle to come together? In the production of mermaids, if something is occurring biologically, why not more evidence of mutation in the manipulation of humans and fish to produce mermaids? Where are the failures? Where are the monsters of human/fish alliances? Where are the other creature from black lagoons (gill-men) and other evolutionary missing links along the evolutionary road to mermaid? What is it about certain environments that seem to encourage emergence of human/fish hybrids? So much perfection! —similar, it seems (sorry for a lack of statistics) to a rate of perfection in production of angels or other beings embodying some human elements and some divine elements. Something in imagination apparently overcomes potential conflict in human and fish unions —did not George W. Bush say that he hoped the human and the fish could coexist peacefully? In configuring scenarios of this coexistence, some of that peaceful cohabitation would exist within a single body, half human, half fish; the bi-species creature practicing a form of political correctness in blending —indeed, Bush's statement could be construed as a call for transspecies experimentation, phase one focusing on human and fish peacful coexistence scenarios.

Had W seen Shiloh Pepin on a Discovery Channel documentary (Mermaid Girl) when he said that?
Did he realize that there was such a condition as sirenomelia, that humans were sometimes born with their legs fused in a disease commonly called mermaid syndrome, a challenging coexistence that might look peaceful? What hope for the future of humans did he foresee in improving human/fish coexistence? What's in that enhanced coexistence for Americans? for democracy? for capitalism?

In written metaphor also things come together with suspicious ease, perhaps in part because of familiarity with a long history of mythical part human creatures from ancient, classical, and sacred texts ; indeed, even Jesus Christ is a half-human outcome of a human/divine union. Evolutions occur inside metaphor; there is a journey from something to something, and details of the journey are seldom mapped. Mapping of what occurs inside metaphor could be quite revelatory and could lead to other revelatory forms of making, thinking, and/or understanding. To the left, Gort becomes The Stig, and to the right, Sambo becomes Obama in two metaphork evolutions by forkergirl. Much, much (compelling and exciting, among other forms of work) remains to be done.