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)=)

(a part of the story of the) MERMAID TINE

When I was seven, I was committed to compromise,
refusing to allow things to be only what they were,
a slave to metaphor.

No cloud was safe.
Anything I wanted to see
appeared above me in temporary galleries of icy sculpture.

I have some co-conspirators:
cloud-gate by Anish Kapoor in Millennium Park
where wei o-connell captured (for her cloud gate sculpture gallery
—please visit it) what I see, in this moment of seeing,
as a hatching of mermaid embryos in her image.
The embryos can also be(come) seeds of a need to impose such seeing, to grow such stories (high rises of stories, development after development, density and entanglement of of everything that can have a voice having its say, some of it through puppetry and ventriloquism and appropriation and hiccups)
without regard for possible benefit for humanity if telling alone lacks benefit,
proves nothing (assuming something in fact can be proved, proof that holds across
scale, across location, across durations of time).

Cloud Gate has a tine extension in Heathrow's Cloud by Troika:


A bit downtempo isn't it? Purpose or not, we're here, and we're made of our stories, our DNA telling a good one, full of recipe, prescription, destiny, opportunity for error, explanation, the joy of code, reduction to information, expansion to information, built-in script, and so forth. I'm trying to tell a story-tine about aspiration, always about aspiration, about becoming, a journey from one place to another, something even am amoeba can do, without requiring a way back, so as to keep nodding to how great it is to keep going, to church out whatever it is that inhabits the wake of movement, from gentle assistance to steamroller crush and pulverization into a fine power that travels the globe like all-purpose cosmetic.

Everything dressed up like mermaids.
Clouds of memories of mermaid parade.
Here is a forkergirl image of a cloud factory producing mermaid embryos:
When I was seven, I wrote Mermaid Sisters and with my cousin made paper dolls that had a change of a dozen different fish tails, mostly based on what could be caught, including what we could imagine could be caught, in Lake Erie. We tried to carve mermaids out of ivory soap, but neither of us were good at that, some really bad butchering (nothing at all like what's available from The Mermaid Soap Company). It didn't occur to us to buy some mermaid soap molds, but we did pour Bosco chocolate syrup into small china lifeboats (from my aunt's good china set so seldom used, she didn't miss the shallow oval dishes just right for a Barbie or Tressy rescue in shallow water) that we put in the oven to try to bake chocolate bars. We also didn't have access to, and at that time couldn't imagine access to something that couldn't exist then (though a possible path to it was in progress): the wonderful Liana's Paper Doll Blog.
(image at left from Liana's Paper Doll Blog)

When we floated the mermaid paper dolls we drew, appropriately putting our half-fish in water, bending them so that their torsos were above water so that they could breathe without oxygen tanks, the paper outfits came off; those tabs we folded to hang the fish skirts onto the mermaids weren't secure fasteners.
The fish skirts floated separately.
Paper fish skirts and paper mermaids became increasingly fragile in the water.
They drank the water.
They became heavier with water. Soaked. Saturated.

(image from animals in the attic.com)
When we squeezed out the water, we held paper wads, the beginnings or aftermaths of paper wasp nests. It was as if we'd chewed and spit out deformed globes, very inexperienced makers of worlds yet the wads were habitable, could teem with microbes we didn't know anything about —and I had no excuse, having attended since kindergarten Louis Pasteur School, named for the then king of the war against germs harmful to humans, the source of the pasteurization process —pasteurized eggs among the safe eggs, the good eggs during the recent egg recall;
eggs that seem signed by Louis Pasteur himself. I do not know how Louis Pasteur felt about mermaids. Had he ever visualized his wife as a mermaid? Was there a mirror that gave her mermaid aspects of herself in exchange for reflection? I don't know how well mermaids may have engaged the imaginations or fever-sponsored realities of his children. I don't know what significance mermaids may have had for him or his children had typhoid not demanded their attention. I can speculate. I can give his children that succumbed to typhoid the gift of mermaid memory in the form of story I might make, some typhoid mermaid tines.

Writing this has given birth to the idea, has included typhoid mermaid tines into the multimedia story system, the limited forked consideration of mermaids that appeared to me in clouds over my head, sometimes taking on the weight of obligation, the fog of guilt for not acting on obligation.

Read Lois Pasteur's papers on Germ Theory
My search, at the moment, for mermaid in the Pasteur Galaxy did not produce any results, but try your own luck in the galaxy; try your own search. what cannot be found, cannot be pasteurized at this time, is not yet bug-free. At some point, a search for Pasteur and mermaid will lead here where the map is not yet reliable, where the meat of mermaid, typhoid, and Pasteur has not fully emerged, and in this gestation state is particularly susceptible to contamination, to mutation, perhaps on the order of trans-species work that may look more and more feasible, less and less ethical as it moves in a range of directions from trans-species organ transplantation. There is a place for this human/fish merger, even the reverse fish/human merge as in this work by Magritte: : Otherkin.net; Otherkin.net is not the only place where species meet, where species have met, producing ligers and tigons, for instance; it's just one place, one tine of a story that in the telling nd retellings might be able to connect, however briefly, with everything on some scale in some location. Meet me at Mermaid Alley and form a (temporary) intersection.