I’ve removed all images from the website that were not created by me.
In not-entirely-unrelated news: 100% of the words and images on this website are now (and shall henceforth be) created by me.
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Author Archives: Michael
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Housekeeping
Posted at 4:19 pm , on July 16, 2019
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Airplane
Posted at 10:50 am , on July 16, 2019
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Weaponsmithing
Posted at 8:19 pm , on July 8, 2019
Feed, Fuel, Forge, Fire;
Shape a sword from your desire.
Whet the blade and make it sharp;
Enough to pierce a demon’s heart. -
Wordsmithing
Posted at 2:29 pm , on July 8, 2019
The only rational state for the artist is to despise their audience, and in so doing, clad themselves in armour against injurious comments and opinions.
The artist is a flickering candle, a flame so easily snubbed out by the thumb and forefinger of logic and reason.
If the artist is to believe in science, then how important is it for us to maintain—stood firmly—with a foot (or other limb) in each world.
The artist aligns their self between two incompatible absolutes.
The pendulum of consciousness swings back and forth across this border and the subconscious can only be where the conscious is not.
It is upon this border of irreconcilable conflict that my mind becomes a forge and I strike—again and again—with the hammer.
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Volcano
Posted at 2:33 pm , on July 5, 2019
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Rock, Paper, Scissors
Posted at 1:45 pm , on July 4, 2019
Is the rock that defeats the scissors the SAME rock that yields to paper?
Or is there an infinite hierarchy of rock, paper, scissors “within which” each game takes place?
And does this hierarchy cycle at the dictate of our neurons, which are attempting to assign randomness* so as to appear unpredictable†.
Will the same pair of scissors always yield to the same rock?
A broken pair of scissors can never cut the paper.
Therefore, the “scissors that cut” must be “remade‡” or “new”.
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Black Smudges
Posted at 10:36 am , on June 5, 2019
Earlier this year, a tomb was discovered in the Egyptian necropolis of Saqqara, a “stone’s throw” from the Pyramid of Pharaoh Djedkare Isesi.
Down a robust wooden ladder into a darkness where the light shines only out of torches, around an L-shaped bend, archaeologists stepped into a picture of the past.
The walls are decorated with beasts and men, plates piled high with food and beautiful, haunting hieroglyphs. The profiled faces on the wall look down on the explorers, but do not judge them, for that is the domain of jackal-headed Anubis alone.
This is Khuwy’s tomb, and his numerous titles are recorded amongst the hieroglyphs. One of them is strangely touching: “sole friend”. The decorations in the tomb indicate that Khuwy was held in high regard, though his precise relationship to the Pharaoh is not known.
The paintings on the walls of the tomb are especially well preserved. The rich hues of the past rise up at us: blue and green and deep, burnt ochre, the colour of skin. There are patches, here and there, where the paint has worn away—of course—to remind us we are fragile. And there is the mummy of Khuwy himself, dismembered. The urns used to store his bodily organs now containing little more than black ichor.
And yet, amongst all this solemnity: a sudden moment of exultation. An archaeologist, face flushed, calls the camera crew over to inspect a mark on the wall. There, barely distinguishable against the white limestone brick is a small black smudge: a fingerprint.
The mark was almost certainly left by whoever painted the walls of the tomb. Beneath the shapes of cats and birds and hieroglyphs painted more than 4,000 years ago is a lingering, tangible reminder of what it is to be human.
At the press conference outside the tomb, against a picture perfect backdrop of palm trees and sand dunes, Egypt’s Antiquities Minister, Khaled al-Enani, does not only mention the art, or the remains of poor dismembered Khuwy (which are to be carefully examined); but he also mentions that seemingly insignificant black smudge.
There is the art and the pictographs. There is the engineering expertise that was used to cut and shift the limestone slabs in order to create such a robust structure. There is the rich mythology of the ancient people of this land decorating the walls, along with those official titles held by Khuwy himself.
Yet, amongst it all, it is that single black smudge that is most affecting.
Some 4,000 years after it was built, a tomb built to honour a man—Khuwy, called “sole friend”—can perhaps teach us something altogether different than expected.
Life—and history—is not only about the rulers and their chosen few. It is not only about the gods and the demigods that spark our imagination and are born again and again into life on our screens and in our stories.
Instead, it’s about the mistakes that we make—those subtle imperfections, those black smudges, that may yet go unnoticed for another 4,000 years. It’s about those small acts of defiance—perhaps a fingerprint left as a signature by an otherwise unnamed artist.
No matter how grandiose the world around us may seem and how insignificant we may feel beneath the shadows of that grandiosity, remember:
Sometimes a black smudge on a wall may be the most important thing of all.
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But There Was Nobody to Read Them
Posted at 2:11 pm , on May 21, 2019
The stories I write are influenced by thousands of years of genetic memory. They arise from the blood and the mud of my ancestors as they migrated across the globe, ending up at last in this far-flung Southern province, gazing towards Antarctica.
I can feel that primal heart-beat of the Universe and the exploding of our sun. The scorching and cooling of chemical balance and imbalance that birthed the improbability of life. Those first bubbles that rose from the mouths of the first fish and then: those slimy creatures who wrestled their way from the brine.
Those grotesque, slippery beings so different to us and yet—somehow—related, left engravings in the shapes of their bodies on the sand. And where the grooves crossed over one another they almost resembled letters; the very first stories written there, on the beach.
But there was nobody to read them.
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