Sky (version 2)

Sometimes it happens like this. It ends being a simple image after all, but the vision takes months to end up as it has to be. I wanted to make a sky going from shades of white to black, as the attached poem goes, that simple.
Thought I would never end this one. And I wanted it for this poem in particular.
If you never listened to good, tragic, existential poems/lyrics of tango, then you can't know how close to that art this poem is. As Milton have seen, and Proust, and Borges, and all the high art, there's no other kind of paradise than the paradise lost... and the sky, in tango music is a symbol of our collective future.

1
On a certain day in the blue-moon month of September
Beneath a young plum tree, quietly
I held her there, my quiet, pale beloved
In my arms just like a graceful dream.
And over us in the beautiful summer sky
There was a cloud on which my gaze rested
It was very white and so immensely high
And when I looked up, it had disappeared.

2
Since that day many, many months
Have quietly floated down and past.
No doubt the plum trees were chopped down
And you ask me: what's happened to my love?
So I answer you: I can't remember.
And still, of course, I know what you mean
But I honestly can't recollect her face
I just know: there was a time I kissed it.

3
And that kiss too I would have long forgotten
Had not the cloud been present there
That I still know and always will remember
It was so white and came from on high.
Perhaps those plum trees still bloom
And that woman now may have had her seventh child
But that cloud blossomed just a few minutes
And when I looked up, it had disappeared in the wind.

Bertolt Brecht, "Remembrances of Marie A.", on Manual of Piety.

Abstract Nº71

Although Oliver had been brought up by philosophers, he was not theoretically acquainted with the beautiful axiom that self-preservation is the first law of nature.

Charles Dickens, "Oliver Twist" (Chapter 10).

Abstract Nº70

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

Max Planck, in "The Observer" of January 25th, 1931.

3D (GA's) Monolith

On december 2007 I was experimenting with interactive genetic algorithms and evolving images in 3D, and when the program came up with this I thought to find a light resemblance with the black monolith of "2001: A space oddysey".

I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

HAL, (in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A space odyssey").

Abstract Nº69

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso.

3D (GA's) Caterpillar

This one was made completely by genetic algorithms (like always) in December 2007, when I was experimenting in 3D. Going back to 3D -and opening a blog for it- is a permanent, constant, everlasting plan.

This caterpillar on a spiritual barren land is looking for the sweet plant of your soul to feed from. Beware of the caterpillar now... but one day will become a butterfly. :-)

With this said, and because of this: Happy should-be-independence-day to my friends in Mexico and to everyone involved in freedom and individual rights.

Protect your digital rights.

Reject the defective by design.

Support a free culture to build upon.

a caterpillar,
this deep in fall—
still not a butterfly

Matsuo Basho.

Shamrock II

Through Erin's Isle
To sport awhile
As Love and Valour wander'd,
With Wit, the sprite,
Whose quiver bright
A thousand arrows squander'd;
Where'er they pass,
A triple grass
Shoots up, with dew-drops streaming,
As softly green
As emeralds seen
Through purest crystal gleaming.
Oh the Shamrock, the green, immortal Shamrock!
Chosen leaf
Of Bard and Chief,
Old Erin's native Shamrock!

Says Valour, "See,
They spring for me,
Those leafy gems of morning!" —
Says Love, "No, no,
For me they grow,
My fragrant path adorning."
But Wit perceives
The triple leaves,

And cries, "Oh! do not sever
A type that blends
Three godlike friends,
Love, Valour, Wit, for ever!"
Oh, the Shamrock, the green, immortal Shamrock!
Chosen leaf, etc.

So firmly fond
May last the bond
They wove that morn together,
And ne'er may fall
One drop of gall
On Wit's celestial feather.
May Love, as twine
His flowers divine,
Of thorny falsehood weed 'em:
May Valour ne'er
His standard rear
Against the cause of Freedom!
Oh the Shamrock, the green, immortal Shamrock!
Chosen leaf, etc.

Thomas Moore, “Oh, the Shamrock”.

Abstract Nº68

Talk, talk, talk; the utter and heart-breaking stupidity of words.

William Faulkner, "Mosquitoes".

Colourful planet

One more on the topic of spherical animals. The world is more interesting, and other times even more tolerable, just because I have paintings and literature to enjoy. So then, just in case I never said this: I love this book since I was a little kid. This is one of my favourite chapters.

The sphere is the most uniform of solid bodies since every point on its surface is equidistant from its center.

Because of this, and because of its ability to revolve on an axis without straying from a fixed place, Plato (Timaeus, 33) approved the judgment of the Demiurge, who gave the world a spherical shape. Plato thought the world to be a living being and in the Laws (898) stated that the planets and stars were living as well. In this way, he enriched fantastic zoology with vast spherical animals and cast aspersions on those slow witted astronomers who failed to understand that the circular course of heavenly bodies was voluntary.
In Alexandria over five hundred years later, Origen, one of the Fathers of the Church, taught that the blessed would come back to life in the form of spheres and would enter rolling into Heaven.
During the Renaissance, the idea of Heaven as an animal reappeared in Lucilio Vanini; the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino spoke of the hair, teeth, and bones of the earth; and Giordano Bruno felt that the planets were great peaceful animals, warm-blooded, with regular habits, and endowed with reason. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler debated with the English mystic Robert Fludd which of them had first conceived the notion of the earth as a living monster, "whose whalelike breathing, changing with sleep and wakefulness, produces the ebb and flow of the sea." The anatomy, the feeding habits, the color, the memory, and the imaginative and shaping faculties of the monster were sedulously studied by Kepler.
In the nineteenth century, the German psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner (a man praised by William James in his A Pluralistic Universe) rethought the preceding ideas with all the earnestness of a child. Anyone not belittling his hypothesis that the earth, our mother, is an organism superior to plants, animals, and men-may look into the pious pages of Fechner's Zend-Avesta. There we read, for example, that the earth's spherical shape is that of the human eye, the noblest organ of our body. Also, that "if the sky is really the home of angels, these angels are obviously the stars, for the sky has no other inhabitants."

Jorge Luis Borges, "The book of the imaginary beings", (Animals in the Form of Spheres).

Spherical animal

Happy international workers' day.
For some reason (unrelated to the previous) reminded Plato and his spherical animal/universe when I saw this sphere came up, so that's why the quote.

In the likeness of what animal did the Creator make the world? It would be an unworthy thing to liken it to any nature which exists as a part only; for nothing can be beautiful which is like any imperfect thing; but let us suppose the world to be the very image of that whole of which all other animals both individually and in their tribes are portions. For the original of the universe contains in itself all intelligible beings, just as this world comprehends us and all other visible creatures. For the Deity, intending to make this world like the fairest and most perfect of intelligible beings, framed one visible animal comprehending within itself all other animals of a kindred nature.

[...]

Now to the animal which was to comprehend all animals, that figure was suitable which comprehends within itself all other figures. Wherefore he made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a lathe, having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the centre, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures; for he considered that the like is infinitely fairer than the unlike.

Plato, "Timaeus", (First main section).