Parent in Love #3

Parent in Love #2

Parent in Love #1

Unfocused #4

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Just in case you're wondering - these Unfocused series are not at all contrived. They simply happen as the camera slips from my fingers and falls. Or a clumsy pregnant finger taps a click when none had been intended. This is part of the phenomenology of the gravid state.

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After years of academic work, I am finally indulging pulp fiction. All things vampire, starting with Interview with the Vampire. I suppose it's an obvious choice, seeing as I am sharing my blood with another human being's, quickening inside me, drawing on my life energy to sustain itself.

Self-portrait with belly # 10

After the Walk

Unfocused #3

36 weeks 4 days

Self-portrait with belly #9

Thirty six weeks

Unfocused #2

Unfocused #1

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I am a hazard to myself and those around me. Clumsy, trippy, forgetful, exhausted. Loopy, bungling, ungraceful. Scattered, oblivious, dreamy.

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Someone said to me today that a pregnant woman's cognitive brain shrinks by four percent. She assures me this is temporary.

The all-transcending mystery of the cosmic process is the only possible direction of the thrust of life, and hence of the possibility of freedom - whatever it may ultimately mean. Again, we are reminded of Augustine's idea that unless people looked in this direction, they were hopelessly curvatas, somehow less than fully human, fetishized and bent upon narrow and ignoble things. This was the difference between cupidditas and caritas, of love for things and love for God. And what is "love" for any living creature,except the sentiment that the universe is alive and significant - alive and significant according to the creature's own living energies.

~ Ernest Becker, Beyond Alienation

Underpass #3

Underpass #2

Underpass #1

After the Rain #3

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In the midst of this dreamless spell, full of nocturnal awakenings (for what purpose, I ask, for what purpose?), a vivid dream-image of snails: fat, moist and abundant, emerging from between lush foliage and wet, freshly upturned soil.

Slow, deliberating, cautious.

Exquisitely delicate outside their protective shell, they retreat at the slightest tap of the finger into their dark, singing chamber.

After the Rain #2

After the Rain #1: Triptych

Conversation with O

"The Holocaust of Humanity" #2

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After centuries of waiting, what remains is the silent aloneness. The noisy orgy of the human world has become unbearable. Existence has fallen ever more deeply into lower time where all perspective is lost, and where experience, if you want to call it that, collapses into a cramped prison cell. Is there yet a mortal who can rise to great time, loosen the bars of his shut-upness, see with dis-interest, with not-in-difference the unfolding infinity of the Visage?

You have not let me in for ages, have kept life's essence sealed. Can you not see that you cannot keep it? It is only a loan, good only for the duration of your short life, good only as substance between us.

"The Holocaust of Humanity" #1

Bay Area Overpass #2

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My effort consists in showing that knowledge is in reality an immanence, and that there is no rupture of the isolation of being in knowledge; and on the other hand, that in communication of knowledge one is found beside the Other, not confronted with him, not in the rectitude of the in-front-of-him. But being in direct relation with the Other is not to thematize the Other and consider him in the same manner as one considers a known object, nor to communicate a knowledge to him. In reality, the fact of being is what is most private; existence is the sole thing I cannot communicate; I can tell about it, but I cannot share my existence. Solitude thus appears as the isolation which marks the very event of being. The social is beyond ontology...


...I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his affair. It is precisely insofar as the relation between the Other and me is not reciprocal that I am subjection to the Other; and I am "subject" essentially in this sense. It is I who support all...The I always has one responsibility more than all the others.


~ Emmanuel Levinas

Bay Area Overpass #1

Self-portrait with belly #8

Self-portrait with belly #7

Self-portrait with belly #6

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The intuition of the Real lying at the root of the visible world and sustaining its life, is present in a modified form in the arts: perhaps it were better to say, must be present if these arts are to justify themselves as heightened forms of experience... We know that the picture which is "like a photograph," the building which is at once handsome and commodious, the novel which is a perfect transcript of life, fail to satisfy us. It is difficult to say why this should be so, unless it were because these things have neglected their true business; which was not to reproduce the illusions of ordinary men but to catch and translate for us something of that "secret plan," that reality which the artistic consciousness is able, in a measure, to perceive.

~Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism

Self-portrait with belly #5

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Maybe the myth of the vampire is a degraded version of the Hades/Persephone story. Perhaps Hades had to become a vampire because Persephone (the virgin soul) would no longer visit him of her own free will. He had become relegated to the realm of evil/death. The ancients did not have the dualistic habit of splitting the psyche into good/evil, life/death, creator/creature. There were rituals for the psyche to encounter darkness, which is also (the orthodox authorities deny) the wellspring of creativity:

The rising world of waters dark and deep
Won from the void and formless infinite.

~Milton

So poor Hades had to molder in a coffin, emerging after midnight to feed surreptitiously on the sleeping (no longer aware) soul. Which only goes to show that the darkness needs us as much as we need the darkness. The Greeks knew this. That is why Persephone ate the pomegranate seed of her own choice.

Self-portrait with belly #4

Self-portrait with belly #3