round house

How many creatures make their nests in rectilinear form? Earth-form circles large or small don't seem so mysterious if we look at the nesting methods of our furry and feathered kin. Whether to enclose real or imagined occupants, dead or alive, arranging earth in circular form seems like standard M.O! How'd so many of us get to thinking right angles were top choice? Most early people's constructed homes appear to have been round. Before aerial photography, the sure clue to an ancient site was leftover stones, depressions and berms. Today, hi-res satellite imagery can suggest previously overlooked sites to ANY amateur. Here is a Edin's Hall, one of supposedly few similar structures in the southern Scottish borderlands. But really? Look for yourself on Google Earth. This amateur sees similar scars nearby.

this bird has flown

First the predawn birdsong
Clacking of tiny feet on wood
A soft rap on the flatmate's door
The startled peal of parting tears
Cut short by stiff upper lipness.

The shuffling of thrice her volume
Swiftly down 3 runs of stairs, and
Up for one last, squeaky valise.
Then a pause, while the taxi idles:
Last gaze from the edge of this nest.

how deep is your love?

The opening sequence to the movie Up in the Air was worth the price of admission. Google Earth has made the virtual traveling done by us map-geeks so rich that it reduces the curiosity to visit some places. Alas, as with most things virtual, we forget the power of the real deal. Viewing the ever-closer landscape of my birth during descent in a plane evoked a core feeling of home-ness. As I gazed at the woodlands and prairie around O'Hare Airport, 30 years of walking communion with my beloved San Francisco fell away to a siren-song from home. How deep is the home bond rooted in the terrain itself? 
David Abrams wrote about poet Gary Snyder driving with an Australian Pintubi man named Jimmy Tjungurrayi to his ancestral territory in a pickup. Being on site was necessary to collect ancient & living stories from Tjungurrayi's culture. Driving through a particularly rich location, the fellow began to recall events unintelligibly fast, like a tape at high speed. No one could understand him. Everyone was frustrated. Eventually they realized the tale was SO linked with footsteps on specific terrain that they would have to slow the vehicle to walking speed for the story to be comprehensible.

promise her anything

Renaissance linear perspective was not the first in "you-are-there" viewer manipulation! Some excavated Egyptian tombs contain a passage with a series of deep niches, in some of which sculpture or an image has been found. If one were to travel the passage, each image or sculpture would be visible only as one stood and gazed directly into the niche. Because of the depth of the niches, what was in store at the next niche could not be determined until one advanced further. Whatever the price of admission was to the chamber, the image-viewing experience was linear and predetermined.
Yesterday I bought a ticket to watch A Single Man, visually choreographed by Tom Ford. 99 minutes of paging through Vogue ads, perusing distinct compositions, while Ford channeled Isherwood. It was not a 3D movie, but it elicited a similar jolt when Ford snatched at my emotional netherbrain --where olfactory memories reside. A couple times in the film, our hero takes a slow-mo trip, a nose-dive into a dog's coat ("buttered toast") or a visual expedition up his department secretary's neck ("Arpège"). I wonder if those 5000 year-old niches once had their own scent-tracks: bunches of lavender, anise or myrrh?

point and shoot

More specifically, we have noted a remarkable relationship between left temporal and parietal activity during the aiming period such that quiescence or “relaxation” in this region is related to higher-quality performance.

Another place to go besides the left brain is the limbic brain. I may not be able to will myself to go there, but there are activities that engage the limbic brain. Swinging, chanting, circle dancing and aiming. Limbic brain engagement supposedly has that "in the zone" feeling that sometimes comes from drawing, too. I wonder if it is simply left-brain disengagement.