In the latest book of the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind, the eleventh and last of the Wizard’s Rules is revealed —not taught but rather shown, in the form of a highly sought after book. The book is unveiled to be all blank.
[as explained by the Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander] The rule of all rules. The rule unwritten. The rule unspoken since the dawn of history […] The only way to express it, to make sure that you would grasp what he was intending to tell you, was to give you a book unwritten to signify the rule unwritten.
“The picture of a flower in a botanical book is information; its mission ends with our knowledge. But in pure art it is a personal communication. And therefore until it finds its harmony in the depth of our personality it misses the mark. We can treat existence solely as a textbook furnishing us lessons, and we shall not be disappointed, but we know that there its mission does not end. For in our joy in it, which is an end in itself, we feel that it is a communication, the final response of our knowing but the response of our being.” ~ Rabindranath Tagore
The random quote today led me to a comment in the group story I wrote a little more than a year from now.
I found in it a renewed resonance this morning…
(*) After he sent his reply to Yann, Yurick took a deep breath in appreciation of all that had been done the last past days.
However tedious, all in all, it had allowed him to stay away from other people’s trauma, and stay focused on his own issues. Now, the feeling of the energy at hand was starting to become lighter. Like a thin ray of light poking through a thick layer of rainy clouds, announcing that the silver lining was more than just a consolation. It was announcing the sun to come.
He took the book of stories that had been unburied (like his pleasure to write) from the bottom of the sofa’s cushions when they’d received hosts last week-end, and looked with amusement at the opening note about the “random quotes”.
A strong sense of an inkling started to dawn at him.
Thanks to the random quotes — or more appropriately said, to convenient synchronicities — “stuff” was never lost or buried in the insides of that ever-growing story, which was eating with gluttony at the edges of its expansion. Things were popping up here and there, reminding of old loose threads, or pertinent inclusions or links to be made.
But there was more. He, for a long time, had thought that imagination was expanding things to make physical reality look smaller in proportion than it was. Like when they’d looked at Dory’s pictures, and everything looked so big on them. Even the mere thought of nine dogs was huge. But when they’d met her, and Dan, and the dogs, it was all so much smaller. Even seeing Dory manage her dogs made having nine dogs seem manageable.
But the reverse was true: physical reality had its way of dwarfing imagination. Not so much making it smaller, but compacting it, making it fit in an unbelievably condensed and small space.
Take that book. Thousands of words, billions of probabilities, endless threads and hundreds of characters, all packaged in a small stack of inked paper. The trick was that when you look at it that way, when you got that small stack of paper in your hands, it all seems so manageable; one starts to get accustomed to it, then fails to see the newness in it each time it’s opened to tell a story.
Imagination is the true gauge of the vastness of the universe. It’s so easy to forget…
A little update of the elk_mediaplayer plugin, which was also the occasion to update to the latest version of JW mediaplayer.
Please note that as the pages I was using it on have moved from Textpattern to MODx and from JW Media Player to Flowplayer, I won’t be able to update it any longer. Anyone interested in maintaining it is very welcome to do so.
0.3 update
Thanks to Steve, the version works with JWFLV Media Player 5.
New variables:
playlist (over, bottom, right)
playlistsize (number; replacement for plwidth)
Made XHTML 1.1 compliant by replacing commas in id="v_1,2,3" with underscores: id="v_1_2_3".
I recently tried something new to reconnect with the joy and the flow of inspiration that one can experience while writing. Bear with me for a moment before I tell you what it is. And if you can’t, it is all fine, you can jump to the end of the post, and you would have proven the point I am making.
Spontaneity—genuine spontaneity— beyond what appearances might tell us, is not something that comes easily, especially given our usual upbringing which tends to bend or harness it into something productive for society.
The Surrealist movement in the 1920s is remembered among other things for artistic and playful experiments that led to expanding our boundaries and views of reality by practising spontaneity without allowing the thought process to hold the full prominence it usually gets. Automatic writing —and automatic drawing— were in fact techniques that Surrealists developed extensively, before they were used by pioneers of conscious exploration such as Jane Roberts.
One of their games/experiments in particular was known as “cadavre exquis” (exquisite corpse). It required a group of people to collaborate in order to compose something (initially sentences, but by extension, drawing, collage etc.) without having a complete view of what the others had contributed to the creation.
In these times we’re living in, success is more often than not valued by the end result. Little is thought of the process leading up to it, not to mention the lengthy detours that may have been required in the making.
It’s been a while since I have posted a little animation from the steps of my sketches (that I sometimes save regularly enough to give an idea of how it works), so here is an update. Other previous time-lapse videos can be found at my website tagged “process”.
This is my personal blog where I discuss a variety of subjects ranging from technology to arts (graphical or culinary) or metaphysics. I’m also known as Elikozoe which is the name of my website/portfolio.
This is my personal blog where I discuss a variety of subjects ranging from technology to arts (graphical or culinary) or metaphysics. I’m also known as Elikozoe which is the name of
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