Existentialism
chaoticutopia | February 20, 2008"A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there’s no other way. There’s no room for her if she’s not a he. If she’s a her-she, it’s in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the truth with laughter.
For once she blazes her trail in the symbolic, she cannot fail to make of it the chaosmos of the personal--in her pronouns, her nous, and her clique of referents.... On the one hand she has…
chaoticutopia | November 11, 2007I wrote this one over a year ago. I wasn’t weirding out about educational choices, as I described in a recent post, but aging. Even though the circumstances are different, however, I’m still in a similar mindset. So, while terms like "yesterday" and "this week" are irrelevant here, I think it will fit in well. So, let’s all feel like a bug.
I’m in a Kafkaesque mood, thinking of transformations, the helplessness of watching such change through a unique and uninterpretable perception. Perhaps this is because I’m turning 30 this week, and I haven’t quite come to terms with that fact. (It was…
chaoticutopia | March 30, 2007"It is what it is." This phrase has been bothering me lately, though I couldn't quite put my finger on the reason. It was enough that I was reluctant to post this fractal last week. Being an optical illusion, it contradicts the whole idea of "it is what it is". Of course, the more I thought about the phrase, the more I noticed people saying it. (Apparently, it was even voted the #1 cliche of 2004 by USA Today.) The more I heard it from people, the more I started thinking they might be wrong. "It is what it is" seems to deny the complex and dynamic aspects of nature. "Maybe it is something…
chaoticutopia | January 20, 2007I must apologize for being a bit slow with blogging lately, and now a day late with the Friday Fractal. A series of events and observations left me in an existential mood, pondering the fuzziness of the line between reality and fiction. Since my story on the subject, Illusions in Lavender was published this week, I have to admit, it is just that sort of philosophical pondering that can drive a person to madness. I've gotten used to these moods, however, and the most that suffered was my blogging. This week, however, as I emerged from that feverish hermit state, I caught another sort of fever…
chaoticutopia | October 13, 2006Is a place timeless? Is a hill the same hill after a hundred years, or a thousand? For instance, this black and white photograph on the right shows a canal along the Front Range. But how old is it? Does it matter? In many of the photographs I've compared lately, there have been striking or subtle differences appearing over time. This scene, however, has hardly changed in the past 150 years. Before then, there wasn't a canal here, nor a lake in the distance, but there weren't cameras around to capture the scene, either.
A few centuries back, we might have seen a herd of buffalo grazing along…
chaoticutopia | August 28, 2006Life, at times, seems rather abstract. So, with little comment, I present an abstract fractal. Unlike most of my fractals, which resemble some form in nature, this one represents a figment of a dream. Since I can't exactly take a photograph from a dream, I'll let the fractal stand alone:
A Mandelbrot Set, using a radial wave function to color the outside of the set. (The inside remains black.)
I'll leave it at that, for now, until I can return to explain the symbolism in greater detail. In the meantime, here is a hint, disguised in one of my favorite poems:
A Dream Within A Dream
Take…