The Scream

In search of a quick snack, I went out to the kitchen in the half dark and cut a slice of bread. When I saw my plate in the light, I didn't really fancy it.*



And in bed later, I swear I could hear the scrape of the bread knife against the carpet as the tiny evil Bread Man pulled himself up, stair by creaky stair.

Ree! Ree! Ree! Ree!


*Unlike the time Johnny Cash, or possibly Beethoven, appeared on a corn fritter, which went down just fine.

Imagine

Everyday miracles: the face of John Lennon miraculously appeared this afternoon in the fabric of my Darryn George T shirt, hanging inside-out on the washing line.

Or maybe it's Leonard Cohen? Be able to tell you on Thursday.

Paranoiac-critical method

Pareidolia is the tendency to interpret a coincidental visual stimulus as something already known to the viewer, and is related to the "paranoiac-critical method" beloved by Salvador Dali, in which the identities of objects are unstable and mutable, and an image of one object gives an affordance of another.

The word comes from "para", or "wrong", and "eidolon" or "ghostly vision". Many examples of pareidolia involve images of powerful entities popping up where one least expects to see them: there's the man coming out from behind a cliff on Mars, seemingly unconcerned that the Hubble telescope has snapped his picture; Darth Vader appearing bold as brass in a nebula photograph taken by NASA; Mother Theresa as a cinnamon bun and the face of the Virgin Mary in a miraculously mould-free cheese sandwich; not forgetting of course my own recent encounter with a world-famous musician.

What is it about corn fritters and their mystical powers? Here's a test-piece of fritter the big guy made the other night which formed itself into a distinct yin yang symbol. Our household has been in a state of perfect equilibrium ever since.

Plastic insects, bathroom primitives

Here's a photo of the small guy's collection of plastic insects, as arranged by the big guy on the bathroom wall, Killeen-style.

An infinity of things

The surrealists saw strange shapes in clouds: they lay on their backs and stared up at the sky and called it research. Hamlet saw a cloud shaped like a camel, and thought it worth remarking upon; in his treatise on painting, Leonardo da Vinci suggested that artists should study not only clouds but stained walls, mud, and ashes from the fire, where they would find visual analogies for "landscapes with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and hills of all kinds. You will also see battles and figures with animated gestures and strange faces and costumes and an infinity of things."

The dinner plate also holds a hidden world of visual possibilities. Above is a photograph I took last night of a corn fritter, in which Beethoven's head can clearly be discerned. Or possibly it's Johnny Cash. I was in two minds about whether or not to eat it, but in the end, I did.

Waiting for the miracle to come

When this popped out of the toaster this morning, I knew today would be a good one.