mysticcheesecakeballoon

[mysticcheesecakeballoon]

Harlem

“What happens to a dream deferred?       Does it dry up       like a raisin in the sun?       Or fester like a sore—       And then run?       Does it stink like rotten meat?       Or crust and sugar over—       like a syrupy sweet?       Maybe it just sags       like a heavy load. Or does it explode?”

- Langston Hugues, Harlem, 1951.

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Diving into the Wreck First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

Adrienne Rich, Poems 1971-1972, 1973. 

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Trainer Works on Muhammad Ali's Shoulder, Gordon Parks, 1966, Miami, USA.  

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Paul Cézanne, Le pont de Maincy, 1879-1880, huile sur toile, 58,5 x 72,5 cm, musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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Région parisienne, France, 2018. 

Source: Mystic Cheesecake Balloon’s students. 

[mysticcheesecakeballoon]

The crazy thing about the human condition is that we are only able to relate to the world to the extent that our language and its limits will allow us to. If you ask any bilingual person, they will probably tell you that the person they are in language A is at least slightly different from the person they are in language B, because to truly learn a language you have to adapt your thought process at least partially to encompass the new reality that the second language creates. And that’s a major thing in sociology, if the language(s) you speak cannot describe a concept, then that concept effectively does not exist for you. We didn’t create language, language created us.

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Cassius Clay and his mother Odessa Grady Clay, Steve Schapiro, Louisville, USA, 1963.

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Fernand Léger, Les disques, 1918, huile sur toile, 2400 x 1800 cm, musée d’art moderne, Paris.

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sorry in advance, my babies

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Aux alentours de Chambéry, France, 2015.

Source: Mystic Cheesecake Balloon. 

[mysticcheesecakeballoon]

市人よ   Hey townspeople, 此笠うらふ  I’ll sell you my woven hat, 雪の傘   The snow umbrella

Matsuo Basho (1644-1694)

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いざ行かむ  Let’s go out 雪見にころぶ  To see the snow view 所まで   Where we slip and fall

Matsuo Basho (1644-1694)

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Muhammad Ali and Don King enjoying some reading material, 1978.

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André Masson, plafond de l’Odéon- théâtre de l’Europe, Paris, 1965. 

Source: Mystic Cheesecake Balloon.

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Seine River, Villeneuve Saint-Georges/ Paris, France, 2018. 

Source: Mystic Cheesecake Balloon

[mysticcheesecakeballoon]

If you like you can read [this book], and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let's say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the Second World War; let's say this or that is such and so, and see what happens... In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.  The purpose of a thought experiment, as the term was used by the [physicists], is not to predict the future [...] but to describe reality, the present  world.  Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like - what's going on- what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies. [...]  They may use all kind of facts to support their tissue of lies.They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which was really fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology; and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalisable region, the author's mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane- bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voice, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. [...]  In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel- that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard t say just what we learned, how we were changed.  The artist deals with what cannot be said in word.

Ursula Le Guin, Introduction,The Left Hand of Darkness, 1976.