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A Day in the Brine

~ Unkempt Mind dribbling in the seethe

A Day in the Brine

Tag Archives: Abstract

Amidst All Your Philosophy

18 Wednesday Jan 2023

Posted by smilingtoad in Photography, Quotations

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Abstract, Black and White, Blur, Cinema Quotes, Literary Quotes, Nature, Photography, Snow, Twilight, Urban Debris

“If men lie in this world, what makes you so sure they’ll be honest in the next?”― Rashomon (1950)

“Logic is of course unshakeable, but it cannot hold out against a man who wants to live.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“Immanuel Kant marveled at ‘the starry heavens above’ and the ‘moral law within.’ It’s a lovely sentiment, but one that I cannot wholeheartedly share. We are marvelous in many ways, but the moral laws within us are a mixed blessing. More marvelous, to me, is our ability to question the laws written in our hearts and replace them with something better. The natural world is full of cooperation, from tiny cells to packs of wolves. But all of this teamwork, however impressive, evolved for the amoral purpose of successful competition…

“And yet somehow we, with our overgrown primate brains, can grasp the abstract principles behind nature’s machines and make them our own. On these pastures, something new is growing under the sun: a global tribe that looks out for its members, not to gain advantage over others, but simply because it’s good.”— Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.” ― David Hume

To While Away the Winter

12 Thursday Jan 2023

Posted by smilingtoad in Experimental, Introspection, Photography, Stories, Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Abstract, Black and White, Drear, Experimental, Fractured Self, Introspection, Micro Play, Nature, Prose, Sea, Water, Winter

“Why are you here, talking to me now, after—so many years?”

“I guess all the frolicking wore me down.”

“Unlikely. I used to see you coming down the street. I’d dissolve out of sight so you wouldn’t—You were always alone.”

“I never did stay longer than a night.”

“Did you ever see me?”

“I did.”

“Did it—did you feel anything?”

“I did.”

“But you kept cantering on. A beautifully proud and stoic Gran Cavallo.”

“A nag out to pasture.”

“I used to wish I could become you. I still do.”

“Grow a beard and thick wrists?”

“Do you know what I think?”

“Probably.”

“I think one day, perhaps, part of my skull shall be found beneath a vending machine.”

“That won’t happen. You’re never around anyone brutal enough.”

“You’re not brutal enough?”

“Maybe.”

“It’s a brightly coloured vending machine, surrounded by snow-laden trees. And everything’s glazed in a thick pelt of ice. And it just sits there, soundless and devoid of use—offering cold drinks in a place where there are no summers. And underneath will be a little piece of my parietal bone—and a pale little springtail, no bigger than a centimeter—will find it. He’ll squiggle in delight, and use it as a lean-to to ease his eyes against the drone of the lights overhead—and there he’ll remain—to while away the winter.”

“A winter that never ends.”

“Maybe it will…I can feel sympathy for strange things.”

“It’s been so long since we’ve done this…”

“Yes. Rather sudden but natural—like the Rorschach of a deer misting across the morning commute.”

“Did you think I’d come back?”

“I didn’t think I’d…be here to find out.”

“Thought I’d forget you?”

“Ha. Like remembering a robin’s egg, found crushed in the grass on a cold spring day. Just a flash of amnion in the mud.”

“You said grass before.”

“Another non-sequitur. So many, so many. Could list them to the equator and back. But why come back…”

“I did miss you.”

“And I you.”

“You could never become me, you know—I’m not, I’m not whole.”

“I know. I know.”

“Did you ever—find that face?”

“Do you see one now?”

(No reply)

“Flakelets are scattering. Can you hear them?”

“Yes.”

“Like tiny white beetles ricocheting against a black tarp. I must bed down immediately. That clicking noise will put me right to sleep.”

“I’m going, I’m going.”

“Did you go already?”

(Silence)

“Will you come back?”

(Silence)

“I guess you’ve gone. I can ease back now, let these arms bond to the earth, and analyze the entropy of this zigzag roof—see how long it takes for those holes to turn into denticled tears…”

Steps that Rap like Rain, Guest Hosting for #WQWWC

30 Wednesday Dec 2020

Posted by smilingtoad in Uncategorized

≈ 39 Comments

Tags

#WQWWC, Abstract, Black and White, Cinema, Existence, Experimental, Florida, Grief, Hope, Nature, Night, Ocean, Photography, Quotations, Sunset, Water, Writing

I gaze into jukebox skies.

Sun-blotted days have bleached my shoulders. My mane is turning white. Hunch-backed, I grasp a scallop-shelled walking-stick, ambling along on driftwood legs.

“My characters are drifters and searchers and they look for something. The journey is a state of mind for them.” ―Wim Wenders

Details peel from my face and trickle away into the citrus breeze.

(Sometimes, I can hear atomies skitter across the metalled sands of apathy.)

“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” ―John Milton

A froth of dinoflagellates sparks electric blue ‘round my stubble-feet. Each step is measured, defying suction as I trace along the arrow of time.

“It all looks the same. You can’t imagine anything anymore. Above all, you can’t imagine any change. I became estranged from myself. All I could imagine was going on and on like this forever.” ―Alice in the Cities, 1974, Written by Wim Wenders and Veith von Furstenberg

(There’s a black maw gaping in the back of my brain.)

“Today was a gloomy, rainy day without a glimmer of sunlight, like the old age before me. I am oppressed by such strange thoughts, such gloomy sensations; questions still so obscure to me are crowding into my brain- and I seem to have neither power nor will to settle them.” ―Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

I used to retreat into the zebra-striped dusk beneath the sagging porch of childhood. Heaps of detritus gathered ‘round like friends- termite-mounds of frass, sparrow bones, and mulberry seeds.

(The subtle sounds of decay became my life’s refrain.)

“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one.” ―Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Mewling cries swarm like midges inside my weltering mind. I turn away from the virason gasping off the sea.

Flailing like a killdeer, I struggle toward the lavender dunes. A wide yellow moon grins overhead.

“I don’t take care of myself. I think, if I don’t take care of myself and I sit still and I don’t move, maybe they’ll forget about me. But then I’m scared of that too, because I think maybe if I sit there too long, maybe when I want to move, I won’t be able to move.” ―Mikey and Nicky, 1976, Written/Directed by Elaine May
Memory microfilms at the margin: Coarse sheets forming little mountain ranges of wet, crimson-black spires. Cloven hands of ivory clacking against shiny metal bars. Hillocks of pillows burning like red coals against a dried-leaf body.

“Sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.” ―Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

I can hear the wail of a train from across the lagoon, punctuating the still-water-night. The cloistered whine of mosquitoes quickly throttles the noise. And then, the sound of my quickening steps.

“A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead, really. They’re just backing away from life. Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. But play as well as you can. Go team, go! Give me an L. Give me an I. Give me a V. Give me an E. L-I-V-E. LIVE! Otherwise, you got nothing to talk about in the locker room.” ―Harold and Maude, 1971, Written by Colin Higgins, Directed by Hal Ashby

Steps that begin to rap like rain. And thunder through the frenzied lights of the howling causeway. Steps that are heading north.

“I’m glad we went to the Rhine. For the first time I see myself…as someone who’s gone through a certain time, and that time is my story. [Pausing] That feeling is quite comfortable.” ―Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit, “In the Course of Time”), 1974, Written/Directed by Wim Wenders

Determined to run into myself again.

“We all talked about leaving, but only one of us, one morning, without a word to a soul, actually left.” ―I Vitelloni (“The Bullocks/The Layabouts”),1953, Written/Directed by Federico Fellini
…………….…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

A little over a year ago, I traveled north and did something I’d never done before. Toured a series of universities.

Here’s to new beginnings.

“I have to go on makin’ a livin’…so I can die.” ―Pickup on South Street, 1953, Written/Directed by Samuel Fuller

…………….…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

This effort was created for Marsha Ingrao’s Always Write: Writer’s Quotes Wednesdays Writing Challenge (#WQWWC).

This week’s theme: New Beginnings.

I invite you to accent your own post with a quotation or two that expresses your own sense of New Beginnings.

Here is further information on How to Participate in the Wednesday Writers Challenge.

Previous contributors to last week’s theme, Celebration:

  • It’s Tradition by Myrna Migala
  • Here Comes the Holiday Season by Tina Schell
  • A very Merry Christmas by Sadje
  • Beach Walk Reflections by Frank who included some music via YouTube Fantasia on For All the Saints

Thank you for drizzling by,

Autumn Jade

Song by Improved Sound Limited, from Kings of the Road

“No Terror in the Bang…”

03 Saturday Oct 2020

Posted by smilingtoad in Experimental, Photography, Quotations

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Abstract, Black and White, Cine-Quotes, Creature, Drear, Literary Quotations, October, Photography, Reflection, Spider, Water

Water

“A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
– Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Arachnid

“-I visit this room every night…
-Visit?
-The blind always live in the rooms they live under.”
– Peeping Tom (1960)

“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
– Alfred Hitchcock

Happy October…

🦇👻👀

The Vitreous Surface of Grief: And, a Death on Halloween

03 Friday Nov 2017

Posted by smilingtoad in Experimental, Photography, Quotations, Stories

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Abstract, Black and White, Dark Humour, Death, Experimental, Music, Nature, Photography, Prose, Quotation, Swamp

“Will I always feel this way?
So empty, so estranged?”
– From the song “Empty” by Ray Lamontagne

Shadows spill in green tendrils across oiled waters. I probe the murky, moschate depths with a long, soggy stick. My hands are black and muddied. Reeds whistle beside me. A seagull mews somewhere far away. Minims of sweat glisten and drop from the end of my nose. I can taste the paracme, the tongue-slitting, nascent edge of the end.

A frog burbles to the vitreous surface. Two aurific eyes shimmer at me, bright as egg-yokes. With a gulp, they vanish. I can smell slime. My fingers balter through the mud. I am waiting. I am always waiting.

The sun spits in my eye and I turn away, longing for the tenebrous clouds of the foggy North to sidle down and cast me in a casket of embalming gloom.

I am addicted to desolation. I ache for darkness, cold and decay.

And then a cool wind finally came. Its chilled fingers ruffled my hair and it made the back gate moan plangorously against its flaking hinges. I reveled, I pranced, I forgot my little pain.

A mouse came in the night. He settled himself in a soft, grey ball beside my feet, nose nuzzling the coarse, back-door rug. I watched him take slow, solemn breaths, his sable eyes squinting, mordant. He died in the wash of a final sunrise that milked across a violescent sky, on the dawn of Halloween. Creatures come to me to die, sometimes.

The ants are burrowing into his raisin eyes, now. In a week or three, his tiny white mouse skull will be decoration on my desk.

There is always a glimmer through grief.

“Walk on down the hill
Through the grass grown tall and brown
And still it’s hard somehow to let go of my pain
On past the busted back
Of that old and rusted Cadillac
That sinks into this field collecting rain”
– From the song “Empty” by Ray Lamontagne

Craggy Fool

19 Thursday Oct 2017

Posted by smilingtoad in Photography, Poetry

≈ 32 Comments

Tags

Abstract, Black and White, Gloom, Ocean, Photography, Poetry, Sea, Storm


A hairnet of pink lightning
Flames across glum skies
Shadows saunter, charcoaling
The Sea’s velvet skin


October wind coos
Across ruffled iron peaks
The Brine percolates
Each heaving sigh beckoning

Where the Seashells Go Galloping
Violently out of place
Craggy Fool remains
Askew at the tide-line
Like a lazy sketch

Sea Wheeze
His bulged back still aches
From last night’s dune-pillowed sleep
Nascent rain oozing
Down the minefield of his face

Tender Little Sea-Monster
A lifetime of anomie
Stings in his shoulders
His nails chew through leather palms
His eyes cloud with Storm


He envies the clams
Where dungeons feel like Home
And little mole crabs
Soothed by every ruthless blow

Hairy Waves and Feathered Thoughts
Silent moments
Rarely come
Through the ocean thrum


From cinder plumes
Scavengers plunge
Ranting, brash and loud

Where the Ocean Embalms
Tearing out his thoughts, like guts
Twirling filipendulous

Spotted Only with a Magnifying Glass

04 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by smilingtoad in Experimental, Poetry

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

Abstract, Experimental, Nature, Photography, Poetry

onlyseenwithamagnifyingglass She is spotted only
with a magnifying glass,
an animalcule
with limescaled wings
And a dusky face.

migrainemosaics
Clinging to
a breathing blade
of dancing
chloroplasts,
she sees
the fractals flash
in a fury of green-
the mosaics of her
shieling sea.

fingersofprairiewind
The dawn scatters
in a migraine of hues,
the aurific daal’mist
sibilant around this
unseen and muted thing.

fractalsflash
Waiting to be flicked
by a snapping finger
of prairie wind,
she watches the world,
as listless as a carcass,
through a cage
of tangled light
and vying stems.

Fade to Grain…

05 Tuesday Jul 2016

Posted by smilingtoad in Experimental, Photography, Stories

≈ 64 Comments

Tags

Abstract, Black and White, Experimental, Florida, Grain, Lizard, Nature, Odd, Photography, Rain, Wandering, Writing

Rain-9284Olitory rain; a rain-forest in the kitchen, again. Time for a change. Time for an adventure. Time to let the ceiling-cascade water the counter-top-basil-and-sage.

Time to escape.

RainReflection-9160“Time runs along a linear plain, they say. Nothing remains the same. Thus, we can never turn back, again.”

Pompous, highfalutin windbag…

Another dull interplay as Traffic Light refuses to change.

“You see, this is known as the arrow of time, which describes the asymmetrical nature of Time, and…”

Please…Eat your…

GREEN.

Bunched traffic left in a puddle, behind.

What am I doing? What have I been doing all these years?

Unraveling like an old sweater.

Rain-9318All my life, pushing quaint little notes under the slouching fence.  But I see no familiar, vibrant-faced recipient peeping back at me through the shadowy gap in the moldered boards. I only see darkness.

She must have grown up and moved away.

Rain-9346How pretty mold can be, as it glitters in the rain.

Rain-9389She used to snack on fistfuls of buttercups in the field and make her eyes turn white.  She liked to snarl like a mountain bear and play basketball on roller-blades.  And how she loved wild toads.

RainC-9494I have found it- another abandoned place to jauk about, dispensing disheveled, nullibiquitous thoughts out into the ether.

Rain-9475Let the leak in the dysphoric sky wash me like a houseplant.  How lovely to watch each drop scatter the dust.

Rain-9545That liminal phase- I wander through a succession of tropical depressions, a soggy bindle sagging over my shoulder.

Rain-9522A golden-eyed hobo toad searching for a secluded little hovel- preferably filled with mud and rain and, preferably, beneath a mossy stone.

Rain-9574A snort of lightning- a sniffle in the clouds- a sneeze of wind.

Rain-9420When is that point at which the pain of change is less than that of remaining the same?

Rain-9441“You’re beautiful,” she said, “and as gentle as a gale.”

The other day, I noticed that I was missing another tooth.

Rain-9450I keep digging under that same old soggy fence, searching for her bones…

I scuffle away, lutose and mildly bemused.  The usual state.

Rain-9265Time to face the traffic.  Time to shuffle on back, back to the swampy garden on the counter-top.  Back to unraveling into a stringy bundle on the floor.

Back to Entropy.

Fade to grain.

“To The Artist There is Never Anything Ugly…”

03 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by smilingtoad in Photography, Quotations

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Abstract, Black and White, Death, Florida, Monochrome, Nature, Photography, Quotations, Thoughts, Woods

SkinnedElbow-BW“If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.”
– Brassaï

AnOldStare-BW-1179“Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected.”
– Federico Fellini

Drowning-BW-5628“To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.”
– Auguste Rodin

SilkenContemplation-BW-0674“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”
– Albert Einstein

Ocean Static Fills My Ears…

07 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by smilingtoad in Experimental, Photography, Poetry, Sea

≈ 86 Comments

Tags

Abstract, Beach, Black and White, Florida, Nature, Ocean, Photography, Poetry, Sea, Water

ShellBW-8394-BIISibilant words
Lumber off the sea

Water-BW-9609-BOcean static
Fills my ears

Beach-BW-8116-BThe dunes shrug
Cicadas throbbing

Water-BW-9904-BThe scent of distant rain
Hanging in a hammock
Of gauzy wind

Shell-BW-9846-BFingers probe
Like crab claws
In cold-packed sand

Water-BW-9565-BAs I listen
To the conversation
Of the waves beyond

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  • “Ahead lay the scalloped ocean…” #WQWWC #17 Leisure
  • “All the Bright Precious Things Fade So Fast…” Guest Hosting for #WQWWC

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