The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

Sabat. The Ruin.

The objects are static, nothing moves; smoke pours forth, smoke gathers
video. The static objects construct archaeology; one wanders among yes-
terday's fury. In the sky, everything is as it was; on the ground, moire
becomes you - it's your movement that makes screened patterns transform
among themselves.

This is a wonderful environment to wander around in, if you can find your
way around.

This is what one is accustomed to - sculptural installation filled with
optical amazement.

Perhaps the site is a ruin. Perhaps the objects are left behind. Perhaps
the spews are exhausts. Perhaps this is a remnant of enormous activity
over a long period of time. Perhaps there was a drought. Perhaps there was
an economic collapse. Perhaps there was nothing left to trade.

There was nothing left to trade. Virtual monies inflated beyond anything
anyone dreamed of. They couldn't be shored by real monies. Behind the
scenes, real monies dry up; servers and routers falter, storage becomes
creaky, bad sectors flourish on hard drives. The virtual world shudders
and shakes. Everything moves jerkily if anything moves at all. The spew
continues because the spew requires no intervention. The world is static.

It's as if embers glow forever. It's as if dynamics becomes museology.
It's an archaeology of the trace. It's a trace which disappears as servers
wink out. It's a memory and these still images and videos below.

It behooves you to go into the site while you can. World-wide, everything
is chaos. There is respite in the ruins. Nothing worse can happen, can it?
And their strange beauty, so uncanny. It's how you imagined things from
the very beginning. It's the stuff your dreams were made of. You know it's
a conjuring trick but you're mesmerized. You know it's prims and protocols
but you're seduced.

Visit the site while you can. This is the future minus the steroids. This
is a form of wandering and who you may come across. There have been 1302
visitations to date. Perhaps there is a visitation now and you are missing
it. Perhaps you have never wandered in inconceivable spaces and you are
afraid of them and there is so much to learn.

But there is a hiatus now and you have time to learn and time to visit.
The slightest gap, almost a liminal space, you're worried about the
future, you're worried about your future, but just for a moment, you have
a bit of time, you'll sit back, relax, you're curious, you'll take the
time, time is all you have, it's all any of us have, the dollar slides,
dolorous, the site remains, everything is still there, a few things moving
up in the sky, but everything waiting for you, everything waiting for you.

http://www.alansondheim.org/sabat.mp4
http://www.alansondheim.org/ sabat jpgs

Everything silent, everything waiting for you -

To access the Odyssey exhibition The Accidental Artist:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/48/12/22
email archive:  http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/

Ice patterns in frozen pond - more odd phenomena -


"God's speech, says St. Maximos, is not loose chatter, for though we were
all to speak at length, we still would not have uttered the equivalent of
a single word of God." (St Peter of Damaskos in the Philokalia, trans.
Palmer, Sherrard, Ware.)

And were there no God whatsoever, one speaks simultaneously of the speech
and muteness of nature, that is to say, what is revealed, and what remains
behind after revelation. And the revelation is our own, what is revealed
to each and every one of us, in relation and intimacy to nature, to a
natural which has pre- and post-existed us. Now,

Whatever caused the circular rings in the pond ice? There's one outlet
only, yet the pattering is different than elsewhere. I wonder if the
overall shape of the pond or its location - winds moving slowly? might
have something to do with this.

http://www.alansondheim.org/ lestwe jpgs (# 06 and 07 are unrelated).
http://www.alansondheim.org/ au jpgs (odd contrail, more ice circles).
http://www.alansondheim.org/ zzzz jpgs (Second Life still life oddity).

There are objects, it seems at the center of two of the concentric rings,
but not at the third - perhaps an underwater object?

Perhaps there's a wave resonance set up somehow so that the rings are the
result of standing waves, interference, and so forth?

The wind seems to below strongly here (Aurora, CO), but the pond is lower
than the surrounding area - perhaps the hollow itself is resonant?

Perhaps this isn't an odd phenomenon at all, but I haven't seen this
pattern in Pennsylvania ponds, for example (or upper NY state, Canada,
etc.

Then there is the contrail with its peculiar development, and then there
were those animal prints, and then an odd halo phenomenon around 100 deg-
rees from the vertial, and then...

Too many things, too much confusion, I'm being toyed with. -

And Second Life? More frozen confusion; I had difficulty extricating my-
self this time. -

Send URLs - your pond pattern pictures!