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You are here: Home / Archives for surviving the worldwide web

Living in Metaphor (And Surviving the Worldwide Web)

October 29, 2012 by Iskra 3 Comments

Leaf_On_Grille

Twenty years ago I wrote a story in which a man in San Francisco leaves his lover’s bed at 3 AM to go into his basement and talk to a woman in Denmark “on the Web.” My readers frowned and asked, “The Web? What is that? You’ll have to footnote that because no one will know what you’re talking about—we certainly don’t.” It may be difficult to believe, but there was such a quaint and innocent time and I was privileged to be, for ten minutes, ahead of the curve. I did not know, as I put the story away unfinished, that the footnote was in fact the story.

When that man “logged on” he entered the beginnings of a metaphor most of the modern world lives in now. He looked transfixed at the picture of a woman’s bare shoulder and the pink and black tattoo winding down her back. He wrote sentences, and sentences came back. He was “here” and he was simultaneously over there in a way he had never experienced before. He went back to bed just before sunrise.

Sunrise, coincidentally, is when the original prototype of the Web becomes most visible. The highwire paths run from hydrangea to pine, from the fern to the apple tree; the circular weavings hang briefly intact. A friend told me of waking on an August morning in a fugue state, trying to puzzle out a difficult problem. She walked into the garden and the sight of spider webs strung with dew and shimmering like shields stunned her with beauty. She walked a few paces to the left, and they vanished. She walked to the right and they reappeared. And so for a long while she walked back and forth observing as the webs came and went depending on the light. And then she turned around and walked right into one she could not see, and it broke.

This struck me as metaphorically accurate on many levels, and stayed with me so strongly that when, a few weeks later I walked into my own spider web, even though I am a confirmed arachnophobe and shrieked hysterically, I did not immediately wipe the web off my glasses. Instead I took my glasses off and marveled, for the web had transferred perfectly to the lens. If I wanted to I could let the pattern remain indefinitely, and walk around the world quite literally seeing “through” the web.

Since that moment I have been thinking about the way we live in metaphor, and how, depending on whether or not we actually see it, our world changes in response. Words shape our consciousness and visa versa. They are neither incidental nor random. When we go on the Web it offers us a choice of roles: we navigate, following threads; we get lost, falling through the spaces; or we are “caught in the Net,” prey just as the fly that hangs in a pale skein outside my backdoor. The words are not innocent. A “net” is only welcome to the hunter or the trapeze artist or the person dangling from a bridge. The butterfly and the fish have quite a different perspective. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: coping with digital life, freedom through metaphor, living in metaphor, surviving the worldwide web, the net, the space between, the web, writing on social media

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Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I sta Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I start my morning pages with barely formed questions: 

What is a dream? Is a glass house safe or waiting to be broken? What is the effect of layering and repetition, a note repeated more and more softly without elaboration?
I am getting ready to start a new photographic-bas I am getting ready to start a new photographic-based series that I’ll be working on for the next six months. A friend here on Instagram gave me these praying hands years and years ago. They are quietly gaudy, and awful and simultaneously completely wonderful. I see them every day when I wake up in a house that I will confess is filled with devotional objects. This image is composed of two photographs, the sculpture and a street kiosk. When I walk down the streets, I cannot resist documenting kiosks, particularly when they are empty. The shredded strange paint residues and the battered metal frames are just waiting to be re-purposed as though the entire street was my personal goodwill junk department. Or you could call it a library. My cross training for the series is reading Virginia Woolfs stream of consciousness, novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s writing gives an artist permission to own their interior world. Of course, letting the exterior world in on the secret can be quite a task. That is, what studio time is for…
I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendsh I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendship, even when they are asymmetric; for the guidance of those in the temple, who have practiced for years and send us their notes and their breathing lessons; thankful for the leaf that my friend saved for me of all the leaves in her neighborhood and thankful to the man who came yesterday when my back had laid me flat to sweep and to blow, as he noted in his documentation, 95% of the leaves in my garden, into piles then compressed with military precision into small liftable bundles stacked like muffins under the eaves. Now we can look out at the spare empty spaces. Feel the freedom of silence and space between branches. Rest, as growth goes quiet and invisible in the best growing season of the year.

May your Thanksgiving be bright✨
Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Art Museum First Avenue level, 2-4! Hope to see you there for our group show celebrating 50 years(!) This piece is called Water Kimono, a reverie on the ever-changing patterns of light on water.
My Narnia My Narnia
Last night I tried to get through more than 20 min Last night I tried to get through more than 20 minutes of the Golden Bachelor. It was Pickleball-date afternoon. The Golden Bachelor, truly a lovely man to observe and listen to under normal circumstances delivered this line: “Pickleball is a regular part of my life. Any woman who is going to share my life must also share Pickleball.” 

God help us. I’ve never been able to hit a ball with a paddle or a sock or a bat or anything else. Combat sports, like music, are abstract. No matter how much I pre-visualize the zen moment, the ball somehow remains in the air unrelated to my weapon of choice. I want to see the next Golden Bachelor rewritten for painters. “He said, fingering the smear of cadmium on his eyebrow, “Painting is a very big part of my life, and any woman who marries me is going to have to live with Painting.” Will he also say “I hope she paints too?” And we’ll have a full time maid and cook? Or will he say “She must be able to bring me my pipe and my slipper at the end of the day. And take the dogs for long walks alone while I try to decide the color of the sky?”

Feel free to write the script below.

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