The Real Full Moon

I thought last night was the full moon, but earlier tonight I stepped out for a beer run to the market, and immediately realized tonight is the real full moon.

Dr. Richards, I Presume?

Aka Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four.

A Forgotten Gem

Saturday, June 10, 2017 in downtown Los Angeles.  I was driving home from Echo Park in the artsy Silverlake district after a leisurely stroll and photo session around the lake.  I was almost home when I was greeted by the sight of these nude bicycle riders down what I had long come to think of as the "back street" (although it was hardly that, since the road cut through the heart of downtown).  It may have been some kind of charity event, I don't really know, but anyway it was unusual enough that I pulled over and took a few precious shots for posterity before they passed out of sight.  The guy in the detail shot noticed me grinning and flashed a "V for victory" sign.  I held out a "thumbs up" in return.  Was all this against some misdemeanor regulation?  Of course not -- there was even a cop directing traffic to make sure the riders were safe.  I just wished there had been more women riders.

Young And Crazy

As I explained in the November 6th, 2011 post, I developed a serious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder as a child.  I believe it was triggered by the sudden anxiety I experienced when I woke up on New Year's Day morning and found that my parents had left me to go and visit my paternal grandmother in Daegu, which back then was several hours' ride away by train -- and of course, to a young child that might as well be on the other side of the world.  The feeling of panic that overwhelmed me was absolutely crushing;  my parents hadn't prepared me by informing me beforehand of their plans.  But to be fair to mom and dad, I guess they really can't be expected to have foreseen the severity of my reaction to their sudden absence from my life;  after all, by the age of ten the average boy probably would have faced it in a more pedestrian manner.  So.  Well.  Except, I wasn't average -- at that stage in my life I was a sickly, delicate child (I remember my father's MD friend coming over to diagnose me and give me a shot -- yes, doctors still made house calls back in those days), less emotionally developed than my peers and highly dependent.  I felt scared, vulnerable and abandoned.  If someone could have seen my aura at the peak of my pediatric trauma they might have seen something like this:

You know -- emergency-red inside, all het up and hopped up, and not in a good way, and the world outside all jumbly unthinkable darkness;  but still all locked in and unable to act out because of all the, well, all the societal rules and boundaries -- appearance and propriety still mattered, especially when you're a child and a "good boy" in Asia.  Anyway, that's kind of how the inner me felt at the time.

But of course, over the years I managed to grow out of all that by and by.  Albeit not completely (perhaps you can see traces of it in this very blog?);  I still feel moderate twinges of it and I just have to obey the sudden irrational impulses that are apt to overtake me at unpredictable moments every day.  I guess at those moments I might impress third party observers -- if any happened to be watching -- as "slightly eccentric" or something along those lines.

I suppose the above image could also do as a visualization of mental illness in general;  the family medical encyclopedia wherein I first found my symptoms described also stated that in extreme cases OCD can be virtually indistinguishable from schizophrenia.

Another Appeal

I came across an innocent-seeming photo of a cloud.  I got an inkling though, and so I turned it on its side, and something extraordinary happened.

Instantly, the cloud has become the very picture of grief, the victim of some grievous wrong, passionately making its case to Heaven and the world, informing all and sundry of the injustice done against it.  In this it somewhat resembles this tree in a previous post;  but whereas the image of the tree was comical, this one seems genuinely pained, like there's a great, transpersonal tragedy being appealed.  The tree was funny because it reminded me of a panicked chicken with that "coxcomb", whereas this cloud has that exaggerated, Chagall-esque mask for a face that I think would fit seamlessly on Shylock -- another very famously wronged character -- from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.

Marc Chagall, Self-Portrait (1960)

Where Heaven And Earth Touch

(What a jumping-off place this turned out to be)

The mythic title of the post was so grandiose, it actually made me think of archetypal dualities, as I also did in the previous post "Puffball And Shadow".  Like:  Father Sky and Mother Earth (instanced, for example, by the union of the god Zeus and the human Danae [leading to the birth of the hero Perseus]; the union of the Titan Helios and the nymph Clymene [resulting in the birth of the tragic antihero Phaethon]; even the angel Gabriel (acting as an agent of, or a kind of stand-in for, God the Father) and the human Mary in the Annunciation.  Some other dualities/polarities that deserve mention would be:  rain fertilizing the soil, the dragon who threatens the virginal princess and the knight-errant who slays him, the chaotic mutability of the air vs the fixity of ground structures, rational man vs the beastly savage (or should I say the beastly savage inside the rational man), the Sun and the Moon, and of course, man and woman.

Which just reminded me -- this is strictly a bonus -- that there is a parallel (ha, "parallelism" itself being a concept requiring two comparable elements feeding off each other -- but now I'm starting to sound a little obsessive) to be recognized in the foundation mythology of Korea.  It is said that HwanIn, the god-figure in heaven, sent his son HwanUng down to the earth to found a kingdom, and the place where HwanUng first made contact with the earth -- which may well be considered a figurative act of fertilization, reiterating the aforementioned archetypes of Father Sky and Mother Earth; this is even doubly confirmed when HwanUng enabled a she-bear, a crawling creature strictly of the earth, to be transformed into a woman -- likely symbolizing, in part, the transition from the womb of the collective unconscious to individuated ego in the evolution of the Self (a tiger also wanted to become human but he did not have the patience to complete the hundred-day ordeal involved and thus remained a beast;  surely this is the Shadow in "beastly" guise -- all the more so since the hundred-day ordeal took place literally in the darkness of a cave), took her for his wife and begat TanGun, the progenitor of the Korean race -- was the summit of TaeBaekSan ("Mt. TaeBaek") in North GyeongSang Province.  It is now a national park.

*WITH APOLOGIES TO C. G. JUNG

Waxing

 

Sunbird

Today as I wended my way up Insadong's main commercial strip toward the subway, I spotted this winged figure in the sky, silhouetted against the late afternoon sun.  How glorious!

Related post:  Dark Wings Over Seoul

Really Late Stragglers

From yesterday.  I was surprised and glad to see them.  I'd thought they would have been gone by now.

 

Polarizing Lenses

Maybe this is why I sometimes get dizzy when I put them on^.

The Secret Language Of The Earth (Pt. 19)

Funny, Then Sad

Or funny and sad, in two parts.  First, the funny (and cute) part:  I was just walking down an alley in an unfamiliar neighborhood, looking and photographing.  Then I came upon this building

with a pair of vent shafts behind a railing.  The pipes looked for all the world like a big brother and a little brother looking out a window, watching the world go by, perhaps pointing out interesting shapes in the clouds to each other.  Maybe this sounds a little odd, but they were "adorable" -- at least I found them so.

Now for the sad part.  While preparing those images to post them, I was reminded of something else, something truly heartrending.  Some time ago while cruising the internet I had come across these images of captive animals in a zoo, pining for the freedom that is rightfully theirs.  The murals of their former environs decorating their cells serve only to cruelly tantalize them -- they are "looking", but not "looking out".  I wonder if they know that they will never be free again.

Spur-Of-The-Moment

While visiting touristy BukChon, I happened upon this establishment with symbolic bird carvings out front.  While photographing one of them juxtaposed with the real thing in the background, I happened to see an aircraft forming a vapor trail far off (middle shot, center left).  And of course, I immediately realized the potential.

How Adorable Is This

Found this old shot of a hummingbird doing its level best to blend in with the tree buds around it.  Even if it's probably just an accidentally assumed pose, the fact the buds are nearly the same size as the little guy brought a smile to my face.  There are no hummingbirds in Korea, so coming across this image from the past was a genuine pleasure.

Fish Crossings

Why does God have fish swimming in the sky?

So they can get to the other side, silly!

But (failed)attempts at ironic humor aside, this sky-crosser looking really, really like a fossil ostracoderm(?) strongly reminded me of all those scary-looking armored ancient fishes.

Like this "Dunkleosteus":

Whereas this cloud could stand for any one of the short-bodied modern fishes, of which there are many.  Funny how as evolution proceeded over the eons organisms seem to have become less well-defended -- but maybe it means they've become more agile and better at evading predation.

Like this rather typical species, which turned out to have the atypical name of Tiger Oscar Fish:

*Dunkleosteus and Tiger Oscar Fish courtesy of the internet.

Errant Wasp

Errant Blue Rose

Errant Sea Horse

Errant Bunny,

Errant Teddy,

Errant Sparrow,

Errant Concrete Mixer,

Errant Kuromi,

And now...