Austin Kleon

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Retina scans and cosmic eggs

Retina scan vs. chicken embryo / Retina scan vs. the planet Venus

I was at the eye doctor last week and I found myself captivated, as I often am, by my retina scan. (I forgot to ask if I could get a copy)

These images reminded me of Stephen Ellcock’s The Cosmic Dance, and what he wrote of “the cosmic egg”:

THE COSMIC EGG, or world egg, features in the creation stories of many Indo-European cultures. The idea first appeared in Sanskrit scriptures, where it is known as Brahmanda, a conflation of “creator god” and “egg.” In this very, the universe hatches from the egg, breaking into two to form the heavens and the Earth. In Chinese mythology, the universe and the deity Panga both form within a cosmic egg, which Pangu breaks open, separating yin from yang and creating the heavens and the Earth. In the ancient Greek Orphic tradition, the hermaphroditic deity Phones hatches out of the egg and immediately creates other gods.

Above: a collection of cosmic eggs, most collected in The Cosmic Dance. 

Top row: Hildegard von Bingen, 1165; woodcut illustration from 1657; Hilma af Klint, early 1900s

Bottom row: Shaligram painted by Badrinath Pandit, c 1960; Cosmic Eggs, painted in Northern India, 20th century

“The world keeps showing me these pictures.”

Lawrence Weschler’s Taxonomy of Convergences


Here is a map in my diary of Lawrence Weschler’s “Taxonomy of Convergences” that the writer has been working out in the past five issues of his Substack.

His idea of “convergences” — when something resembles something else, or makes you go, “that reminds me of…” and you make “free associative linkages” — has been a big influence on me. (See my blog tag: “Convergences.”)

Here is an example of a convergence from Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences: 

late Rothko vs. the moon landing

In this recent taxonomy, Weschler proposes a spectrum of things that resemble one another, ranging from an imagined but not real connection (“apophenia”) to a connection that is being deliberately concealed (plagiarism).

The only trouble is that these marvelous pieces have been sort of buried in his numbered Substack issues, so I’m hoping by sharing these images from my diary and direct links to the pieces, maybe it’ll make you want to click through. It’s a lot to sift through, but it rewards the sifter.

First up is an introduction to the concept of “convergences.”

Second is Apophenia, Chance/Accident, and Affinity, or “inchoate projections, vague coincidences and misty affinities” in which there is no real underlying connection other than the one we make.

The third installment is “Co-Causation,” or “that part of the widening spectrum where if things happen to look alike, it’s because they’re likely to be drawing on the same sorts of sources.”

The fourth installment covers “Direct Influence” and “Invocation,” or, “the kind of things that happen as one artist or thinker or group of such artists or thinkers impacts upon another—both forward and backward, and consciously and unconsciously.”

The fifth installment covers Allusion, Quotation, Appropriation, Cryptomnesia, and Plagiarism. (My favorite of the batch.) Weschler ends at a point on the spectrum in which things resemble each other for a reason, but the reason is being hidden from us.

I suspect that some of us are wired to see these convergences more than others. But I also think this way of seeing is very infectious. (I call it “the world keeps showing me these pictures.”)

Pansy precursors

A reader sent me this amazing find: a special “Poet’s Number” of Vick’s Floral Guide from 1893, which not only contains quotations from famous writers about flowers and gardening, but also this family of “Pansy Sailors” which show up throughout the pages. Certainly, they are ancestors of my Pansy Luchadores!

I can’t find any real explanation for them or any evidence that they were used in other Vick’s guides.

Here’s a little bit about James Vick and his illustrated floral guides:

Vick’s Floral Guide and Catalog, first produced in 1862, proved to be the perfect outlet for his expertise as a printer, writer, publisher and gardener. Filled with charming wood-cut engravings and vivid color plates (by some accounts, Vick was the first to use color illustrations in a U.S. seed catalog), the Floral Guide quickly became the most popular seed catalog of its day. “Vicks Floral Guide came like the first breath of spring, with promise of future bloom,” raves a typical magazine review. “Vicks catalog, like his seeds and plants, is first class.  It is finely illustrated, on good paper, and with two beautiful colored plates.”

This particular illustration is mentioned in A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-siècle Art: 

Inverts were also called, from at least the 1880s on, “pansies,” “buttercups,” “daisies,” “violets,” “blossoms,” and even more generally, “horticultural lads.” A Vick’s Seeds advertisement from the 1890s conflates the already queer figures of the pansy and the sailor into a suggestive hybrid. The back cover of a seed catalogue, the image depicts two flowery sailors, overseen by their captain, raising anchor. The anchor’s chain for the moment imprisons the blooming asters, but when the “sailor lads so bold and free / Put out again,” the poem at the bottom right assures us, dissemination will occur.

“A pansy is a loaded subject,” wrote John Ashbery in a 1997 retrospective of Joe Brainard’s work, then pointed out the “seed-packet look” of Brainard’s paintings and collages of pansies.

Compare those pieces to this:

“The world keeps showing me these pictures.”

Comp book double take

I did a double take yesterday when I came across these images of the student notebooks of 16-year-old Oliver Sacks. (See more of his notebooks from later in his life.) They reminded me so much of one of Lynda Barry’s composition book pages, like, for example, this one she posted yesterday:

It’s Lynda herself who’s primed my eye for these kind of connections. She’s taught me over the years what thinking on the page looks like, when the thought is making the line and the line is making the thought…

My eye was also primed by their shared fondness for cephalopods. (The squid on the right hangs in our bathroom — I look into its eyes every time I take a pee!)

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