At the Intersection of Fiction & Reality

I'm getting this out a little early because I'm heading to Minicon tomorrow.

I got together with a friend, Rebecca, for another Year of Adventure event: she spent a couple of pleasant hours teaching me some of the very basic principles of ikebana, or Japanese flower arrangement (she has been studying the practice for a number of years). I recognized some of what she explained to me about the principles of Japanese design from what I know about bonsai, and from some articles I'd read about Japanese fashion.

These arrangements are meant to evoke tranquility. They emphasize asymmetry, minimalism, and negative space. Rebecca demonstrated how to a build the structure using a kenzan (a spiky metal pin frog) to secure stems in a shallow bowl.

Traditionally, ikebana focuses on three elements: Shin (heaven - the tallest line), Soe (earth - the supporting line), and Hikae (human - the balancing line). The stems you choose for each are set at specific angles in the most formal style. We played around with free form. I had no idea what I was doing, of course, but it was fun and absorbing, and I was genuinely proud of my first effort.

Since Japanese ikebana emphasizes minimalism, this collage is very simple: a picture of my arrangement displayed on a table top. The only other element I added is the enso symbol in the upper right, a circle which may be closed (perfection) or open (the beauty of imperfection).

The enso is the symbol of the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi, which is about embracing the beauty found in imperfection, transience, and the natural cycle of growth and decay. Ikebana embodies this by celebrating the fleeting beauty of life.

Image description: An ikebana flower arrangement in a white vase with eucalyptus leaves, pussy willows, sea holly, and white tulips sits on a table. Upper right corner: an enso circle.

Ikebana



Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

I made three entire collages this week, and rejected the first two of them. I guess they were aesthetically fine, but they were about subjects I'd touched on before, and I was dissatisfied that I was saying anything new and didn't feel like rehashing everything.

My problem was partly that I didn't feel I had much to work with this week, because I fell ill partway through the week, and everything dissolved into that. At first, I was afraid I had contracted Covid, as some of the symptoms matched. Everything became a blur, and I was barely able to care for myself (Eric, bless him, did do an emergency grocery run for me). I did order Covid tests from the drugstore and had them delivered, but I kept testing negative.

After three days of blurred and surreal misery, I recovered. Eventually, I decided it was just a particularly virulent general bug with a heaping side of extremely gross gastrointestinal effects.

Okay, not very interesting to do yet another collage about being sick, either. But what particularly struck me about falling ill this time was how very helpless and isolated I felt. And that, more than the illness itself, is what I tried to capture in the images I used.

I experimented with technical effects to do this, extracting the figure on the bed and mixing it with an image of bare tree branches, and then overlaying the result back over the same position on the bed (keeping the bed itself in clear focus). I then used the same tree branches as a scrim overlay in the background. I was trying to capture the sense of dissolving, the fear that I might actually fade into nothingness and not be able to come back.

I did come back. This time.

I always have a lurking fear that I won't manage to do so the next time.

Image description: Foreground: a woman lies on a bed, either asleep or ill. The bed is focused but the woman is indistinct, as if run through by cracks. Background above the bed: the blurred image of a woman with closed eyes, overlaid by a scrim of semitransparent leafless branches.


Dissolving



Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.