And here is a photo I took today (July 11) of a decoration on the exterior wall of a vegetarian restaurant.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Popular posts
-
Following up on the idea that the pecked are no longer alone in their bodies , reader Ben Pratt has brought to my attention these remarks by... -
But Men shall remember Atlantis's name Come hell or high water! Sith both of them came, It rests unforgotten, and what we now tell Skill...
-
Mark your calendars, and in the meantime find something else to read. Note added: For those who have asked, nothing is wrong, and my decisi... -
In a comment on " Ascending to the black star ," Bill brought up a game called The Blue Prince , and so on a random whim I searche... -
It's been a while since I clicked for a randomly selected /x/ thread . I tried it today just in the spirit of "Is this thing on?... -
My mention of a "Buddhist text" in my last post was probably misleading, making it sound like I was poring over Mahayana scriptur... -
Back on August 17, Bruce Charlton posted an episode from the old children's TV show Pipkins (which I had never heard of), in which Hart...
-
Google is being weird again. Update: I published this post at 10:59 a.m. Exactly 47 minutes later, at 11:46, I photographed this logo, whic... -
As I have mentioned before, I regularly have to create cloze tests for which write a brief article using a dozen or so of the vocabulary ite...
-
I had had a meeting scheduled for this afternoon, but the client called to ask if we could reschedule it to 7/22. Minutes later, I was readi...
2 comments:
The container that houses the owl (in the photo William took) would appear to be a flowerpot; beside the owl, you can see what might be soil, or more probably a birds' nest. The owl itself seems to be a flowerpot; peering inside its open head, one can see what look like sprouts of grass. The container is affixed to the cement wall behind by a screw; there's a crack in the wall that may have been caused by driving the screw into it. Can't help but think this echoes the recent "bone screws that get loose." Bone is the stony component of a human being, and thus can be analogized to the cement wall. Not only the wall, but the container itself , as well as the owl, are stony.
On the outside of the container is a word: "buule." I put it through google-translate on my phone--it came back Somali for "hut." Then I just googled it and got a variety of answers, but a couple were instances of "buule" as a Somali surname. That made me think that the idea of "buule as Somali" wasn't all that far off. Finally, on my laptop, I tried google-translate again--this time, it replied, Somali for "nest." I put "buule" into the gematria calculator; according to that site's transliteration, buule's Hebrew-derived number was 427. (I tried 427 in the blog's search box and got no hits.) The list of words that also had the numerical sum, in Hebrew letters, of 427 included "cherubims" (In "Phillip as a Christmas reindeer in polyvalent perspective", William references "a double-plural in the spirit of the KJV's cherubims") and "unsong."
What role does the owl play in the detail William supplies from Bosch's "Conjuror?" In the (fictional) setting of the picture--"inside" the world of the painting, so to speak--it's possible to imagine the owl serving one or another concrete purpose. We aren't, however, inside the world of the image, we have rather "the view from outside." For us, it would seem, the owl serves principally as an emblem. Owls traditionally figurate wisdom; wisdom has several senses, one of which is cunning. I suppose it thus reinforces the idea of the depicted conjuror as a scammer. Reflective of a higher wisdom than mere cunning--call it "prudence," if you will--surely the painter doesn't deplore his conjuror in the least.
Wade, please! It's "earthen dwelling."
Post a Comment