046 - B is for Bad to be Human

046 - B is for Bad to be Human, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

During our visit to Poznan I finally realized why the shops we didn't want to enter used shop window dummies without legs, while we were much more inclined to use dummies with legs.

At first we just assumed the non-leggers wanted to sell to a clentele with aspirations, but why would aspirers prefer legless models?

Eventually it came clear that the legless represented a dehumnised aspiration, that aspiring to a class as opposed to be aspiring to be a kind of human. Weird idea? Not really, you won't have to go far to find people who value your life less than their status. OK, it is a simplifaction, what explanation isn't. Sadly, sitting in a local church yesterday, I was seriously lonely, the priests had achieved a congregation unable to enter into dialogue with others, we were a mere class of people, not human to the priests. Contrast that with a visit to another church where, as strangers, we were helped to a pew, given books to help us join in, and spoken to by the congregation and priest afterwards.

Education spends too much of its time teaching through naming classes and then assigning those classes values. This is an important thing to teach, but you also need to teach with as much vigour that these classes are simplifications for our understanding, that the class is not real, but what it attempts to classify is. This gives a duality of vision - the class in question, and the broadest, loosest class we can imagine. I might be described as being middle class, but I fit better the wider class of human or even a living being. You might be reading this on a computer screen, but it is part of a much wider class of information presentation objects, of the larger class of human constructed objects, of the much wider class of brief coming together of atoms that probably won't matter one way or another twenty trillion years - but does now.

many churches teach that sex is bad because somewhere in its history it was worried about holding society together in the face of irresponsibility, disease and other social ills. But because sex was perceived as a problem, it came to be seen as bad. And if sex is bad,l the body must be bad. And if the body is bad, Man as a species is bad. And if man is bad, why care about the individual?

I suspect God loves the good athiest better than the average church-goer, because God cares more about humans than a class called 'Church'.

029-Love is Living

029-Love is Living, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is a conjunction of some song comparing love as a fact to another fact of nine million bicycles in Beijing, with the table-culture of Poland - and elsewhere.

It's Easter, say, and the family come together and spend the whole day sitting around a table, eating non-stop throughout the day, ignoring the children in a huge adult-fest that at some point includes some discussion on why some family members currently sitting around a different table in someone else's house or flat are failing to bring up their children properly. You know the kind of thing. The problem I can see is that the children present are not being brought up particularly well either - they are bored, desperate for attention and not being encouraged to discover their own thing. They are being trained by boredom into eventually taking part in the same custom in the future.

Why won't they play with the children, why is it only I that can make paper aeroplanes, take them for walks, teach them how to step from sawn log to sawn log, or be invited to inspect theit toys or drawings.

Because I notice them. Because I respect them. Because I have not become a boring fart adult who desires only gossip, porking, look-what-I-own and aren't-I-hard-done-by.

Love is not saying 'i love you' or simply being there, you have to move and hold them, follow them, take them by the hand, and notice them when things are going wrong. I asked Ania when she last hugged her sister, and she couldn't remember, whereas I could.

Love survives in contact, and since we are always moving, contact is a changing action.

056: Raindrops

Raindrops, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Covered Faces

This is the view through my windscreen of our Citroen C1 on a rainy Saturday morning as Ania shops at the nearby market, with a view of a nearby housing block, trees and bushes and a blue car - and a partial view of me in the mirror, of course! I usually shop with her, only today we had a lot of things like laptops in the car, which we did not want to leave unattended. Shopping together is a very important social function, an opportunity to help each other in an environment which is neither the home nor work.

I applied a texture from the GIMP library, and this is the first texture that I have used. I expanded up a small one to the size of the screen to give a kind of raindrop texture.

045: My Love for Ania

My Love for Ania, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Catchlights

The sun is setting in the west as I look towards New York, where my wife has to stay for another week to teach a course.

She lets me become what I am, more than I ever was before. She listens to my dreams and my philosophy, letting me do what I have to do, even if that is quite different from the other people who surround us. I love her more than anything else in the world.

Catchlights are where you put reflected lights in the eyes to make them more noticeable, and here they look rather rectangular because they are reflections of the sky over the building opposite. In the same way, I processed the image so that the background has become fuzzy, putting more attention on my face rather than losing it among the kitchen units.