Timothy Barr, Heirloom, 2010, Oil On Panel

I feel. So dumb.

THIS is where the Caribbean is.

For my WHOLE LIFE(admittedly not that long) up to this point, THIS is where I thought it was

Damnit

Nonlinear Systems

© gif by riverwindphotography, May 2022

Iceland by Ruslan Stepanov

Trying out this new thing called ‘line art’.

Jack-o'-lanterns have such a grab bag of lore, i love it

Fire, of course, has a long history of offering protection from evil forces. During the Celtic festival of Samhain (from which many Halloween traditions originate), the veil between worlds was considered thin, and ritual bonfires reminded the spooks to stay on their side of the lane.

Many a lantern has protected the lonely traveler on a dark moonless night. But lanterns can be dangerous too—especially the supernatural ones. in certain folklore 'jack-o'-lantern' was another name for will-o'-the-wisps, atmospheric ghost lights (or as legend has it, lost souls) that appear above bogs and lure unwise wanderers into sinkholes.

Then there's the 18th cent Irish folktale of Stingy Jack, a mischievous fellow who tricked the Devil twice, exacting a promise that hell would never claim his soul. So Jack goes on his cheerful way, and dies (as humans are prone to do), and ends up at the pearly gates. Now Heaven, it turns out, doesn't want a damn thing to do with him. So Jack jaunts on down and goes knocking on the gates of hell—only to have Satan slam the door in his face! How this leads to Stingy Jack being doomed to wander the earth carrying a hollowed out rutabaga lit by an ember of the flames of hell, I couldn't tell you. But that is how the story goes.

Whether the legend of Stingy Jack inspired or fueled or was created-by the gourd-carving practice, by the 19th cent, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh alike were annually carving jack-o'-lanterns out of turnips & rutabaga & beets & potatoes, and lighting them up to ward off Jack and other wandering spirits. Immigrants carried the tradition to North America, where pumpkins were indigenous and much easier to carve.

And so the modern Jack-o'-Lantern was born!

Not that gourd lanterns were anything new. Metalwork was expensive, after all, and gourds worked as-well-as and better-than-most crops when it came to carving a poor farmer's lantern.

As for carving human faces into vegetables, that supposedly goes back thousands of years in certain Celtic cultures. It may even have evolved from head veneration, or been used to represent the severed skulls of enemies defeated in battle. Or maybe not! Like many human traditions, jack-o'-lanterns evolved over multiple eras and cultures and regions, in some ways we can trace and others we can only guess at. But at the end of the day, it makes a damn good story, and a spooky way to celebrate—which is as good a reason as any (and a better reason than most!) to keep a tradition going.

In conclusion: happy spooky season, and remind me to tell yall about plastered human skulls one of these days 🎃

srcs 1, 2, 3

Authority (2019) - Eliran Kantor

in addition to the fact that people just have different natural rhythms, a big reason why we can’t seem to go to bed as early as we “should” is that nighttime is, for many of us, our safest and most fulfilling time of day. we don’t have to work, we won’t be contacted by bosses or insurance companies or collections agencies or other suffocating life business… we’re likely only to be contacted by our friends, or by no one at all. night time is release; it’s ours. we can rest or recreate. we can do things we actually want to do. who would choose to cut that short?? just to usher in the next morning when our lives are not our own again? nighttime is precious and nothing could be more normal than the desire to embrace this

Guarda e Scopri Gli Animali della Preistoria

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