Another thing about staring at the baby

It never gets boring, because her face changes every second. I mean, changes to the point where it becomes difficult to understand how the process of recognition works. It’s not that she just has different facial expressions; she has different faces. She’s like ten thousand different people, flickering by from moment to moment, that my mind can somehow put together in one.

I imagine that this is probably true of anybody at any age, but of course I don’t usually get to give most people the same degree of concentrated attention.

Baby person

In Medieval Byzantine iconic images of the Mother of God, the Christ child is usually depicted in a way that he looks to me like a kind of miniature adult. That is, although he is shown as tiny compared to Mary, his facial features and overall proportion are typically those of an adult, rather than an infant. I can guess at, but don’t really claim to understand, the theological or didactic significance of this mannerism—but its effect on me has always been to make these images seem creepy, offputting, and surreal.

Now that I have an infant child of my own, however, and have spent some time holding her, I can perceive that there’s a sense in which these images can be viewed as plainly naturalistic. From time to time, when I’m looking at Lucy’s face, all the obvious babyishness of it seems to melt away for a moment and I’m just—I don’t quite know how to put it—just looking at someone, at this complete human being that I know. I don’t picture some imagined adult version of her face at these moments; her appearance is still basically the same, but my sense of the significance of that appearance somehow shifts away from sentimental notions of infantile adorableness (and I think my notion of babyhood includes an “unfinished” quality) to a more clear-sighted and regular human love, in which Lucy appears perfect and complete already, rather than a being in potential.

I don’t know that I’ve described the experience very well, but anyway it helps those icons make a lot more sense to me.

Personal aesthetic revision

One unexpected side effect of having a kid in the NICU: due to exposure to certain alarms the appeal of repetitive electronic beeping noises has declined dramatically in my mind, heart, and tastes. I remain accutely interested - probably more than ever - in sounds hypnotic, droning, and rhythmic, but they really have to be defined by something other than sine waves tied to a machine pulse.

This, as much as the lack of time and energy, has a lot to do with why the mtrnmc project has been on hold lately. I just need to come up with something different, a sound that hasn’t emerged yet. I’m thinking that Colleen has the right idea, but I’m still working out what I can do that would be inspired by that, without being purely derivative. We’ll see I guess.

Did I miss a memo?

Um, who decided that this is the year everyone in the USA has to pretend to be interested in the World Cup?

Seriously, I don’t remember ever seeing nearly as much USA media coverage of Cup games as we’re getting this year, and I’ve noticed more people mentioning it in casual conversation as well. When did this start, and where did it come from?

Deleuze and Guattari go to war

In “The Art of War”, architect Eyal Weizman interviews Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi and other Israeli military strategists on the influence of post-structualism on contemporary military theory:

If, as some writers claim, the space for criticality has withered away in late 20th-century capitalist culture, it seems now to have found a place to flourish in the military.

Scary.

Best. Flickr pool. Ever.

The secret art of graffiti removal (via dataisnature)