fanciful devices: The Names

A Stone Is Nobody's

A man ambushed a stone. Caught it.
Made it a prisoner.
Put it in a dark room and stood guard over it for the rest of his life.

His mother asked why.

He said, because it's held captive, because it is captured.

Look, the stone is asleep, she said, it does not know whether it's in a garden or not. Eternity and the stone
are mother and daughter; it is you who are getting old. The stone is only sleeping.

But I caught it, mother, it is mine by conquest, he said.

A stone is nobody's, not even its own. It is you who are conquered; you are minding the prisoner, which is yourself,
because you are afraid to go out, she said.

Yes yes, I am afraid, because you have never loved me, he said.

Which is true, because you have always been to me as the stone is to you, she said.

Russell Edson

FAQs

1. Are you a Southeast Asian dancing girl from the 1800s?

No, sorry to disappoint. My avatar and banner images are from an ancient book I found in the depths of my grandmother's cabinets. More on that here.

2. How do you make everything look so old?

First, you need a good oxidizer to brush on every bit of metal you can reach. I'll tell you all about it here.

Then there's this wax. I first mentioned it here. You'll have to scroll down a lot.

3. How can you be so productive?

I'm insanely obsessed and I have no offspring. I do nothing else- I don't have a day job, I don't clean my house or cook, I spend all day in pjs, often completely abandoning personal hygiene... I only interact with other humans when I walk my dog. And I like people! But I prefer dogs.

And I'm sloppy- but I make that sloppiness work for me.

4. Any tips you'd like to share?

No! Except for these 16 posts about techniques and this one about how to find your aesthetic.

5. Would you be offended if I took some inspiration from your designs?

Well, I'd be happier if you outright copied them.

No really, imitation is how we learn. I have enough ideas to go around. And even if I don't- please. No one's going to do this obsessively enough to threaten my business. (Probably.) I learned by copying others and I've seen others copy me as a step toward developing their own voice. So feel free. (I'd love if you tossed me a link in my comments, so I can feel like a proud momma.)

6. What do you look like?

Why, what have you heard? Really? Wow.

4/20/10

The Names

I had a lot of trouble coming up with a name and description for this new necklace.

See, I found an old etching that had the beautifully evocative name of "Building the Temple of Warka in the Time of Urukh."

So I looked it up. I found an old book, tried pull out only the most interesting parts, but it got stranger and more complicated the more I read. Trying for a simple paragraph I ended up w/this disjointed mess:

"Uruk was an ancient city of Sumer and later Babylonia, now Iraq.Uruk is eponymous of the Uruk period, the protohistoric Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age period in the history of Mesopotamia spanning ca. 4000 to 3100 BC. One of its earliest known rulers lived after a great flood had destroyed the land and much of its cultures. Said to be a descendant of Hisuthrus, known in the bible as Noah, the first post-flood king is Bel-Nimrod, the great hunter. "

It was too all-over-the-place and finally I had to give it up for something simpler. Nimrod, however, turns out to have been a descendant of the figure in Arab history on which the story of Noah is based. And Iraq seems to have been a great, cosmopolitan state since pre-historic times. Wow.