Will Turner: This is either madness... or brilliance.
Jack Sparrow: It's remarkable how often those two traits coincide.
It includes a short essay by Jonathan Safran Foer, describing his discovery of Salomon’s work in Amsterdam. He writes that “even more than praise, Life? or Theater? demands creation”:
Beautiful things are contagious, and no work of art has inspired me to strive to make art more than Life? or Theater? has. No work is better at reminding me what is worth striving for. The images I’ve selected for this exhibition [for the catalogue] are those I find myself most often returning to when nothing feels worth writing. They do not make sense as a thematic or stylistic group. They are simply my antidotes to indifference. [h/t...Charlotte Salomon’s “antidotes to indifference” at Book Haven...]
Theologians need to meditate on God's inexplicable habit of wading into the river with us sinners. Clothing Adam and Eve…
In the Margins
Tresspass: [Masxur]: Jake Beecher is described as loving the margin between land and sea; in other ways, too, he is an extremely marginal character. What is it that you find interesting about the margins?
Oh, that’s where all the interesting folk are. The ones who aren’t easily categorized, so that in their unfamiliarity you really have to look at them, to pay attention. Then, too, for those who exist at the margins, boundaries make up a large part of what they see; trespass is a necessity of life for them, always possible, inviting, imminent" [h/t: (I think) to Reading Life]
The Spice of Life
In chemistry the only action is ‘in the margins.’ Take table salt. On one side of the storage room hidden immersed in heavy oil is the very touchy soft metal, sodium. It does not get along well with others at all in the open air. On the other side hidden in pressurized tanks is the colic, swampy green and gaseous chlorine, which is extremely caustic and explosive. In order for them to meet without contamination a very defined, orchestrated closed crucible has to be constructed. The extreme energy released at their meeting requires that everything in their environment must be protected. As a chemist I have carefully braved introducing these two to each other. At issue between them below the fringe of the nano-scale is one single electron. When these two met there were definite fireworks, explosions and neither survived intact. The clean up job of what was left of the crucible is horrendous. It was apparent that sodium and chlorine were totally transformed by the extremely energetic antics of that one electron: into the tame table salt. To salve their bruised egos, however, table salt retains just enough ‘spice’ to light up our French fries, veggies and fried chicken.
I truly believed my tryst with the fringes and marginalia was over! Not! But where could I possibly travel after the trek above the jet streams and storms of the high mountain pass?
But then I remembered: “You always have to push the limits!” However that is the call on my life for better or for worse.
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