partner, parent, artist, knitter, sailor, cyclist, sketcher, house painter, set designer, safety officer, itinerant equestrian, kite flyer, questions?
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Bats are good luck in China, a fact which startled and delighted me because they seem to be regarded with suspicion (or hunger) in most cultures around the world. Apparently the word for bat is close to the word for luck, thus fu bat.
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Very sketchy, but elegant – the eagle is one of the few psychopomps that isn't fundamentally mysterious.
I just realized I stitched the top wing backwards….
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The more I look at creatures that are considered psychopomps, the more I think it is just animals that people find mysterious for one reason or another. Take bees – their social structure is almost recognizable, but not really. Their use of flowers and construction skills are much the same. They were thought to be able to fly between worlds by some cultures.
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Hathor, one of the oldest goddesses in the ancient Egyptian pantheon, was called "the Goddess of the West" and believed to welcome the dead to the afterlife.
November was originally going to be all the presidents but I got so overloaded on politics, and so interested in skulls and Day of the Dead celebrations and the idea of psychopomps that I changed my mind I did think briefly about embroidering skulls over all the various presidential portraits, but that didn't seems correct. Or polite. Psychopomp is an ugly word for entities that guide the spirits of the dead to the afterlife. They are also ways the unconscious communicates with the conscious mind, and an aid to creativity. Depending on the culture, psychopomps range from gods and goddesses to animals and angels.
I like the idea of someone meeting me after I die, so they are kind of a compelling concept for me.
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In the late 1980s there was a man making wooden automata. I want to say Spooner, but I am not sure. He had a display of many og his automata in the cellar at Covent Garden, where I spent a happy hour pushing all the buttons and watching them move. Mr Spooner was very fond of Anubis, and showed him eating spagetti, sipping an espresso at a cafe, and bathing. Labels for each of the Anubis pieces carefully used his full name: Anubis, jackal headed god of the mummy wrappings. Which, for some reason, cracked me up.
A tiny amount of googling produced Paul Spooner. Iam grateful to my brain for remembering odd things.
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We have the world's most ambivalent printer. And it is black. It grinds its wheels, and clicks and whirs for what feels like minutes, and finally pulls in a sheet of paper, pushes it out and pulls it in again before it finally finally finally prints. We named it Hamlet. And of course it has needed a Yorick. So I finished today's circle and stuck it to Hamlet the printer.
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May you have judged the amount of candy you got perfectly, leaving you with a small treat and hordes of happy neighbors.
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While I did go out to get my teeth cleaned first thing this morning, before the weather really got here, I stayed home the rest of the day and accomplished things, including the crow above and another smallish chicken (sorry, you'll have to go look on Flickr for her).
Sandy let us off easy – a lot of wind, some rain, and probably high water when the rain catches up with the rivers. If you follow any news you know the coast got hammered. I think all that's left now is getting power in and water out of places where, at the moment, the reverse is true.
Lee Thomson 