Tuesday, February 3, 2009

World Hysteries

I misspelled the word "history" while taking notes late last night for my theory class. In my sleep-deprived haze I stared at it for awhile before figuring out what was wrong with it-- and then once I did, I thought about how all the permutations of this misspelling (history/hystery/mystery/mystory) are interesting. Forgive me, it was late, as it is now, and time to hit the sack. But I like how the word "hystery" omits the his and implies the mystery. I also like how the spelling of "mystory" combines the confusion of truth with that of personal narrative.

This picture seemed appropriately historical for this post(hystorical? hysterical?), a stereograph of frosted rocks in a cave. Colter taught me how to cross my eyes so that you can get the image to pop without the special lens. The geologic subject matter of this particular image made me think of a place my father took me to once when we lived in New Jersey. After a long sticky car ride we got to a parking lot and took a trail to a big field full of boulders which had been left piled on top of one another after a glacier gave up the ghost and melted into the ground. If you climbed up onto the top of the pile and hit a hammer against boulders that were suspended above the ground only by other rocks, they would ring and hum like great big bells (this being because they were mostly comprised of iron/steel). I remember being kind of scared of this rocky field full of ringing rocks. I wonder what this place would be like now, after having been processed by my whirring hystery-making machine of a brain for 20 years.

No comments: