Mind Deck?
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudioAnother gorgeous day at 70F! It's still 60F out there right now as I write, and I have two windows open up here! It's like May in November, and there were still some bush crickets trilling out in back when I got home from work.
It's supposed to stay around 70F for the next nine days... and while that'll make for a very nice start to November... all the way to Veteran's Day... I'm gettin' a little tired of sweating at work, in the not-air-conditioned school building!
It's not as bad as it was in September, in there, but... ya know!... I was kinda hoping by NOVEMBER, it wasn't gonna be an issue anymore!
--<>--
After working with my headphones on the past, what?... five weeks?.. I decided to just spend today without them... free to let my thoughts wander.
I haven't been having remembering many dreams lately, and the few I have recalled, haven't been very interesting or vivid. And I think the reason why, is that I HAVEN'T been giving my brain any time to just coast, while I'm awake.
--<>--
The quest I've been on, recently, to build a model of the mind... finally lead me to an inspiration for a project.
Jill Bolte Taylor's, four brain model; two on the left, and two on the right, got me to thinking about playing card decks, with their four suits... two of red, and two of black.
And that got me to thinking about a very old, creative project I was working on waaaay back in 1992 and 1993!
--<>--
This was the year before I started recording crickets or working at the public library, when I was even newer to smoking weed!.. and going through an occult phase, after dating Laurie, my wiccan girlfriend.
It started with the idea to draw my own Tarot cards, but I got hung up on the fact that the the Major Arcana are numbered with Roman numerals... except for, The Fool, who is numbered, zero!
The Fool is the only one of the 22 trump cards in the Tarot that resembles The Joker, which is the ONLY trump card in the playing deck!
The Fool, was clearly lifted from the playing card deck... which also has the concept of zero in it's numbering!
And if you remove the fool, then there are only 21 Tarot trump cards... numbered with Roman numerals!.. and that tracks, because 21 is 3X7! And in old european mythologies, both three, and seven were considered magical!
The popular theory at the time (probably still is today) was that the Tarot came first, and later on, the playing cards evolved out of them, into a more simplified model... much as we assume Chess came first, and Checkers was just a simplification of Chess, by people who didn't appreciate it's complexity.
--<>--
But clearly, the FULL Tarot deck could NOT be more ancient than the playing card deck, because it features the concept of ZERO, in the Major Arcana, and uses Arabic numerals to number the spot cards, with the top spot being 10!
So I surmised that the original Tarot was just... those twenty-one trump cards, sans The Fool. No suit structure... nothing!
And my weird stoned research at the library lead me to believe that the playing card structure was actually ripped off from the MAYANS, who had little prayer book type thingy called, The Book of Days!
The Mayans, as you may know, DID have their own concept of ZERO, before anybody in Europe did (Europe never came up with their own zero, but nicked it from India).
The Mayans didn't have paper, but instead of using scrolls, like the ancient europeans, they created books by fan-folding long lengths of leaf or skin based proto paper, into pages. And they'd stick a block of wood on either end, to act as front & back covers.
So, you could page through a Book of Days, much as one might page through a more modern book.
--<>--
Now, as you also probably know, the Mayans had a very accurate CALENDAR! It was, in fact, MORE accurate than today's modern Gregorian calendar.
And the Book of Days was... like a little prayer book to use throughout the year! It kept track of the year, in some way, with alternating pages of red and black symbols.
I don't think any survived. I think they were just described by early Spanish monks who'd found them among the relics of the Aztecs, and puzzled over them, but didn't know how to read them.
--<>--
Okay!... so NOW take into account that a deck of playing cards can be used as a CALENDAR!
This is an obscure factoid that used to get some circulation when I was younger, but has fallen out of the zeitgeist in recent decades.
Still, it does hold true!
There are 52 cards in a playing deck, plus one Joker... and the year is exactly 52 weeks, plus one day!
Thus, if you flipped over a new card every week, starting on January 1st, and then, flipped over that joker for just one day before starting again... you'd have a perfectly accurate calendar!
All you'd have to remember to do was use the EXTRA JOKER, every fourth year, for one day, between February and March, and it would be as accurate as the current Gregorian calendar!
But it get's better, because the 52 cards are divided into four suits, of thirteen cards each!.. and that EXACTLY corresponds to our four astronomical seasons!
From Winter Solstice, to Spring Equinox is thirteen weeks. And from Spring Equinox to Summer Solstice is another thirteen weeks... and so on to the Fall Equinox, and back to the Winter Solstice again!
One suit for each season!
So, using a card deck as a calendar, you could forsee when winter would end... and when summer would start... and so forth! You could use it to reliably plant your crops... or plan your vacations!
Your birthday would always fall in the week of the same card, every year! If it fell within the Seven of Clubs week this year... it will always fall in the Seven of Clubs week!
And the same for every fixed holiday!
--<>--
NOW... card decks did not exist, anywhere on Earth until the invention of cardboard... and that's why we call it cardboard!.. which was first developed by the Chinese, and did not spread to Europe until the early 1400s.
The Chinese created the first decks of cards, but they weren't related to the Tarot or the playing cards in any way... they weren't even usually rectangular... they were octagonal or circular.
But by the 1440s, Europe surely had Chinese decks... and they had spoils of South American conquest... like the Book of Days, or at least a detailed description of what a Book of Days looked like... and they also had the printing press!
So my THEORY in 1992, was that the Tarot deck began in the mid 1440s as just the 21 Major Arcana... numbered with Roman numerals, because it came from some earlier european occult tradition of images on tiles, or scrolls, or something... that was based on the numerology of seven and three.
But meanwhile... some clever monk, perhaps just trying to gain a better understanding of this Book of Days mystery he'd read about... decided that if he could create card versions of the pages, then he'd be able to shuffle them around and sort them out some way that made sense.
And maybe he didn't even realize it was a calendar! Maybe all he knew was, there were four symbols... two red, two black... and thirteen pages of each...
But the numbering only went from 1 up to 10, and the final three pages bearing each red or black symbol, were not numbered... but only had faces of kings, queens, or famous warriors!
And then, there was one special page with a god on it, that bore no symbol or color and had special instructions nobody could decipher!
He decided to invite other monks to help him ponder this problem... with his unbound version of the Book of Days... each monk holding a few in their hands as they sat around a table... drinking a little wine.
A couple weeks later... they hadn't solved the mystery... but damn this deck was fun to play games with!
--<>--
As we know from the experience Dad & I had at Abbey Farm last month, Monks are devilishly adept at finding new ways to make money. And so the theory goes, that they began reproducing this novel deck, and selling them!
With the playing cards sweeping Europe, the Pagans started figuring out ways to use the playing deck for mystical cartromancy, like they were already doing with their 21 card Tarot decks.
Before long, they just retro-engineered the Tarot deck to subsume the playing deck!
They changed the suit symbols from Spades, Clubs, Hearts, and Diamonds, to the more Pagan branded, Swords, Wands, Cups, and Pentacles... added a fourth rank to the court cards, because, why not?... and took that weird Joker card and added him to the Major Arcana as The Fool, and numbered him zero.
------------{=0=}------------
Such was my theory back in 1992, and because of this, I decided not to draw my own Tarot deck, but instead, to create my own original divination card deck, based on the playing cards alone.
And I actually got flack from Laurie about that idea! She was like, You can't just invent your own Tarot and throw away the Major Arcana!
But I'd already owned an extremely cool, original divination deck, that was going around in the late 1980s, when I was a teenager... called Cartouche Cards!
--<>--
Cartouche Cards were the invention of some guy in the 80s, but based on Egyptian mythology.
They were very cool to look at, but it was kind of a small deck... no suit structure or anything. I think it was only 27 cards or something.
These days you can only find them on Ebay, and they go for between $700.00 and $1000.00 depending on their condition.
Of course, I was an idiot and lost mine, or probably threw them away, back when I was 19 or 20, so I no longer had them in 1992.
But I knew Laurie was wrong, and... why couldn't I invent my own deck, and give it whatever structure and meaning I wanted?
--<>--
I ended up doing it, and produced... five decks?
I made a rough draft deck... then redrew all the master line drawings better, and photocopied several copies of each.
I had backing cardboard that I had to color black with a marker, and on the backs I'd glue-stick a grey note card stamped with a hand made stamp symbol.
The line drawings were then meticulously colored in with colored pencil... cut out, and glue-stuck on the faces of the base cardboard... and then each card was laminated on the front and the back with big adesive plastic sheets, and the edges were trimmed off with a pen knife.
It was insanely hard work, and each of the four second-draft decks took me months to complete!
It never went anywhere. The internet didn't exist yet, and I was too poor and obscure to dream of publishing them. I "sold" three decks in exchange for weed! I kept the last one for myself... with the rough draft deck going to my old friend Laura... who probably still has it!
--<>--
I then went through a born again Christian phase, and threw away my only copy of my own Messenger Cards, because I decided they were, of the devil!
And then life moved on, and I went through other phases, and the whole matter was just forgotten like water under the bridge.
--<>--
In the decades that passed, I'd thought back to my Messenger Cards from time to time and pondered trying the project again.
But I'd forgotten most of the images I'd chosen to represent each spot card.
And the whole, Fire, Air, Earth, Water, for the suits, and the numerology for the numbers, and the Cardinal, Fixed, Mutable, for the Kings, Queens, and Jacks... to turn the twelve court cards into the twelve signs of the zodiac, as represented by twelve new animals....
It all just felt a bit too stupid to ever go back to!
It was a fun art project, but... I don't put stock in any of that garbage anymore!
------------{=0=}------------
But Bolte Taylor's model of the four brains?...
Two left, and two right, like two black and two red?..
And my Sex brain, Dream brain, and Observer brain... as Jacks, Queens, and Kings?...
Hrmmmmmm... that could be a good deck!
I'd have ten spot cards for each of the four main brains, to cover these other weird things that've popped up like Kahneman's, System Two!
Forget Club Theory, or Legacy Theory, or any other theory I might arrive at!... Why not just have fun and make a Mind Deck?
--<>--
In the old deck, it was just the suit of spades dedicated to the mental sphere, with the other three being physical, emotional, and spiritual.
But fuck that noise! It's all consciousness, right? It's all mental in the big picture!
So that's what I was thinking about at work today, as I moved through my routines, with nobody talking or singing in my ears.
--<>--
So, I think I'm gonna give this a shot!
It's gonna be a long winter, and I might be able to get a lot done with this!
I decided to change out the suit symbols for ones that are similar, but don't carry all the baggage that Spades, Hearts, Clubs, and Diamonds do.
Instead of Spades... Arrows. The dingbat kind of arrows you see on road signs and traffic lights. A modern, directional arrow... pointing up. And that will be Left Cortex.
Instead of Clubs, the other black suit... Teardrops. A single teardrop shaped dingbat in black. Rounded like the club is, but simpler. That will be Left Limbic... which is the worry wart, living in the past, remembering all the trauma, and very pessimistic about the future... the crybaby!
Instead of Hearts... Flowers. A simple, five petal flower dingbat with a circular hole in the center... in red! Rounded and happy looking like the heart symbol, but without all the valentine baggage. This will be the Right Limbic... the happy go lucky, always in the moment, seat of humor, and adventure.
Instead of Diamonds, Stars! Just that basic, five pointed star dingbat, in red. Everybody loves stars! This will be the Right Cortex... the center of advanced creative persuits, executions, and performances.
--<>--
As for Jacks, Queens and Kings... or J, K, and Q... I'm thinking of X, Z, and O.
X for Sex. Z for sleep. O for observer.
Instead of corresponding to Mutable, Fixed, and Cardinal... whatever that trichotomy was ever supposed to mean... they'll kinda correspond to the three classic states of matter... Gaseous, Liquid, and Solid.
X, or sex, is gaseous... because, pheramones or something? And I was thinking the figures should all be ghostly.
Z, or sleep, is liquid... because dreams are very liquid. And the figures should be... liquidy phantoms?
O, for Observer, is solid... because... the record is set in stone! It's frozen! And the figures should be... fossil like and skeletal?... to keep with the ghost and phantom dynamic?
I dunno, it's early days for the court cards.
--<>--
I debated about what the symbology should be for the spot cards like... depictions of objects, or scenes with people?
Being a mind deck, it would seem to demand people and faces.
But like... I don't want to create a racially biased deck, promoting a gender binary! This is supposed to be about the human mind!
My idea tonight is... what I liked about those old Cartouche Cards. Each one did depict a being... a person... but it was based on Egyptian mythology so, they were all these different gods, with animal heads.
I'm thinking of... mask like faces, and strange god like beings who look cool, but have no discernable race, gender, or coded stereotype.
I'm thinking about robot faces in metal, carved stone faces, wood faces, cloudlike visions of faces... or whole bodies if need be.
But abstracted, yet iconic looking characters, or groups of characters... to symbolize different states of mind and ways of thinking.
--<>--
Seems like a big task... one that could take years, working on and off with it, over winters or other slow periods.
But it also seems like a good excuse to get stoned... or to keep a dream journal and pull weird ideas out of that.
Something fun... and very long term... but something I may be able to get off the ground this winter!
°¦}
https://soundcloud.com/snoozefestaudio
It's supposed to stay around 70F for the next nine days... and while that'll make for a very nice start to November... all the way to Veteran's Day... I'm gettin' a little tired of sweating at work, in the not-air-conditioned school building!
It's not as bad as it was in September, in there, but... ya know!... I was kinda hoping by NOVEMBER, it wasn't gonna be an issue anymore!
After working with my headphones on the past, what?... five weeks?.. I decided to just spend today without them... free to let my thoughts wander.
I haven't been having remembering many dreams lately, and the few I have recalled, haven't been very interesting or vivid. And I think the reason why, is that I HAVEN'T been giving my brain any time to just coast, while I'm awake.
The quest I've been on, recently, to build a model of the mind... finally lead me to an inspiration for a project.
Jill Bolte Taylor's, four brain model; two on the left, and two on the right, got me to thinking about playing card decks, with their four suits... two of red, and two of black.
And that got me to thinking about a very old, creative project I was working on waaaay back in 1992 and 1993!
This was the year before I started recording crickets or working at the public library, when I was even newer to smoking weed!.. and going through an occult phase, after dating Laurie, my wiccan girlfriend.
It started with the idea to draw my own Tarot cards, but I got hung up on the fact that the the Major Arcana are numbered with Roman numerals... except for, The Fool, who is numbered, zero!
The Fool is the only one of the 22 trump cards in the Tarot that resembles The Joker, which is the ONLY trump card in the playing deck!
The Fool, was clearly lifted from the playing card deck... which also has the concept of zero in it's numbering!
And if you remove the fool, then there are only 21 Tarot trump cards... numbered with Roman numerals!.. and that tracks, because 21 is 3X7! And in old european mythologies, both three, and seven were considered magical!
The popular theory at the time (probably still is today) was that the Tarot came first, and later on, the playing cards evolved out of them, into a more simplified model... much as we assume Chess came first, and Checkers was just a simplification of Chess, by people who didn't appreciate it's complexity.
But clearly, the FULL Tarot deck could NOT be more ancient than the playing card deck, because it features the concept of ZERO, in the Major Arcana, and uses Arabic numerals to number the spot cards, with the top spot being 10!
So I surmised that the original Tarot was just... those twenty-one trump cards, sans The Fool. No suit structure... nothing!
And my weird stoned research at the library lead me to believe that the playing card structure was actually ripped off from the MAYANS, who had little prayer book type thingy called, The Book of Days!
The Mayans, as you may know, DID have their own concept of ZERO, before anybody in Europe did (Europe never came up with their own zero, but nicked it from India).
The Mayans didn't have paper, but instead of using scrolls, like the ancient europeans, they created books by fan-folding long lengths of leaf or skin based proto paper, into pages. And they'd stick a block of wood on either end, to act as front & back covers.
So, you could page through a Book of Days, much as one might page through a more modern book.
Now, as you also probably know, the Mayans had a very accurate CALENDAR! It was, in fact, MORE accurate than today's modern Gregorian calendar.
And the Book of Days was... like a little prayer book to use throughout the year! It kept track of the year, in some way, with alternating pages of red and black symbols.
I don't think any survived. I think they were just described by early Spanish monks who'd found them among the relics of the Aztecs, and puzzled over them, but didn't know how to read them.
Okay!... so NOW take into account that a deck of playing cards can be used as a CALENDAR!
This is an obscure factoid that used to get some circulation when I was younger, but has fallen out of the zeitgeist in recent decades.
Still, it does hold true!
There are 52 cards in a playing deck, plus one Joker... and the year is exactly 52 weeks, plus one day!
Thus, if you flipped over a new card every week, starting on January 1st, and then, flipped over that joker for just one day before starting again... you'd have a perfectly accurate calendar!
All you'd have to remember to do was use the EXTRA JOKER, every fourth year, for one day, between February and March, and it would be as accurate as the current Gregorian calendar!
But it get's better, because the 52 cards are divided into four suits, of thirteen cards each!.. and that EXACTLY corresponds to our four astronomical seasons!
From Winter Solstice, to Spring Equinox is thirteen weeks. And from Spring Equinox to Summer Solstice is another thirteen weeks... and so on to the Fall Equinox, and back to the Winter Solstice again!
One suit for each season!
So, using a card deck as a calendar, you could forsee when winter would end... and when summer would start... and so forth! You could use it to reliably plant your crops... or plan your vacations!
Your birthday would always fall in the week of the same card, every year! If it fell within the Seven of Clubs week this year... it will always fall in the Seven of Clubs week!
And the same for every fixed holiday!
NOW... card decks did not exist, anywhere on Earth until the invention of cardboard... and that's why we call it cardboard!.. which was first developed by the Chinese, and did not spread to Europe until the early 1400s.
The Chinese created the first decks of cards, but they weren't related to the Tarot or the playing cards in any way... they weren't even usually rectangular... they were octagonal or circular.
But by the 1440s, Europe surely had Chinese decks... and they had spoils of South American conquest... like the Book of Days, or at least a detailed description of what a Book of Days looked like... and they also had the printing press!
So my THEORY in 1992, was that the Tarot deck began in the mid 1440s as just the 21 Major Arcana... numbered with Roman numerals, because it came from some earlier european occult tradition of images on tiles, or scrolls, or something... that was based on the numerology of seven and three.
But meanwhile... some clever monk, perhaps just trying to gain a better understanding of this Book of Days mystery he'd read about... decided that if he could create card versions of the pages, then he'd be able to shuffle them around and sort them out some way that made sense.
And maybe he didn't even realize it was a calendar! Maybe all he knew was, there were four symbols... two red, two black... and thirteen pages of each...
But the numbering only went from 1 up to 10, and the final three pages bearing each red or black symbol, were not numbered... but only had faces of kings, queens, or famous warriors!
And then, there was one special page with a god on it, that bore no symbol or color and had special instructions nobody could decipher!
He decided to invite other monks to help him ponder this problem... with his unbound version of the Book of Days... each monk holding a few in their hands as they sat around a table... drinking a little wine.
A couple weeks later... they hadn't solved the mystery... but damn this deck was fun to play games with!
As we know from the experience Dad & I had at Abbey Farm last month, Monks are devilishly adept at finding new ways to make money. And so the theory goes, that they began reproducing this novel deck, and selling them!
With the playing cards sweeping Europe, the Pagans started figuring out ways to use the playing deck for mystical cartromancy, like they were already doing with their 21 card Tarot decks.
Before long, they just retro-engineered the Tarot deck to subsume the playing deck!
They changed the suit symbols from Spades, Clubs, Hearts, and Diamonds, to the more Pagan branded, Swords, Wands, Cups, and Pentacles... added a fourth rank to the court cards, because, why not?... and took that weird Joker card and added him to the Major Arcana as The Fool, and numbered him zero.
Such was my theory back in 1992, and because of this, I decided not to draw my own Tarot deck, but instead, to create my own original divination card deck, based on the playing cards alone.
And I actually got flack from Laurie about that idea! She was like, You can't just invent your own Tarot and throw away the Major Arcana!
But I'd already owned an extremely cool, original divination deck, that was going around in the late 1980s, when I was a teenager... called Cartouche Cards!
Cartouche Cards were the invention of some guy in the 80s, but based on Egyptian mythology.
They were very cool to look at, but it was kind of a small deck... no suit structure or anything. I think it was only 27 cards or something.
These days you can only find them on Ebay, and they go for between $700.00 and $1000.00 depending on their condition.
Of course, I was an idiot and lost mine, or probably threw them away, back when I was 19 or 20, so I no longer had them in 1992.
But I knew Laurie was wrong, and... why couldn't I invent my own deck, and give it whatever structure and meaning I wanted?
I ended up doing it, and produced... five decks?
I made a rough draft deck... then redrew all the master line drawings better, and photocopied several copies of each.
I had backing cardboard that I had to color black with a marker, and on the backs I'd glue-stick a grey note card stamped with a hand made stamp symbol.
The line drawings were then meticulously colored in with colored pencil... cut out, and glue-stuck on the faces of the base cardboard... and then each card was laminated on the front and the back with big adesive plastic sheets, and the edges were trimmed off with a pen knife.
It was insanely hard work, and each of the four second-draft decks took me months to complete!
It never went anywhere. The internet didn't exist yet, and I was too poor and obscure to dream of publishing them. I "sold" three decks in exchange for weed! I kept the last one for myself... with the rough draft deck going to my old friend Laura... who probably still has it!
I then went through a born again Christian phase, and threw away my only copy of my own Messenger Cards, because I decided they were, of the devil!
And then life moved on, and I went through other phases, and the whole matter was just forgotten like water under the bridge.
In the decades that passed, I'd thought back to my Messenger Cards from time to time and pondered trying the project again.
But I'd forgotten most of the images I'd chosen to represent each spot card.
And the whole, Fire, Air, Earth, Water, for the suits, and the numerology for the numbers, and the Cardinal, Fixed, Mutable, for the Kings, Queens, and Jacks... to turn the twelve court cards into the twelve signs of the zodiac, as represented by twelve new animals....
It all just felt a bit too stupid to ever go back to!
It was a fun art project, but... I don't put stock in any of that garbage anymore!
But Bolte Taylor's model of the four brains?...
Two left, and two right, like two black and two red?..
And my Sex brain, Dream brain, and Observer brain... as Jacks, Queens, and Kings?...
Hrmmmmmm... that could be a good deck!
I'd have ten spot cards for each of the four main brains, to cover these other weird things that've popped up like Kahneman's, System Two!
Forget Club Theory, or Legacy Theory, or any other theory I might arrive at!... Why not just have fun and make a Mind Deck?
In the old deck, it was just the suit of spades dedicated to the mental sphere, with the other three being physical, emotional, and spiritual.
But fuck that noise! It's all consciousness, right? It's all mental in the big picture!
So that's what I was thinking about at work today, as I moved through my routines, with nobody talking or singing in my ears.
So, I think I'm gonna give this a shot!
It's gonna be a long winter, and I might be able to get a lot done with this!
I decided to change out the suit symbols for ones that are similar, but don't carry all the baggage that Spades, Hearts, Clubs, and Diamonds do.
Instead of Spades... Arrows. The dingbat kind of arrows you see on road signs and traffic lights. A modern, directional arrow... pointing up. And that will be Left Cortex.
Instead of Clubs, the other black suit... Teardrops. A single teardrop shaped dingbat in black. Rounded like the club is, but simpler. That will be Left Limbic... which is the worry wart, living in the past, remembering all the trauma, and very pessimistic about the future... the crybaby!
Instead of Hearts... Flowers. A simple, five petal flower dingbat with a circular hole in the center... in red! Rounded and happy looking like the heart symbol, but without all the valentine baggage. This will be the Right Limbic... the happy go lucky, always in the moment, seat of humor, and adventure.
Instead of Diamonds, Stars! Just that basic, five pointed star dingbat, in red. Everybody loves stars! This will be the Right Cortex... the center of advanced creative persuits, executions, and performances.
As for Jacks, Queens and Kings... or J, K, and Q... I'm thinking of X, Z, and O.
X for Sex. Z for sleep. O for observer.
Instead of corresponding to Mutable, Fixed, and Cardinal... whatever that trichotomy was ever supposed to mean... they'll kinda correspond to the three classic states of matter... Gaseous, Liquid, and Solid.
X, or sex, is gaseous... because, pheramones or something? And I was thinking the figures should all be ghostly.
Z, or sleep, is liquid... because dreams are very liquid. And the figures should be... liquidy phantoms?
O, for Observer, is solid... because... the record is set in stone! It's frozen! And the figures should be... fossil like and skeletal?... to keep with the ghost and phantom dynamic?
I dunno, it's early days for the court cards.
I debated about what the symbology should be for the spot cards like... depictions of objects, or scenes with people?
Being a mind deck, it would seem to demand people and faces.
But like... I don't want to create a racially biased deck, promoting a gender binary! This is supposed to be about the human mind!
My idea tonight is... what I liked about those old Cartouche Cards. Each one did depict a being... a person... but it was based on Egyptian mythology so, they were all these different gods, with animal heads.
I'm thinking of... mask like faces, and strange god like beings who look cool, but have no discernable race, gender, or coded stereotype.
I'm thinking about robot faces in metal, carved stone faces, wood faces, cloudlike visions of faces... or whole bodies if need be.
But abstracted, yet iconic looking characters, or groups of characters... to symbolize different states of mind and ways of thinking.
Seems like a big task... one that could take years, working on and off with it, over winters or other slow periods.
But it also seems like a good excuse to get stoned... or to keep a dream journal and pull weird ideas out of that.
Something fun... and very long term... but something I may be able to get off the ground this winter!
°¦}
