A Work Progressing

Pondering a Public Post

Facebook, Twitter (X), TikTok—all allow and encourage public posts. Early online spaces required joining groups; there was usually some sort of vetting. Public posting changed the game.

I’m thinking there are a number of reasons someone might make a “public” post.

1. Bearing witness

Marking something that matters—an event, injustice, joy, or grief. Posting makes it public, a way of saying: this happened, and I saw it. In historic terms, it might be called a primary source.

2. Connection

To keep ties alive with society. A post can be shorthand for: I’m still here, and while society is large, I’m still a voice.

3. Legacy

To create a record. Whether you intend it or not, posts become part of the breadcrumb trail of your life. Some people post to leave markers their kids, grandkids, or even their future selves might stumble back upon.

4. Influence

To shape how others think or feel—persuasion, inspiration, provocation. Even if the impact is small, posting carries the implicit hope that words ripple outward. You may become an “influencer.”

5. Relief

To get something off your chest. Sometimes the act of posting is less about who reads it and more about putting it down, outside of yourself, letting it live in your words.

Obviously there could be other reasons, but this is a good start. I don’t have problems with the reasons—only with how it’s done.

With witness, there’s often little effort to check personal bias. It can come off not only as truth, but as absolute truth.

With connection, the assumption is that being a member has more merit than being an observer. Sometimes true, often just club bias.

With legacy, the word is misapplied. Legacy is your story told by someone else. Posting a picture of petting puppies doesn’t make you an animal lover. If no other record exists, maybe it stands—but it’s a thin legacy.

Influence is worth dwelling on. Why influence? Most often, because it has been monetized—through products, clicks, or both. That’s why “tricks of the trade” surface: absolutes like always, never, all, none, everything, nothing.

To influence is to persuade, and all is fair. One goal is to convince the reader the writer is wiser, smarter, closer to truth. Sometimes it’s linked to a profession—pastor, politician, teacher, author. Sometimes it comes with degrees or awards from somewhere distant.

The one that grates on me most: stacking dozens of quotes from famous people. Often they are long dead and cannot speak to a current reality. The assumption is that the “influencer” has read deeply. More likely they’ve searched and sprinkled, to create the impression: I am well read, so listen to me.

Copy the whole article, delete the tricks, the noise, the quotes—and see what the writer is really saying.

And finally, there’s the best reason of all: relief. Real relief. To get something out of your head and onto paper—or screen. And that’s why this one goes public.

The polarization of American politics has caught my eye for several years. I’m old enough to remember a time of great debates between sides, yet maintaining social connections and occasional eating together. There were some people during the 1960s that thought this was an example of selling out. You couldn’t be against the war in Vietnam, and then break bread with administration. It made sense to me, because I had a low draft number and I was just waiting to be cannon fodder.

There was actual violence from the left, bombs were deployed, rioting in the streets, and bricks thrown at police. The major left politicians soon distanced themselves from the violence, and this enraged the protestors even more.

Time moves on, the protestors got older, the war was ended.

The political pendulum swung to the right, each side developed language buzzwords to feed their base. The political right spoke of border invasion, administrative corruption, stolen elections, and fake news.

The political left spoke of racism, fascism, Nazis, the end of democracy, and tyrants. Obviously both sides found the words used as offensive. Most people had a hard time seeing any difference, and felt more helpless trying to keep balanced.

As an experiment I asked several Ai engines to use their databases to find which political side that is more likely to promote violence. The response was a little unusual, there were lots of examples from the data, but the following was summary…

So, based on the current language environment, the right sits closer to blatant violence, because the permission slips are not just tolerated but in some cases institutionalized.

The “permission slips” were the buzzwords that were used to bolster their bases.

But something was unusual, in the provided historic examples, there was never a mention of fascism, racism, or Nazis. I had certainly read of their use, and heard it many times on newsclips from many different news organizations. But Ai didn’t mention it at all, instead, pointed out the possibility of institutionalizing their permission slips as the greatest threat of blatant violence. I would have to agree that this was troubling, but it seemed to me it was out of balance. The silence of language concerned me.

I asked Ai if there was a reason that these verbal “permission slips” were not used in the summary that Ai provided. The response was that Ai has guardrails and limitations at the basic programming level, it cannot read or discuss words like Nazi, racist, or fascism.

So when it tried to compare the left language to the right language it eliminated anything that was too harsh. The left’s language ended up being much more acceptable.

The curious thing is that the harsh words that Ai couldn’t use, all lead to a labeling of “evil” that must be eliminated. Very unbalanced rhetoric.

In summary, Ai can’t be used to assess reality, if reality uses bad words.

The phrase Convivial Digital Images is deliberate. It sets these works apart from the frictionless churn of “AI art” and from the dismissive category of “filter effects.” The digital is present, but not as a gimmick. It is treated as a tool—pliable, fallible, resistant—no different in spirit than brushes, chisels, or photographic lenses.

To call the images convivial recalls Ivan Illich’s idea of convivial tools: technologies that serve the maker, rather than consume them. These pieces are not surrendered to the software. They are bent, interrupted, and corrected. Where a filter produces excess smoothness, the hand reintroduces drag. Where an algorithm offers perfection, the artist leans toward ambiguity. In this way, each image resists disposability.

The process is iterative. A photograph or generated surface may be the seed, but what follows is labor: re-seeing, overlaying, cropping, adjusting until the image carries its own weight. The discipline is not to make the picture “better,” but to make it different—to let it bear edges, silences, and tensions that a frictionless digital product cannot hold.

The result is not an illustration of software capability, nor an illustration of a subject, but an artifact of encounter. The images carry both presence and refusal. They draw the eye in with color or gesture, then interrupt it with drag—an unfinished fold, a shadow that resists clarity, a streak that refuses harmony.

In this sense, Convivial Digital Images belong to a longer tradition. They are not outside painting, photography, or collage, but in conversation with them. The digital here is not a replacement for craft; it is a medium of encounter, a place where presence can be tested. What matters is not the novelty of the tool, but the restraint and choices of the one who shapes it.

To name them as convivial is to stake ground: that digital work, too, can carry weight, ambiguity, and witness—so long as it is not surrendered to ease

Johannes Gumpp — Triple Self-Portrait (1646)

In the Vasari Corridor at the Uffizi hangs what may be Johannes Gumpp’s only painting. At twenty years old, he shows himself from behind, staring into a mirror, painting what he sees. One man, three selves: back, reflection, and canvas.

The mirror face and the painted face don’t quite match. The nose shifts, the mouth changes. Even with mirrors, the self slips. Gumpp seems to admit you can’t ever get it exact—what you are, what you see, what you make. The most complicated painting I know.

I miss what I haven’t met, all the time.

https://youtu.be/YvuT0sF4_LY?feature=shared

Knowledge can nourish like bread—substantial, necessary, filling. You learn where the letter G came from, who invented it, why Z was exiled, and suddenly the alphabet feels alive again, a meal worth chewing.

But then there’s the other side. ‘Knowledge that turns to garnish. Sitting outside Quesnos, sandwich in hand, I wonder which side I’m on. Is this a meal, or an aside? Do I carry history into the bite, or do I watch it wilt like a pickle slice on the edge of the plate? I’m sitting under the logo Q, the Phoenician sign for “monkey-but”, eating something first made by Montague, the Earl of Sandwich.

The test, maybe, is simple: when knowledge changes how I see, it feeds me. When it only changes how I sound, it decorates.

The alphabet looks settled, a neat procession from A to Z. But that order hides centuries of invention, exile, improvisation, and craft. Each letter carries its own survival story. Some are dramatic, some subtle, but together they form a lineage far less tidy than the row of symbols suggests.

Take G, for example—the only letter we can pin to a single person and a single moment. In 250 B.C., Spurius Carvilius Ruga created it, replacing Z in the seventh position and shoving that older letter to the end of the line. Rarely do we see invention so clearly stamped into the alphabet.

M began as the Egyptian pictograph for water, and for centuries its wave shape flowed easily. Yet in the medieval period it nearly vanished altogether. Scribes often replaced the full letter with a simple line over the previous character. The letter we use to measure type—the “em”—was once on the verge of erasure.

R has always carried weight. From its Phoenician root resh, meaning “head,” you can still see the outline of a profile if you flip the letter. But R is also the most difficult letter for designers to draw. Its tail must join the bowl before the bowl completes its connection to the stem, a delicate sequence that makes or breaks its stability. It is both symbol of leadership and typographic headache.

Some letters don’t stand alone but instead blur into families. U, V, W, and Y all trace back to the Phoenician waw. The Romans blurred U and V into one form, leaving context to determine pronunciation. Anglo-Saxons doubled the V to create W, while English scribes leaned on Y when I risked disappearing in the shadows of m, n, or u. What looks settled now was once a tangle of improvisations.

And then there is Z. In Phoenician it was zayin, a dagger. The Romans dropped it, then grudgingly restored it for Greek loanwords. Because it had no place in their native tongue, they exiled it to the end of the alphabet. A weapon turned afterthought—always present, never central.

Other letters have quieter stories. N, for instance, does not dazzle with drama, but its width defines the “en space.” Every block of text breathes at the measure of N, though few readers ever know it.

T once stood as the mark of the illiterate. Those who could not write their names would scratch a simple cross, a taw, in place of a signature. That same letter later became a symbol of beginnings and endings, the last of the Hebrew alphabet and paired with alpha in the Christian promise: “I am the Alpha and the Omega.”

S was a sword in Egypt, barbed wire in Phoenicia, and finally a curve of elegance in Rome. For typographers it is both torment and joy—the most admired, the most abused. Slightly off balance, it looks clumsy. Drawn well, it may be the most beautiful letter in the set.

Y is the outsider, never quite at home. Imported from the Greek upsilon, it had no true Latin sound. Later, scribes used it as a workaround for I, when clarity demanded a taller stroke. It has always been provisional, improvising its way into permanence.

And finally Q, born from the Phoenician qoph, meaning monkey. Its tail, once imagined as the curve of a dangling limb, became the typographic flourish by which entire typefaces are recognized. No other letter so quietly declares the hand of its designer.

Together these ten letters—G, M, R, U/V/W/Y, Z, N, T, S, Y, and Q—show that the alphabet is not a frozen system but a living record of conflict, compromise, and craft. Some letters bear the scars of exile, others the pride of invention. Some whisper their influence in spacing and proportion, others announce themselves in bold tails and curves. We inherit them as if they were inevitable, but they are anything but.

About twenty years ago, I decided to try my hand at real modeling clay. For decades I’d messed with plasticine—projects that never lasted, always mashed back into new forms, leaving behind only a few bad photos. Some of those pieces I still miss.

This time I wrapped newspaper into a rough core, tied with string, and covered it with half an inch of clay. My plan was simple: once the bust was finished, I’d pull out or burn away the paper core and oven-fire it. I didn’t own a kiln, but I had ambition.

Over several days, the figure emerged. No model, no photograph—just memory, mostly of my wife. I shaved one side flat, imagining it as a bookend. Between sessions the clay reached “leather dry,” firm enough to carve yet still able to take a wash of slip. I worked mostly in reduction, shaving down, smoothing with a damp brush, letting it rest overnight.

Then came firing day. I set the oven, placed the bust in the center, and told myself I’d rotate it now and then. About forty minutes in, a sharp crack pulled me to the door. Dust hung in the air. A shoulder had exploded. I stepped back, half-expecting shrapnel. Then another crack—an earlobe gone. Another—half a nostril vanished. Each burst was my mistake unfolding: the water I’d brushed on that morning had sealed moisture inside. With nowhere to escape, the steam tore the piece apart.

When it finally cooled, the bust looked like a marble relic battered by invaders. Damaged, scarred, but still standing. I placed it on a shelf where it remains, holding up volumes on the history of the barbarians at the gate—some of whom, as it happens, were my ancestors.

An artifact by accident. A failure turned keeper.

We have a dog—a dog that barks. We’ve tried to reason with him, but reason isn’t really his strength. Tyson is always alert, rarely resting. If he’s awake, he’s on guard, ready to respond to any sound. His hearing is remarkable.

Since moving from a free-standing house to a townhome, he’s focused almost entirely on the front of the house, where all the noise comes from. Gates opening, cars passing, neighbors arriving. The back deck is silent, and so is he. Not a single bark from that side.

I’ve noticed a pattern: sometimes there’s a low growl at noises I can’t quite detect. If the noise is distinct enough that even I hear it, Tyson responds with one sharp, explosive bark. I tell him to stop—he doesn’t. It’s not a rolling bark, just a single cannon-shot. If I repeat “stop,” he must have the last word: one more bark, this time at half volume.

A lifetime with dogs has taught me that barks fall into three main kinds:

Alerts—something is here, pay attention. Separation—I’m alone, come back. Play—let’s keep going.

Tyson is 90% alert.

Dogs have lived alongside humans for tens of thousands of years, and we’ve trained them for almost every purpose imaginable. They are intelligent—I see flashes of it in Tyson—but their “language” remains simple.

Prairie dogs, on the other hand, bark with astonishing complexity. Con Slobodchikoff spent decades decoding their calls and showed that they use modifiers and syntax. They can warn their community that a tall man, carrying a gun, in a yellow shirt is approaching. Specific, layered, descriptive. Yet they only talk about the immediate present. No past. No future. No stories.

What I can’t quite reconcile is this: prairie dogs have a sophisticated language but live wild, far from us. Domestic dogs, who often sleep with us, bark in simple ways. Why is that?

Today I bore witness to a friend being placed in the earth. It was a Jewish funeral service. I’ve attended several over the years, but this one included traditions I had never seen before.

Yes, there were prayers in Hebrew and English, and moments of silence and reflection. But right at the start, there were differences.

The pallbearers carried the coffin to the gravesite, stopping meaningfully seven times along the way. Tradition teaches that seven is the number of completion. The pauses embody reluctance—acknowledging that the act must be done, but wishing it were not so. That was exactly how I felt. Her death was sudden, unexpected. Just weeks ago she was well. The pauses became our own hesitation, our unwillingness to accept reality.

At the grave there was the open earth, a mound of dirt, two shovels, and the coffin. After it was lowered, the rabbi explained the next tradition: each mourner would place three shovels of dirt into the grave. I had seen flowers, pebbles, even handfuls of soil offered before—but never this. The rabbi himself went first, flipping his shovel over so only a trace of dirt could fall. The mourners flipped the shovel for full loads. His reluctance was built into the act. And no shovel was handed from one mourner to the next; it was always set down, never passed, so that grief could not be transferred like a burden.

The sound was unforgettable: great clumps of earth striking pine, a timpani in the ground. Later, as the mound settled and softened, the sound muted.

The rabbi’s message was simple but weighty: the soul exists before and after, but only in life can there be mitzvahs. In that framing, existence divides into self, community, and the divine.

I thought immediately of those who elevate one of these above the others, instead of holding them in balance. Like a stool with one leg too long—what should be stable becomes awkward, then unusable. Over time it tips.

The image holds elsewhere too. Even in Christianity’s Trinity, imbalance distorts what was meant to be steady. Well-intended devotion can lengthen a single leg until the whole stool can no longer support us.

Ruth was the source of many mitzvahs in life, and they have often cascaded down through her family, friends and colleagues. A small bit of immortality.