Webster's Images and Ideas

Carceri d'Invenzione (1745-1761) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi    The imaginary prisons of Piranesi have haunted many (even some who had never seen them!) since they were etched in the 18th century. Here is a famous reference to them by Thomas de Quincy:   Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome , Mr Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr Coleridge's account) represented vast Gothic halls: on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pullies, levers, catapults,.&c. &c. expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceive a staircase: and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, ...

Virtuosity of Complex Numbers     Virtuosity of complex numbers is demonstrated by conversion into geometrical form of the formula that relates e (the natural base of logarithms), pi and the square root of negative one. The equation can be expressed as the sum of a series of vectors. When these are added and plotted on a complex plane, they form a spiral that strangles the point equal to negative one.    - Philip J. Davis, Number , Scientific American, September 1964. The square root of negative one was a useful but self-contradictory nuisance to mathematicians until they discovered that it was the portal into a whole new dimension of numbers.  In 1797 a geometric interpretation of complex numbers was developed by the Norwegian surveyor, Caspar Wessel (1745-1818). He showed that complex numbers involving the root of negative one are equivalent to real number pairs, and thus to points on a two dimensional plane: one...

The Kiss photographed by Oliviero Toscani, 1991 One of those provocative ads that United Colors of Benetton ran in magazines. They have photo galleries showing these ads in the Press area of their web site. The Kiss    What smouldering senses in death’s sick delay Or seizure of malign vicissitude Can rob this body of honour, or denude This soul of wedding-raiment worn to-day? For lo! even now my lady’s lips did play With these my lips such consonant interlude As laurelled Orpheus longed for when he wooed The half-drawn hungering face with that last lay. I was a child beneath her touch,—a man When breast to breast we clung, even I and she,— A spirit when her spirit looked through me,— A god when all our life-breath met to fan Our life-blood, till love’s emulous ardours ran, Fire within fire, desire in deity. by Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Kiss by Rodin

...nothing is real beyond the imaginative patterns men make of reality, and hence there are exactly as many kinds of reality as there are men. "Every man's wisdom is peculiar to his own individuality," and there is no other kind of wisdom: reality is as much in the eye of the beholder as beauty is said to be. Northrop Frye (quoting William Blake), Fearful Symmetry , p. 19

A visual or concrete poem I wrote a long while back. I resurrected it because Kenny made it into a song. Only he would have the audacity to try this: Guns and Laughter (the song) Typed on a very old typewriter that had been passed down through the generations. It came out gun metal gray on my old scanner which doesn't photocopy text very well, but the color suits it, I thought. I was whacking the keys harder and harder so that the letters would get darker and darker. That doesn't seem to work on my computer keyboard, where I can whack the keys as hard as I like and it makes no difference at all.

  Complaints spark a redesign of Zoodles 'nude' noodles can If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so, it would appear, is obscenity.  And Nestle Canada, bowing to a few consumers with especially critical eyes, will redesign the label of its popular Zoodles, noodle animals in tomato sauce.  "If I want soft-core pornography around, I think I can go to an adult bookstore and get it, not the grocery store," said Evelyn Turner, a 42-year-old Nova Scotia mother.  When the can is turned upside down, Turner complains, the cartoon palm tree on the label can be interpreted as a depiction of male genitalia... --- Nicolass Van Rijn, Staff Reporter, The Toronto Star

The Reunion of the Soul and the Body  designed by William Blake, as an illustration for Robert Blair's poem, The Grave. After the day of rest, Sophia sent Zoe, her daughter, who is called "Eve (of life)" as an instructor to raise up Adam, in whom there was no soul, so that those whom he would beget might become vessels of the light. When Eve saw her co-likeness cast down, she pitied him and she said, "Adam, live! Rise up on the earth!" Immediately her word became a deed. For when Adam rose up, immediately he opened his eyes. When he saw her, he said, "You will be called 'the mother of the living' because you are the one who gave me life." from On the Origin of the World , in The Nag Hammadi Library , James M. Robinson, General Editor. A collection of Gnostic texts.

Warning: This page contains some works of "anomalous motion illusion", which might make sensitive observers dizzy or sick. Should you feel dizzy, you had better leave this page immediately. Snakes Optical Illusion The amazing moving snakes illusion could be an animated gif, but it is NOT. Such illusions warn us that the eye is not merely a window, and that perception often alters what it perceives. An in-depth discussion of color vision and this illusion can be found at Color Vision: One of Nature's Wonders . This illusion was created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka, Professor, Department of Psychology, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. Please visit his amazing Akiyoshi's illusion pages .

  Cartoon Religion    ...the sensation of something ludicrous and at the same time stellar, lurking constantly around the corner--and one likes to recall that the difference between the comic side of things, and their cosmic side, depends upon one sibilant. Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol , p.142 My elf is myself without the snake.