The Map becomes the Territory

 by  Shaun Lawton 

   When the map becomes the territory, the world comes alive in a snap. The tumultuous terrain breaks free in upheaval, shedding series of dorsal fins from overlapping tectonic plates. Generated from the interstices in between, wriggling out a host of scuttling insects that swarm and shudder off into the shadowy distance. A bifurcating reality opens up, as if being unzipped and let in to ours; a monstrous invasion with no apparent way of stopping it. 

 These were to be known as the Dragons of the Instant, another manifestation of demonic possession.  What makes them unnerving but not overtly dangerous is how, upon their manifestation before us, while taking on the appearance of an objectively autonomous creature capable of attacking, they always render as an optical illusion and instead phase into the backdrop scenery itself, unraveling into the foothills along the horizon, revealing itself to be another section of the land we're traversing.  It does feel as if a map were being unfolded at our feet, a map to step into through which we enter into the terrain it depicts.  Leaving behind the sensation mirrored in the unfolding of creatures capable of appearing any time. 

Seeing Stones

 

   You're staring at the evolution of my digital art, and it's staring right back at you.   I can make this assertion with a certain degree of confidence considering the style templates I designed to be used in my deep dream generated pieces.  The swirling patterns that result often generate eye-like whirlpools in their random interwoven configurations for a reason.   

        A few months ago I began working on a series of digital images rendered using Wombo since they added the feature of being able to upload images for transfiguration.  I was working on the idea of creating a gallery of images which would be presented in the form of individual cards in an oracle deck.  I had already begun to build several oracle decks, beginning with the Tolkien middle-Earth deck (which for now I've been referring to as my Ennor deck), continuing with a series of individual cards based on Werewolves which I call the Wolf Pack, a Melnibonean oracle deck, and a Kaiju deck which features a subcategory (which is to say, many guest star appearances) depicting nods to Ultraman.  

   The Seeing Stone  deck is comprised of a series of images which all feature the oval shape of the cabochon-cut stones that I bought from my friend Andy through his Etsy shop Uncommon Stones. It all started the day I asked him to shine a blacklight on one of his dinosaur bone stones. A vivid interlaced tapestry of fossilized veins shone out in the resulting picture I took of it on my cellphone.  I decided to use this as a style template in Deep Dream Generator as well as in Wombo.  The two images depicted below were created on the Wombo app.  

   

    

   These two cards are from my dinosaur oracle deck.  The idea being, it's the same stone, only each time you look into it, a different scene from the distant past is shown.  In the case of this stone, it always displays glimpses into eras back when the dinosaurs roamed. These 'time stones' are kind of like little palantirs, which is to say windows through which the viewer may see certain scenes of the past. (The methods by which this may be achieved is the focus of my time travel story.)   

    The crux of the matter lies in the stones themselves, in particular the one dinosaur fossil which I photographed under blacklight. That's the one I think of as my flux capacitor. It's ultra hi-lit profile based on an actual fossil record serves as the foundation upon which the AI text-prompted vectors were configured into their shapes.  It's sort of an exercise in showcasing a range of possible variants to the requested scenery, and the best of these may serve to represent that bygone possibility, a subject still available for examination in hindsight.    

      As noted in the image at the top of the page here, the middle stone appears to be staring up at the top stone.  A closer examination of the top stone reveals the lower greenish circular area to be the top stone creature's nose, and its eye readily noted just above and to the right, in a shade of brown with a black pupil. This stone appears far older than the smaller one below it, which now resembles more of a newborn stone, or at least one yet in its infancy.  These are the opals. 

    The two darker stones below are the dinosaur fossils.  The one to the right appears to have an eye with which it stares out of and off the page at an angle.  The stone to the left seems to be a tangle of shadows and tails or some sort of blended components nestled up within the stone. The impression I'm left with is that these four are some sort of family of stones forming a nuclear unit, conjuring an electromagnetic connection like lodestones.  

   The seeing stones signify that time travel as we have typically come to wish to expect it to be (i.e, the ability to travel into the past or future) remains a mere fantasy, an objective which applied here in the real world will never yield results.   Thus making this ability to glimpse the past or future a viable alternative to outright time-travel, the next-best thing so to speak.    

    

Notescense Inusticularity

 If it wasn't in between the jaws of the sea leviathan,

 it would have been against the twisting edge 

of another's blade winking in the moonlight, 

just another cutting whisper on the wind.

 The way the earth's been shaking about once a week 

has got us pretty unsettled. It only happens during 

the weekend, and in hourly tremors, at that. 

If the novel coranavirus were one sign of the trumpet, 

these other manifestations fall in accord with the overall

 development of ongoing issues heralded in the scriptures 

of various languages and their countries, it would seem to me. 

The finishastration  ensumeralled encyclircodices 

diversticulated  enshrevesascense forwithinto 

a triumverification of elegant forces combined

 in a brand new concerted effort against the quarantine.