Groo's Wanderings

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. 

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. 

So... I heard you like corvids.

Carrion Crow (Corvus corone) screams in the rain, family Corvidae, order Passeriformes, Spain

Carrion crow

Screams in the rain

Order Passeriformes

Corvidae

The light from the window was striped. It made stripes on my cigarette smoke. The end of my cigarette crumbled into ash. My marriage had also crumbled into ash.

She was not wearing a ring. It means something when a woman does not wear a wedding ring. Usually, it means that she is not married. “Seems your ring has also gone missing,” I said. I hoped her dress would join it.

Her red mouth curved upwards. She was smiling a little. “I don’t wear it outside. A diamond that large would only invite trouble.”

Mount Fuji in full bloom.

This is a deep-sea octopus from the genus Cirrothauma, filmed 2,923 m beneath the Ocean’s surface during the Doldrums expedition.

An international science team is studying the Doldrums Megatransform and Fracture Zone, a region where plate movement forms wrinkles and lines along the planet’s surface, known as fault zones. They tell the story of Earth’s tectonic history. These fault zones circulate water into the seafloor and through the crust, later releasing it with new chemical compositions, some of which feed deep-sea bacteria that fuel thriving ecosystems in the deepest, darkest parts of the Ocean. While chemosynthetic ecosystems are well documented along the ridge, little is known about what lives on the fault zones.

mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters