Day 61: Emphasise the Flakes

In a search for some misplaced felt-tip pens (colouring-in emergency), I inadvertently end up sorting a box of 'stuff'.  Most of it goes straight in the bin, but there are some good finds - a box of staples, some forgotten photos from a holiday in 2004, and a set of Oblique Strategies (Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt).  I immediately pick a card, which tells me to 'Emphasise the Flaws'.  I consider putting on a bikini and sauntering up to town, but I suspect this is a rather over-literal application.  I will sit with the advice, and see whether a more sophisticated interpretation reveals itself. 

(Incidentally, I find the felt-tips in the back-up drinks cupboard, along with some weight training gloves, an electric whisk and the ghostly skeletons of many spiders.  On a drinks level, I am surprised by Bols kirsch, half a bottle of Cointreau, brandy, a bottle of dessert wine, and some Creme de Cassis.  I put them all back, so I can be surprised again in a couple of years.)

Eno - Aggressive Shorts

In looking for the picture of Brian Eno to decorate this page, I find an article about his involvement in the development of ambient music.  He was in hospital, listening to music over his headphones, but unable to drown out the additional environmental sounds, he chose to listen to everything as a whole.  (I suspect morphine may have been involved...)  When I had my tonsils taken out, I was given morphine and I lay in bed drinking in everything around me, utterly at peace and at one with my surroundings (a crumbling hospital on the Greys Inn Road).  I didn't need music.  I'd have listened to a light bulb.   

Sigur Ros - Shy

In the mood for soundscapes, I play some Sigur Ros - spacious, chilly, Icelandic.  You can almost hear the glaciers and the icicles.  But it's not quite enough.  So I turn to Sibelius - vaster, bolder, darker.  And then Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade, and rippling desert sand.  My excellent Sennheiser headphones fill my head with music and my mind EXPANDS, man.  I am glaciers and dark water and sand.  No morphine needed. 

Perhaps I wasn't in the right mood to pick an Oblique Strategy.  Now I am mentally aligned with EVERYTHING, perhaps I will be able to pick something more fitting. 

I draw a new card.  'Emphasise the Flaws'...  OK.  I GET IT.  This is clearly the card I am meant to have.  (Maybe the flaw is non-acceptance...).

So, what exactly is a flaw?  The word comes from the Old Norse, and originally meant snowflake, or spark of fire (from the word 'flaga' - flake).  The sense of it being a defect or fault didn't come until much later, from the concept of a fragment (or flake) broken off. 

That's more like it.  Not flaws.  Personal snowflakes, yeah? 
My FLAKES in your FACE.  (EMPHASISED.)