the flight of the eye, and the grasp of the open hand...

Yesterday at our UU church, we had a skype conference call with our friend Devon in Moscow. He is 31 and has been visiting Russia for extended visits since the age of 14, and offered some interesting insight into the current state of apparent hostility between the US and Russia over the matters in Ukraine. Some of my readers will be old enough to remember Perestroika, and Glasnost, as being terms applied to the dissolution of the Soviet Empire leading to the current Russian state. Russians at the time perceived the dissolution of the empire as being a thing they did for the world. Americans, on the other hand, perceived the situation as the utter collapse of the Soviet Union resulting from their "defeat" in the Cold War. These two utterly different views of world events dating back to 1991, leave American and Russian leadership strutting upon the world stage like cocks on a walk.

Take a stick and wave it in the air like a teenaged boy. Imagine it to be a spear, or a sword, and you'll get the idea. But the greatest power is not in the sword or stick, but in the open hand. We have to wonder when we will get leadership that understands such things. In the meantime, our friend Devon is a one man ambassadorial mission to Moscow. And we may each be the same.

Barbara, in her ongoing translation  of Jacobsen's book, I Sløjdsagen Et Inlæg, noted the following referring to how the eye follows and interprets a line:

Linjeflugt is the first word of the sentence, the last being flugte etter, literally to flee, escape, and written in scare quotes by author.

Norwegian "flugt" is flight (noun and verb; German: Flucht, fluechte, mid consonant shift which made learning Norwegian rather simple ).

Fly means both airplane and to fly. Near the airport we have the "fly museum" advertised in huge letters which never fails to tickle my mind.

And so, yes, the eye flies along lines while the hands may take a slower, more certain path. What the eyes perceive the hands trace to carefully ascertain.

Yesterday I was successful in printing a 3-D prosthetic hand. Of course at this point it's little more than useless disconnected parts.

Make, fix and create...