Category: BEAUTY

21st Century Symphony Manifesto

This craggy fantasy mountaintop enshrouded by wispy clouds looks like a bizarre landscape from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, which is even more dramatic than fiction, captures the chaotic activity atop a pillar of gas and dust, three light-years tall, which is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks. This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina. The image celebrates the 20th anniversary of Hubble's launch and deployment into an orbit around the Earth. Scorching radiation and fast winds (streams of charged particles) from super-hot newborn stars in the nebula are shaping and compressing the pillar, causing new stars to form within it. Streamers of hot ionised gas can be seen flowing off the ridges of the structure, and wispy veils of gas and dust, illuminated by starlight, float around its towering peaks. The denser parts of the pillar are resisting being eroded by radiation. Nestled inside this dense mountain are fledgling stars. Long streamers of gas can be seen shooting in opposite directions from the pedestal at the top of the image. Another pair of jets is visible at another peak near the centre of the image. These jets, (known as HH 901 and HH 902, respectively, are signposts for new star birth and are launched by swirling gas and dust discs around the young stars, which allow material to slowly accrete onto the stellar surfaces. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 observed the pillar on 1-2 February 2010. The colours in this composite image correspond to the glow of oxygen (blue), hydrogen and nitrogen (green), and sulphur (red).

Artistic Assumptions 1.) The universe is a process 2.) This process is the ‘becoming’ of soul 3.) Human beings have one foot in the world of soul, but remain mostly in matter 4.) History moves in cycles, and time is accelerating these cycles 5.) Awareness of cycles, and consciously rejecting them, is how soul creates… Continue reading 21st Century Symphony Manifesto

Published
Categorized as BEAUTY

27 Intuitions

By Alex Blum I. We are the conquerors of nature, the masters of materiality And yet we will be destroyed by our own mastery Climate change is this very reckoning, endemic to our nature The very fuel we burn to survive will seal our own destruction The means of industry ensure its own demise, it… Continue reading 27 Intuitions

Published
Categorized as BEAUTY

Christ Returns to Heaven

By Alex Blum Fires stains the soul, the demon-soaked world Haunt rises from the bodies, amassed at the throne of God He smiles, the lows of demonology alight in His mind The guilty throne abides by power alone, no ethic to find Fire and fury are the tools of the devil, pure annihilation is the… Continue reading Christ Returns to Heaven

Published
Categorized as BEAUTY

Sophia’s Prelude

By Alex Blum Bloodstained Sophia was poised before the silver moon, to blame for the world of matter. Pregnant she stood, beside the world that was cast in her shadow, a universe filled with demons, and in its deepest abyss, in the expanse of deepest darkness, farthest from the light, there was a world that… Continue reading Sophia’s Prelude

Published
Categorized as BEAUTY

Theophany

By Alex Blum The snowy courtyard stood before the church, at the edge of a cliff. A steel black fence lined the perimeter, and each pike ended in a fearsome tip. White smoke billowed from the church, past its bell tower, into the misty sky. A man stood in the snow, dressed all in white.… Continue reading Theophany

Published
Categorized as BEAUTY