Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Art (Mandalas, Doodles, Scripts)
Doin’ Its Own Thing
Everything is doin’ its own thing, follows what the ancient South Asian Indian scriptures call its “dharma.” But the thing that everything is doing is vastly inter-dimensional, connected to many, many other things doin’ their own thing. Gravity, aesthetics, patterns, symbiotic connections, underlying similarities, the list goes on. Some things are more rapidly eventful than […]
Doodle-Art
My dear cousin said that I do amazing doodle-art: “This is better than Rorschach! They also look like a gorgeous sequence of cathedral rose windows.” I guess so. I just doodle with a compass, but of course my genius—“genius” refers to a guardian spirit during the centuries BC and AD. Genius or genii guide my […]
Drawing the Best Forward
I want to help in integrating the best creative developments of the creative arts therapies. Indeed, it’s not just for therapy. Normal people need encouragement to use the creative arts, to improvise. The conventional school system says in effect, "I don’t care about your creativity. Learn what we know. That ought to be sufficient." But […]
Eeksplanations (and other Confabulations)
Sometimes my spirit guide, one of a couple dozen or so, channels inspirational messages and pictures. If this seems too far out, ignore it, consider that I just made this stuff up. Or contemplate these words on their own merits. As a psychiatrist colleague who was a consultant to our program when I was in […]
Elementary Arts Education
So much of arts education seems to be targeted at an audience as an act of impressing people: See how good I am. Okay, there’s a place for that. But what occurs to me is that doing expressive arts may involve several levels of competence and talent, and only the upper levels—the ones requiring talent […]
Elf-Origins
In a story told by Cyrano de Bergerac titled “Voyage to the Moon”,” illustrated by P. Craig Russell in 1991—I found it in a new age comic book among a number of rather painfully dark other stories—Cyrano relates his visit to the moon and adventures there. One element was a meeting with a being from […]
Fairies
I became interested in fairies before they were featured in Tolkien’s Return of the King trilogy. In fact, my interpretation of these non-physical beings is that they appear in whatever form the audience imagines, as in the Christmas song, Some Children See Him Lily White. In fact, faery beings appear as imagined through the filter […]
Free Spirits Playing
Here’s what I mean: These are indeed free spirits—or that’s what we might call them. Or their technical species name is vibratium transcendentum. They are playing, frolicking, even, messing around. They vibrate! You can almost hear their giggles. This is going on in the cosmos. We can participate too, with a certain knack for second […]
Gary Larson, Cartoonist
This is the non-anniversary of Gary Larson’s retirement, which was around December 1994. Gee, it occurs to me that many people have grown quite up without knowing about this wonderful cartoonist. He introduced a madcap style of cartooning that has been followed by others. When he left I felt bereft, but I just found two […]
Geometry of Logarithmic Spirals
One of my low-priority hobbies is a bit of geometry, as it helps me contemplate the intricacies of God’s creation. The phenomenon of “geometric spirals” grabbed my attention recently. Both rectangles and triangles can be constructed so that their vertices describe a shrinking (or expanding) spiral. Here’s the big picture: Now, below is the spiral […]
Give Yourself a Medal
Marian Henley, a cartoonist who did “Maxine!,” created “medals” (back in 1999)! She created: The Triple Star Telephone, for refusing to surrender under heavy barrage of telephone solicitation calls; The Silver Cereal Box. for extraordinary strength of will, courage, and endurance displayed by simply getting the heck out of bed every day! […]
Gizmoids
It’s hard to express what gizmoids do. The word is a combination, a portmanteau, of “gizmo” and the suffix “-oid”—which means “-like.” A gizmo is a mechanical device or part whose name is forgotten or unknown; a gadget. However, being transdimensional, their function and essential nature is more elusive—hence the “-oid” suffix. Represented here in […]
Hallowe’en Thoughts
When did scarey become cute? The many pressures of commercialization, mixed with the candy and snack industry, the greeting card and costume industries, the specialty Halloween shops and the many Goodwill and other charity stores, commercial Haunted Houses, scary movies, and much more all contribute to the mass celebration of what really is the “shadow” […]
Happy Re-Birthday
I don’t find reincarnation to be particularly compelling for me. It may be true for all I know, but my own path is to help improve where we’re going as a species, rather that to trace where any individual has “been.” Also, I think that mind has a far greater capacity for fantasizing vividly what […]
How Life Goes
I find the diagram known as the Shree Yantra to be a profound one that I use to exercise my imagination. In the following freehand drawing, I note within each triangle its own sort-of maze. What this symbolizes for me is this. The eight central triangles and the one that weaves them together is the […]
How the Mind Works
The mind, or as they say in a children’s song, “Der Honky-Donky-Doodle,” works in mysterious ways. At last (or as I am wont to say, alas) neruo-imaging has met neuro-imagining and resulted in a picture of the nerve bundle that connects right and left brain, the “corpus callosum,” as it is technically called. Below is […]
I Thought I Had It Figured Out
… but then I woke up. Dang! I dunno, in the dream it made sense! Those little guys had a part to play in the grand scheme of things. Well, it seemed so. I was so gratified. The “aha” really felt good. But, then, “poof.” Aw, man, come on!
I’m Not a Cheese
Kids learn weird songs such as “The Farmer in the Dell.” Unless the birthday boy or gets it, and nowadays he might not, it’s not funny. It’s a bit of name-calling. But the other kids are innocent and well-disposed, so there’s a disconnect here. I suspect that as time goes on many seemingly innocent bits […]
Importuning the Great Mystery
To importune means to ask (someone) pressingly and persistently for or to do something. Other becomings (a better word than beings as all is in flux) elsewhere in the multi-verse do this too. However we are, there are riddles. Huston Smith, the scholar of comparative religions, defines the words tellingly: A puzzle requires a knack, […]
Inter-Dimensional Directions
If you remember, Zordak is my little flying-saucer lil’ green man archetypal character who figuratively lands in my back yard for a visit. (Dante had the ancient Roman poet, Virgil, as his guide to Inferno. I have Zordak.) Why the lot behind my home? I don’t know. Maybe he also empties what passes for his […]
Levels of Mind
I don’t know how to prove this, but mind that thinks about awareness represents a dimension of mind as different from bare awareness as is the third dimension different from the second dimension. Yet there’s a further step in dimensionality: If mind—awareness—is another dimension, then thinking about thinking is what humans do. So if space […]
Life Enlargement
Life of course is already huge beyond our comprehension, and adding depth is just mind-stretching. However, that is what I am bound to do: articulate in words what I’ve come to know: It is my karma—I think. Also, I enjoy it! Several years ago I did a cartoon playing off of the Peanuts’ cartoon strip, […]
Mandala As Primal Diagram
Circular, vaguely or finely symmetrical drawings that usually show a center and a periphery—such are called “mandalas,” a word used in India. They recognize that certain kinds of art can stimulate meditation. I began drawing mandalas when I was about 30 years old. I was influenced in 1972 by a book titled “Mandalas” by Jose […]
Mandala Movie
Some of Adam’s mandalas, set in motion:
Mandalas and Sacred Geometry
I just received a card from a friend that had a mandala on it as a design, and that reminded me of this emerging trend to present this form of art for your enjoyment. Thousands of people are exploring this medium and you can find many examples on the internet—especially if you google “mandala.” My […]