“The map? I will first make it”*…
Greg Pass has built a formidable resume– past CTO of Twitter, current Founding Entrepreneurial Officer of the new Cornell Technology Campus being built in New York City– but it is his hobby, his blog Unurthed, that has earned him a place in your correspondent’s Pantheon…
Unurthed is a survey of diagrams, cosmograms, emblems, etchings, sketches, illustrations, yantras, paintings, engravings, photographs, figures, cutouts, seals, depictions, pictures, images, with an eye for that which cannot be diagrammed, cosmogrammed, emblemed, etched, sketched, illustrated, plucked, painted, engraved, photographed, figured out, cut out, sealed, depicted, pictured, imagined.
All of the material is scanned from my personal collection or, in a few cases, drawn by me.
And what material it is! Consider, for example, “Cramer’s Emblems“:
Six of forty emblems from Daniel Cramer’s 1617 The Rosicrucian Emblems of Daniel Cramer, each presenting a contemplative exercise working upon the heart process of a Rosicrucian meditator. Prefaces Cramer:
“And so, Reader, you have the work of death and life,
The embossings of the Holy page, and a short epigram.
These will be able to show and teach your mind
What your state was once and what it may become today” (p16).
Emblem 34: NEITHER ON THIS SIDE, NOR ON THE OTHER
“‘…we will not turn to the right hand nor to the left.’ (Numbers 20:17)
“Not in this place, not in that;
The heart will go more safely in the middle.
He who rushes from the mean, runs to destruction” (p63).
A plethora of perspicacious pictures to ponder at Unurthed.
* Patrick White, Voss
***
As we learn to love to limn, we might recall that it was on this date– the birthdays of the eloquent Dalai Lama (1935) and the not-so-eloquent George W. Bush (1946)– in 1535 that lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, Renaissance humanist, and councillor to Henry VIII of England, Sir Thomas More, author of Utopia, was beheaded by Henry for refusing to accept the king as Supreme Head of the newly-established Church of England. More was acting in accordance with his opposition to Martin Luther, William Tyndale, and the Protestant Reformation… for which he was canonized in 1935 by Pope Pius XI. (He is remembered by the Church of England as a “Reformation martyr.”)
Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of More