First published in The Study of Light, on Substack, on September 2, 2025
My shot at breaking basic rules of composition and pointing out that everything can be symbolic, if only you will see it.
If it is round, I like it. I want to take its photo. I don’t care if it is a ball or a hole or a melon. I will compose my photo so that it is right in the middle, a hub from which all life extends. The object of our devotion. A god-like thing that we should appreciate.
Rules of composition say I shouldn’t do this. Put things on the thirds, or on a Fibonacci curve, or on a diagonal line. But to the pointed question, who cares about round things? Well, I do, and that’s why I choose not to follow the rules.
Diocletian's Palace in Croatia, seventh grade trip to the bowling alley, LA farmers market, classic car (Corvette?)
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If I try to analyze myself, and jeez, it’s not like I haven’t been doing that full time since I was two, I remember my fascination with psychology that started in high school, and lead me to take a slew of Psych courses in college. Sigmund Freud had a lot to say about a lot of things. And since he was a pioneer and a founder, he was given a lot of credence and leeway for ideas that have lost a lot of ground, if not all of it, during my lifetime. So when I was in college, it was like, “Yeah man, that chick really does wish she had a penis.” Or “clearly that dude wants to sleep with his mom.”
A pretty, helium-filled balloon bopping against the sky at Prince's memorial site in Minnesota.
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I didn’t like that Freud managed to reduce everything to weird kinky sex stuff, AND he got to pick what it meant. If a person wants to step out of the mainstream for some unconventional titillation, who is Siggy to say what it means with such precise detail? It’s like he knows too much, so he must be projecting. When he was called out for habitually smoking phallusi, he allegedly, famously said “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” What a cop out.
Then along comes Carl Jung, Freud’s protégé, and after toeing Freud’s line for a few years, breaks from him, and decides that things are less kinky, and more spiritual. He posited that we all share a collective unconscious, meaning that we are all connected. We share ideas, themes, and impulses that traverse space, time, and individual bodies. Have you ever had a brilliant idea about, say, good and evil, only to find out that Friedrich Nietzsche said pretty much the same thing a hundred years ago? Have you been impacted by today’s troubles and written a feel-good poem, only to find that Mary Oliver wrote the EXACT SAME poem, in 2010? Maybe you didn’t plagiarize! Maybe you drew from the same source of consciousness that Nietzsche and Oliver did. This explanation may not stand up in court, but it sure feels good to be connected to the greats.
(Now I would like to share a poem I wrote about wild ducks…).
Someone brought THIS salad to a potluck in Wisconsin; a protest at the capitol in Madison; a barrel of the good stuff, being rolled by Dan Johnson; Spanish moss backlit by a Georgia full moon
I once had a vivid dream that my dear Geralyn was singing, in a nightclubby way, to a stadium full of appreciative fans. The song goes like this (and I still can recall the melody) "I'm blue over you/A rose is a rose/I'm blue over you, Blue Rose." Well, imagine our excitement at finding this establishment in Tokyo!
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In case you didn’t know, the circle, the ball, the orb, the sphere, all symbolize wholeness, completion, the Self, the return, eternity, God, and nipples. Okay, Freud was right about that last one.
The ancient Norse had a symbol of a snake of some kind, in the shape of a circle, swallowing its own tail. They called it the ouroborus, and it symbolizes eternal cyclic return. It also signifies a shit ton of money for tattoo artists.
Kids these days don’t appreciate the power that Freud had over us. From the early days of psychoanalysis, in the 1910s, through his death in 1939, and up to my youth in the 60s and 70s, Freud OWNED psychology. You couldn’t interpret a dream without Freud’s special dictionary by your bedside. Every pencil was a penis; every bagel a vagina. Nowadays, a steeple can just be part of a church. A donut is what you use to get your sugar high and aggravate your inflammation which you have because you have Lyme disease and gluten sensitivity. It is possible to eat a bratwurst without harboring secret desires. I know, because I have done so several times. Sometimes a hula hoop is just a hula hoop, so it is presumptuous to say that we all want to crawl back into our mothers’ vaginas and hide from the world, though given the news from Washington, that doesn’t sound bad at all.
Please, please enjoy some round things, with a small side of Jung, and a little Freud for dessert. And may your life be abundant, corpulent, meaningful, and fraught with symbolism.
That good Fizzeology kraut; I couldn't have placed these three in a logo, but someone did -- the six-pointed star, "Cradle of the Confederacy," and "The Civil Rights Movement," for Montgomery, Alabama; sundog in the Driftless!; a "garbage blossom" at the Westby Ski Jump competition.
Pretty International Harvester tractor at Philothea's place.