skating

skating. I can't skate but I'm going snow shoeing in a few days. This picture was taken in Budapest in 2005 when I was on alternative context. We'd stopped at a restaurant and there was a rink below us. We had left the art museum on Hero Square.

skaters

I should have posted more today. I thought about Kierkegaard and Jung and Paint and Trains. I photographed these skaters in Budapest in January of 2005. It was our last day in Hungary and we had left the national museum of art and trekked across Hero's Square to this little restaurant where we could get some beer and soup. I looked down at these skaters and thought about a picture my dad had taken when he was in the service in 1956 of skaters in Germany, somewhere, of skaters, in black and white. My dad, and the whole NATO force was ready to go to the aid of the Hungarians in 1956, but didn't. So 49 years later I told my dad I was taking that trip to Budapest he almost took when he was in Europe.

At the habittat site in Budapest in Jan 2005

I have an idea for a further Harry Potter, and not in the vein of fan fiction, although any derivative work is liable to slip into that category. Something on the order of Harry Potter and the Sickness unto Death: wherein walks a more Kierkegaardian wizard, whose very use of magic fills him with despair and whose very evasion of magic fills him with despair. How can he be authentic? Who is he behind the mask of what he does? How is his interpretation of the world clouded by his projections of desire and fear? Can he comes to terms with otherness and limitations on apparent freedom?
If anything I suppose that it's fan fiction based on Walker Percy's The Movie Goer, although I might want to extend the story with elements from the Second Coming or the Last Gentleman.
Sample text:
"No sooner do I point my wand and incite the incantation, than despair floods my soul. Is there no other way to deal with this monster? And the monster's words of mockery - how typical, almost as typical as my action here. And I can't get away from it. I've tried and my search continues. But the pleasure of repetition and irony only garners me small reprieve. The very moment I believe that I am acting in freedom, I find that I''m constrained on all sides: obligations to friends, to the school and my teachers, even to my enemies - as I present myself as The Hero. I tried yoga, but that too is an evasion: the very lotus of despair."