Plato on my mind...

Today I'm stitching away...it is gray, windy and probably all the remaining leaves on the trees may just have to fall.  Or so it seems.  Only the O'Henry leaf will remain, it remains for us to find it.

I have been thinking a bit about the Allegory of the Cave from Plato's Republic.  The allegory deals with prisoners that are chained in a cave and only get to see shadows on the wall and perceive this to be reality. They have no concept of what reality really is.  (This is my summation in a nut shell.)  Of course once they are let out of the cave into the sun light and actually do see "the real," they don't know what/how to deal with it and long to return to the cave. And do.  This reminds me a little of stories you hear about blind people who have their sight restored.  They have to relearn their surroundings and people they knew by voice since their sense of reality has been altered.

 Plato also goes on to deal with the issue of Form and Idea.  Here he asserts the the non-material world  (abstraction - ideas or ideals) and not the material world of change which we know through sensation, construct  our highest and most fundamental reality.  In many ways I think this is believable.  If you think about it - what forms our ideals, the image industry...media.  (?)

So what does this have to do with my current stitching project (LEFT)...well, it's the shadow.  I think the shadow image is the most important feature to me.

Thinking about the shadow this way, I decided I needed to add another figure, hence, the shadow on the left emerged.  This cloth is a little darker - camera flashed washed it a bit.  I also decided I wanted to add a little dimension to the cloth...nothing to pronounced just a little more surface to introduce the concept of separation.  A boundary layer, defined as: a region of retired fluid near the surface of a body which moves through a fluid or past which a fluid moves; a bounder. Thinking that this might present a region where one body could not reach another body with noticeable ease.  

closer look at the shadow figure

I also added the "applique" type edge.  I brings forth the surface and contrasts the unfinished edges.  As Jude states, it a nice play with the edge. 

In thinking about how in someway, are lives are like shadows, I started thinking about simulacra.  Theories that were presented by Jean Baudrillard.  It was a much discussed issue when I was in graduate school so forgive me for the chit chat here.  I copied the following from Wiki because it would take me forever to get it all out and I probably would make it even more confusing...I guess this is also a issue about the separation of people that social media has brought about.  That school are considering that their students not learn writing (penmanship) because most of them are typing.  Conversations are mediated through mechanical means, etc. Those few entries that Jude did with written  text instead of typing were nice...all this and more brings me to this issue (but I have to say, not all media is a negative.  It allows  me to share here with  you, and other places in the media sphere.) But still...makes one stop to think.  So could a mere shadow bring all this about? ha.


Simulacra and Simulation is most known for its discussion of images, signs, and how they relate to contemporaneity. Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is of a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that anything like reality is irrelevant to our current understanding of our lives. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is rendered legible; Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable. Baudrillard called this phenomenon the "precession of simulacra".

"Simulacra and Simulation" breaks the sign-order into 4 stages:

1. The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct that, a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order". The page six refers to the volume titled Selected Writings. 
2. The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance - it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully show us reality, but can hint at the existence of something real which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
3. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery".
4. The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims.

So there it is...or here it is...or was. My update.