Wednesday, January 06, 2010

when skulls determine the form of the name of a color...

"according to one of the most prominent experts of kanji ideagrams - shirakawa shizuka (1910 - 2006) the chinese characters for 'white' was modeled after the shape of the human skull... supposedly because the image of white held by people back then was based on the sight of abandoned skulls in the fields, bleached by wind, rain, and sunlight."

from: white, by kenya hara

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1 Comments:

Blogger MS said...

Which brings us back to Rilke and the phonograph!

from Primal Sound, Rainer Maria Rilke, August 15, 1919, translated by G. Craig Houston

"What is it that repeatedly presents itself to my mind? It is this: The coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has–let us assume–a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally–well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen?"

3:51 PM  

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