Arriving

Dear Kate,

My dog hates the vacuum cleaner, each and all, as in going apeshit at the first whiff of the word 吸 ("suck" in Chinese) squished out between my two front teeth; yet she is perfectly fine with the biggest and loudest of them all standing right beside her crate at night most humorlessly like a moai on Easter Island.

I do wonder, is it because simply the vacuum is not moving, making no noise?  Does my dog even recognize it as the hideous creature and for its heinous offense? How can she miss the most obvious?

I posted the picture above two days ago on Facebook, and I wonder what people see in it, three of them together but first separately.

As I explained before and I hope not again or too much, each of these "sequential drawings" is a "short story," contains a word that this world cannot contain.  All the elements are there for you to engage in the story being told; anything beyond the boundaries of the rectangles, the freeing constraints, are yours to imagine.  Your active, creative participation is not merely optional.

Look at the picture again: what does it mean?

If you cheated and moved carelessly (which is usually too quickly), you would conclude it's some sort of political statement.  It can be.  It needs not be.  It is not.  I might have captured a political statement, but that doesn't make mine a derivation of one.

In the mise-en-scène of our everyday life, our attention chases after moving elements - or more like the other way around.  What we see in the first two frames of the picture, almost fatefully, would likely be the elevator moving up the shaft, even only very slightly, for a reason obvious.

For the same reason your attention is called, when you arrived at the "conclusion" of the third frame, to decide the arrival was indeed conclusive: that the picture has to do with what's happening in Ukraine, and my calling your attention to it a somewhat noble endeavor, your attention paid somehow reciprocated my good intention.

If this is a good conclusion, have you considered, that we might not need the first two frames at all?  Why not just take a wider shot to orient the reader properly, and maybe add a few words to hit home a message noble and timely?

Here I invite you to reconsider.

Where was the "Ukraine flag" in the first two frames?  You can only tell by looking closer at the third frame again...possibly where the three tree branches are, an orientation that I did give?

And are you sure the canvas indeed was a "Ukraine flag"?  That what you are seeing is indeed blue, not something more like...green?

Does it even matter, for a flag of Ukraine, that the blue is on top and yellow below?  Could it be a possible desecration to get ourselves confused, wrong-side-up about such crucial order, sequence of things?

Consider, too, how everyday we would arrive at "obvious" conclusions in the same careless, hasty manner, and think ourselves good-intentioned, even noble for it?

Yours, Alex