A Book of Ether, Chapters 1&2 - from Cheryl Penn

[Marie Wintzer]

 

Ether is one of Cheryl's favorite words, and after meeting it several times in our conversations I became fascinated by the concept behind it. Ether is a word that is so multilayered that it is impossible to simply give one definition of it. This word needed a book! We started exchanging chapters for it, in an experimental "let's see where this goes" kind of way, but I think that these first two chapters are the promise of a great book.

 

 

Chapter one is a tale, a lesson, a warning. What is this World of Ether? In Cheryl's note, she writes: It is [a world] filled with opposites. Good and bad, negative and positive, light and dark. It's a place of contrasts, a world very similar to our own. It exists as its own universe.
Ether is a Dark and Dense Forest with a dangerously captivating Glow (my favorite part of the chapter is that one can REALLY see the glow of the Ether through the black trees. She's an amazing painter...).
The inspiration for this chapter is the nursery rhyme "If you go down to the woods today", bears being replaced by wolves. You can go down to the woods any time, the wolves will be there, having their picnic, as they do every single day. And they surely will invite you to join in. And you will join in. Picnics are such fun, but wolves, well, they are still wolves....

 

 

And wolves DO haunt. You need to be aware of this simple fact when you enter the Dense Forest of Ether. This is today's lesson, for Children and Others. Mostly for Others....

01100110101.... is Ether a Binary World? Yes it is, yet it doesn't use binary language. Another interesting fact that adds to the mystery of it.

 

 

Where does Ether take place? Where are the Woods actually located? "Ether takes place in the Core of our heads. Places even X-rays can't find. With so many shades of Gray."
Cheryl used real brain scans for this second chapter, which is absolutely genius and innovative. Ether is there, and X-rays are scanning through, finding absolutely Zalop. Small dots are pierced, a trace, a trail, but it's gone....

 

 

These two fantastic first chapters are already shedding some light onto the concept of Ether. I hope there will be plenty more (and I have to get working on it!!). Cheryl, thank you for sending, I'm so happy about this book, it's going to be a FABU.

 

[cheryl penn]

Marie - can I leave another one???

"But such incidents were as nothing to the intervals, those awful pauses when one drifted through the air towards that pouring tide of night" 

MAN! His writing is succinct.  Thanks DVS - glad you like :-) X

[De Villo Sloan]

The build-up for this book raised expectations, but it does not fail.

 

The images and words are integrated perfectly, CB, I immediately focused on the 0-1 that I thought were a reference to computer code. In your comments (really illuminating!) you talk about opposites of themes: "it is a world filled with opposites: negative and positive, light and dark." People who use structuralism in literary analysis look for "binary oppositions" - patterns of oppositions that form the structure of a narrative (already in the ether here) so you really have something going with this binary idea.

 

CP-SA - "The First Men in the Moon"! - What a choice, perfect for this.

 

So much going on in this piece I could go on forever....

[De Villo Sloan]

The ether is here! The ether is here! I'll be back.

[cheryl penn]

Marie - WOW - thank you! What wonderful photographs - as usual! You out-do yourself every time :-) I am reading H G Wells AGAIN - so - 

Over me, under me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer, was the eternal, that which was before the beginning and that which triumphs over the end; that enormous void in which all light and life and being is but the thin and vanishing splendour of a falling star, the cold, the stillness, the silence - the infinite and final Night of space"

From The First Men in the Moon

It just sounded like the Ether on some days :-)

Thank you C.B. and thank you Theresa :-) X