Welcome to the rat haus reality gallery
hello. i'm mr. tillo,
and i'll be yer host
| your mother and my mother are both mothers |
| --Curly Howard |
1stfloor
complete, minus lights [February, 1982]
3rd floor
complete, including lights [May]
two stories later, the floors were starting to pile up. it was important
to always be visible somewhere in the pic'cha so a "scale" reference
wood convince friends far away this house was "real" and not some sort
of visual trick being played on their red eye-balls. immediately in
front of where i'm running, is the roof above the 3rd floor mawstah
bedroom. this is the only room in the whole house spanning the
entire length of either front-to-back, or side-to-side distance. dig
that classy pentagonal gable in the corner closest to da camera's eye, hey?
guy i hired to do the labor [May]
i employed a down-and-out old who-mahn (ferengi pronounciation) friend to do
most of the back-breaking labor on this project. he had that peculiar streak
of vanity most who-mahns are quite susceptible to, so i agreed to let him have
one self-portrait made after the 3rd floor was finished before beginning the
fourth-fifth floors/roof. and i, the ever-present scale, am still visible
peeking out of the 2nd floor bathrum. s'pose i've picked up some
of his vanity in this endeavor.
complete [September]
by this time, we figured any photog's wood be most swank taken outside rather
than in the musty rarified air of the massive who-mahn "ware-houses" we had
been "constructing" in up to that point. here one can see the electrical
wire "snake" for the 32 lights throughout all five floors. the
vantage point here is the backside of the house. i'm carefully choosing
my footing across the joists for the soon-to-be-covered-by-planking back
porch.
[October]
this set o' pic'cha's add an extra dimension to the rat haus
reality "mystique", as one of the who-mahn's ware-houses is
nearby-visible as well. it's architectural style and form lends a sort of
visual continuity to the rat haus itself with it's "who-mahn realism" features
being heightened by the juxtaposition with the actual who-mahn edifice
in the background. this set o' pic'cha's manifested the highest
incarnation of rat haus reality--who-mahn style, accomplished
by their visual recording devices. others from this day are also
included below and are some of my all-time fave's.
have always enjoyed the geometries visible and suggested by
the unfinished-but-framed-in fourth and fifth "floors" attic space. in
this shot, one instance of the triangular pat'ins abounding
throughout the roof structure is emphasized, with yers truly doing
his walkabout-for-who-mahn-recording-device in the center of it. my
who-mahn friend-builder is visible in the background, but, the other
who-mahn at the backside of the recording device, is also to be
commended for his perceptive capacities with regard to composing the
mise en scène.
and moment for reflection
this was recorded back in the early september series. i had been reviewing
the recent work's results and needed to stop for a moment. in case yer not
aware of it, we not only are constantly stopping to wash our heads and
bodies for reasons of physical health, but, we also engage in this activity
to enable "stepping out" of the i'm so bizi and don't have any time
thought-stream who-mahns raised in industrial cultures seem to be so
deeply thrall to. our unner'tanding of this dimension of being is that
the who-mahn activity occuring on this planet related to such quaint
concepts as "progress is good", "psychological evolution is occuring",
and "becoming [better, peaceful, etc.] is desireable" is a denial of
the "what is actuality of existence. perhaps more of you
are beginning to see the fact of this.
a practice for balance & groundedness
taken at the same time as the "welcome" shot at the very beginning of this
gallery, this yogic stretch provides a wealth of access to flow
energy. this is a label i use to stand-in for a process of being
where, that which you who-mahn's inwardly think of as "the self", is
suspended in various ways on the brink of the unknown. in such a state
there is a dying to the long-standing assumption that "we are all
individuals, inwardly separate and different from `each other'". with such
a dissolution, an opening occurs into a realm who-mahn thought (meaning
the response of memory ) cannot grasp hold of--there is no longer
a division between one's thought's, anger, depression, fear, excitement,
anxiety, elation, grief, enthusiam, despair, and one's "self". there is
no longer a "me", which, by it's very existence, automatically creates
all else as the "not me". this is where all the division begins which
then flows as a river outwardly into the world those of us raised in
industrialized cultures daily are creating with evermore conflict and
fragmentation. yes, even tho i am a rat, i have been with such who-mahns
long enuff to begin to be very influenced by this construct thought calls
"the self". the level of self-interest driving most feverishly the bulk
of human activity on this Mother Earth at this time, did not used to
exist as intensely as it does now. it may yet be possible to die to
this incoherent incarnation of self-interest and provide an increased
opening for the seventh generation yet unborn.
involves swabbin' all the decks
i admit it--i've got this thing about our brothers and sisters you call
sponges. they're SOO GORGEOUS throughout their natural home
in the sea. i've seen a couple of different places where tremendously
diverse communities thrive and rejoice in their lives of swaying and
dancing to the fundamental beat of water's pulse. even after they've been
killed and collected by who-mahns, and then cut into right-angled volumes,
their exquisite beauty is still breathtaking, with the richly complex and
intricate structures revealed along all sides of such pre-fabed who-mahn
"tools". here i was attempting to lift a sponge piece up onto the first
floor, but the size my friend-builder had provided me wasn't the proper
scale. still, the feeling and closeness of such spongeness was quite
invigorating and while this was being recorded, i began to hear the
ocean's pulse that this part of a sponge sister had danced so passionately
to not very long before. it started to carry me away as well.
listening to
the ever-present bird chorus symphony
how often i've caught myself not sensing the world in all its myraid
forms! --and then stopping whatever-it-is to observe the inifitude of
being occurring. here the winged-one's chorus transfixed me for some
indeterminant period of time. their song is always so rich in depth and
intensity, both each participant's, as well as the whole of their sonorous
rhapsody. they are always there to lift and buoy up, soothe and
excite. this and the next pic'cha both make effective use again of
the who-mahn ware-house in the background to further convey that rat haus
reality--who-mahn style.
this image struck my vanity so deftly: the tail's curve, uplifted paw,
curving upper body off to the right, whisker's pleasing evidence, mouth
visibly demonstrative, semi-profile flattering--all appealing to my
who-mahn-learned trait of self-interest stemming from a sense of lack
of inner substantiality. the more i look the more i observe that most
of the time who-mahn's are, by their actions, attempting to compenstate
for a feeling that they "don't measure up" or "are not very good" in
comparison to someone else whom they think is "better" than they
are. this preoccupation with comparison is one of the primary ways
who-mahns appear to avoid or escape from the actuality of being. my good
friend, Krishnamurti, articulated
this very well
when he said, "Not knowing oneself deeply, profoundly, is ignorance; and
you cannot know yourself if you cannot look at yourself, see yourself
actually as you are, without any distortion, without any wish to
change. Then what you see is transformed because the distance between
the observer and the observed is removed and hence there is no conflict."
framed almost in the rect-
-anglular porch threshold
this porch is one of my fave parts of the rat haus. there's nothing
like a back porch to sit/lie/stretch out upon and take in the world,
freer from the frenzy of hustle-bustle biziness which appears
to be taking up more and more of the space of being on this mother
earth of all life exploring itself here.
there are a great deal more photogs of this endeavor. i'll have to see if i can interest my who-mahn friend in going back through the many "proof sheets" he's got and make prints to "round out" more of the history of this edifice.October 9, 1994.
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