{"id":3567,"date":"2019-11-11T11:49:17","date_gmt":"2019-11-11T16:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=3567"},"modified":"2019-11-11T11:55:15","modified_gmt":"2019-11-11T16:55:15","slug":"of-ot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=3567","title":{"rendered":"of Ot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This little story is complicated and digressive, but well worth trying to put together. It begins maybe a dozen years ago, in a taxi in Providence RI, a city that has a lot of public sculpture and other art stuff to look at. We passed by a particularly arresting sculptural creation and one of us said &#8220;What&#8217;s <i>that<\/i>?&#8221; and the taxi driver said &#8220;That? That&#8217;s <i>ot<\/i>&#8221; and thus the term <b>ot<\/b> was implanted into the Lexicon.<\/p>\n<p>\nSo yesterday morning one of the blogs I follow pointed to <a href=\"https:\/\/ruinsmami.tumblr.com\/post\/178710306179\/2019-is-almost-over-and-all-i-gotta-say-is-what\">another tumblr<\/a> with the stark message<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>2019 is almost over and all I gotta say is what the fuck was that<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>which expresses succinctly one of the mental states into which I occasionally stumble.<\/p>\n<p>\nAnd the next though that coursed through my mind was<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I take refuge in Ot<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Where do these things come from? What imp instantiates them, sends them into Consciousness, which then offers them up to me to play with, these illusions and allusions that connect things to improbable other things?<\/p>\n<p>\nThe next thought was<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>hmmm. &#8220;take refuge in&#8221;&#8230; <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>which of course is a formula in Buddhist practice (one takes refuge in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha), and <i>that<\/i> led to the realization that I was a bit less clear about this Dharma thing than I thought I should be, so a brief Wikipedia digression happened, and <i>that<\/i> led to an article on the Vedic concept of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/%E1%B9%9Ata\">&#x1E5A;ta<\/a> (&#8220;the order that makes life and universe possible&#8221;, which seems to be nothing more or less than the Tao, innit?). That Sanskrit &#x1E5A; phoneme is &#8220;a vocalist r, like that in pert or dirt, when pronounced with a rhotic r, e.g. as in American&#8230;&#8221;, but in Providence or Boston dialect would be <i>non-rhotic<\/i> [caa, paak, ot&#8230;]. And \/&#x1E5A;ta\/ can be glossed as &#8216;Truth&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>\nAnd so on.<\/p>\n<p>\nThis <b>Ot<\/b> in which I claim to take refuge is well known to whatever readers of this blog there may be out there. Yesterday produced several more examples:<center><br \/>\n<a data-flickr-embed=\"true\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/blackmerh\/49045025278\/in\/dateposted-family\/\" title=\"10xi1908\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/49045025278_f3015aa53c_z.jpg\" width=\"640\" height=\"459\" alt=\"10xi1908\"><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><br \/>admonishing the young<\/p>\n<p>\n<a data-flickr-embed=\"true\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/blackmerh\/49045502476\/in\/dateposted-family\/\" title=\"10xi1903\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/49045502476_3ccd584a36_z.jpg\" width=\"427\" height=\"640\" alt=\"10xi1903\"><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><br \/>punk sensibilities<\/p>\n<p>\n<a data-flickr-embed=\"true\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/blackmerh\/49045914513\/in\/dateposted-family\/\" title=\"alien\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/49045914513_22588b553e_z.jpg\" width=\"640\" height=\"614\" alt=\"alien\"><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><br \/>(name it and you can keep it)<\/p>\n<p>\n<\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This little story is complicated and digressive, but well worth trying to put together. It begins maybe a dozen years ago, in a taxi in Providence RI, a city that has a lot of public sculpture and other art stuff to look at. We passed by a particularly arresting sculptural creation and one of us [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,4,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lexicon","category-metastuff","category-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3567"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3573,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3567\/revisions\/3573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}