The Monkey Boy and The Higgs Boson

By Wayne Brown
The Monkey Boy Jesus: Fresco of Jesus famously "fixed" 
"About the only thing the original fresco shares with Cecilia Jimenez’s touch-up is the wall it is painted on. The work, called Ecce Homo, or Behold the Man in English, is now referred to as the Monkey Boy of Borja. At first church officials and townsfolk were horrified." -- PRI, The World

We started touching up the image of Jesus as soon as He appeared in person in Galilee 2,000 years ago. The process got under way in earnest after He was executed by the Romans.


Church of the Holy Sepulchre
The Church of the Holy Sepuchre is a must-see if you are on a tour of the Holy Land. Jesus was born here, or perhaps died here.  Depending on the brochure you read, you can picture the simple stable or the wooden cross that once stood here.

This is what I picture when I'm thinking about how we encrust precious things with layer after layer of our own artistry. Discovering traces of the real Jesus beneath all this jewelry is akin to "discovering" of the Higgs Boson in the faint traces it leaves in billions of collisions with particles we can see if we look very closely with eyes trained to see them.

The cosmic impact of Jesus' passage through our world left traces in history that are unmistakable  to those with eyes trained to see them. 

Sadly, when we think of Jesus (if we ever do) most of us see the guy on the left as the "real" Jesus and we look to the heavily bejeweled version of his life in the New Testament to learn his teachings. As for me, I try to observe the traces of His impact throughout history and in my own life. This is a process for the "trained eye" and the open heart. I can never hope to do more than see Him a tiny bit more clearly than the lady who who created the Monkey Boy fresco. But that tiny bit has still been more than enough to completely change my life.

P. S. Archaeologists are busy excavating down to the actual tomb, moving aside the layers of devotional encapsulation. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Facebook and Bing - A Killer Combination

By Wayne Brown
Image
 This is a partial list of groups I belong to that focus on Generative AI art: Facebook creates community. I use BING as a kind of Generative AI university: BING U.  I prefer the role of student, so my job is to find good teachers. Think of me as the guy who shows you around the campus and knows his way around, but he's a student himself. Microsoft BING is free and very powerful. It's an excellent way to learn Generative AI and a standard tool that everyone in my imaginary school has. The way to find a teacher is to see their work in a Facebook group. Then, save the picture that caught your eye in a Word document (or document editor of your choice). For example ... Joe McIntosh What we have found here is not only the prompt for the picture but a teacher who shares the prompts for all his pictures. Look for artists who work primarily with BING. Don't get distracted by other platforms or techniques. Learn to do one thing well before shopping for better tools. The best Facebo
Read more

A Process ...

By Wayne Brown
Image
She will be 105 in September. She struggles to recognize her four children, let alone her countless grandchildren. Today, she said, "Nobody told me how to die." She has always wanted to die in her own home, an oversized place that has always had room for an endless parade of visitors. She has always been very "social." Although she struggles to remember the old friends dropping by, she chats happily "on automatic." There are a lot of relatives. She was raised on a farm near North Battleford, Saskatchewan, where her Russian parents raised 16 children. I asked "AI" - specifically Claude 3 Sonnet , to describe this situation in a short essay. I have taken the liberty of letting Grammarly , my AI writing assistant, make a few corrections to Sonnet's purple prose. This is the slightly edited version: She sits in  the twilight of her extraordinary life, a living embodiment of resilience and grace. At 105 years old, her eyes, dimmed by time, still h
Read more

Warp Speed Generative AI

By Wayne Brown
Image
Jump to Warp Speed Warp 2 Warp 3 Warp 4 "Warp Speed"  Illustration of " Language is a Virus " Laurie Anderson Completed in the time it takes to perform the song For a very long time, I have tried to master information processing tools and "wire" them together into a "machine" that suits my purpose. "Warp Speed Generative AI" combines several powerful families of AI tools to turn an idea into one or more pictures. Along the way, we get an explanation of the original idea, references and a detailed explanation of the style. I call it "Warp speed" because AI seems to give me whiplash as it takes my idea and runs with it. I just hang on and enjoy the ride. "Warp Speed" is a response to the current obsession with prompts: how to write them, when to share them, how to monetize them, what books to read, what courses to take and so forth. AI can write pretty good prompts. "Prompt Engineering" is an endangered speci
Read more