THE PRE FLOOD TELEPHONE

by Richard Sharpe Shaver

Many rocks, when sawed, show a black and white miniature content like the above.

All such art is both humorous and ambiguous. By ambiguous, I mean it is several faces in one. This ambiguous multiplicity is evidently it's own language of pictures.

If one knew all their symbols, these faces (like the one seen when the big woman talking is turned upside down, who looks like a henpecked husband listening or trying to get a word in edgewise). Turned left side down, there are half a dozen characters who all seem interested in the phone orifice. This photo is a re-photo, often called a crop ... but in this case, it is a re-photo of a small part of the original print in order to isolate the area from all the other distracting pictures.

A boy in a too big cap is seen holding the instrument. One wonders just how it varied from the modern telephone, and what the differences were.

Hair and hats are often in these silhouette pictorials, very familiar in style, and if infinitely more recent than they are.

This familiarity of style and hairdo is, I believe, just one more example of a little known fact of life. That "fact" is hereditary memory guiding our dress and behavior much more so than we realize. We act and dress as we do because our most remote ancestors did so, too, but we don't know this.

To us, it's all new.

©Shavertron/Richard Toronto


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