Sherry Salman

Eating Ashes Yesterday someone told me she dreamt she ate her dead mother’s ashes. I wondered what this meant. Today Our Lady burned. Now I wonder What if we ate her ashes, before Our Lady rises from those ashes, anew in phoenix-like splendor?…

Four new Democratic House members — from left, Jahana Hayes, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Lauren Underwood (in background) and Katie Hill — went searching the Capitol for Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader.CreditCreditTom…

Moved to do something constructive with my anger and sadness about the SCOTUS debacle, I was reminded of work I’d done awhile back on The Furies of classical Greek myth and tragedy, and the ways in which the Western solution that we’ve cobbled together in response to the power of fury’s rage  has been fragile at best, outright deadly at worst.                            “That they could treat me so!                             I, the mind of the past, to be driven under the ground, outcast like dirt!                                        The wind I breathe is fury and utter hate.” …

“Am Not I a Fly Like Thee?”, 2018, Alexandra Eldridge While Trump’s Department of the Interior has its sights set on rolling back the 1973 Endangered Species Act  the noblest of the landmark environmental statutes enacted in recent history, it seemed like a good time to work on a modern bestiary.  …

  The Cloud of Unknowing, mixed media painting, Alexandra Eldridge, 2008 “All are clear, I alone am clouded,” is the first line of the last paragraph in Jung’s final book, his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.  …

Cover illustration, “A Modern Monster” by Craig & Karl, 2018, Science, Vol. 359, Issue 6372 It’s been 200 years since Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein was written, and the monster lives on in the form of Frankenbook.…

Set design for Scheherazade, (Ballet Russes), Leon Bakst How do we stay sane and humane in what feels like an insane world? Finding the deeper stories running underneath the runaway stories on the nightly news, well, for me it makes the difference between sanity and madness.…

The Old Jester, Pablo Picasso, 1963. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © 2018 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York When it comes to the complexities of human nature, Oscar Wilde was rarely wrong.…

In this thoroughly of the moment book, Salman sees the approaching reckoning with our slouching monster headed toward its postmodern Bethlehem as a confrontation with imagination itself, rather than with the parade of ideas, religions, or cultural and political systems that history has presented through the veil of Maya.

The book shines…the strong emphasis on imagination and imagery is one of the powerhouses of her argument which is to come to terms with imagination and its dreams of totality. Her final chapter is an excellent set of steps for delving into the potential sense of living in a meaningless, or uncentered world… Salman provides an exceptional journey detailing how we seek to explain such a world by drawing on history, philosophy, psychology, and art.