Only problem with the hippie approach was that the flowers died without water, and people didn't always know what the hippies meant by "love." CATS who CROCHET, on the other hand, are making things that last, some from a year or so ago, I've been told, and usually our friends and neighbors remember what they symoblized when we gave them. A Perfect World: We didn't litter; we didn't deface anyone's property; and we did share a message of love and caring.

And it all started with sharing bits of crochet with our neighbor's children, along with the bit of candy and quarters for UNICEF at Halloween. Why, that's how I met Damian and Steph! They just love Halloween. So we had this all to share. Thanks to the children and the CATS, it's now growing into a cross-country project. jeanne

"This is an e-mail we received:"

To Whom it May Concern,

Several knitted items were recently found at the Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site bearing tags linked to your KnittedLandscape website. Please be advised that leaving items and/or advertising on the grounds of National Historic Sites is prohibited by Title 36 of the Code of Federal Regulations, sections 2.22 (abandoning property) and 2.37 (noncommercial soliciting).

While I find your "knit graffiti" an interesting social experiment on a personal level, I do enforce these regulations and advise you not to leave your items on federal property again. The current fine for disobeying each regulation is $75.00, and I hope that you will help spread the word so that others may avoid such actions. Thank you for your future cooperation.

..[name]
LE Ranger
Roosevelt/Vanderbilt NHS

And here's really "thinking out of the box":

Albert O. Hirschman, 1991 The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-76867-1 (cloth) and ISBN 0-674-76868-X (paper). An excellent practical discussion of how liberals and conservatives shout at one another without really saying anything. The one-sided argument, par excellence. Mature reading, but worth the effort to understand public discourse as it often takes place, especially in the seats of government. jeanne

The_Imaginary_and_French_Culture "Use for the imaginary of 'the adjective as a noun can...be traced to the works of the novelist Andre Gide...[and] was probably given greater currency by [Sartre's] L'Imaginaire '. . .. In Lacan's hands, the Imaginary came close to being an omnivorously colonising interpretive machine: thus Rene Girard regretted that 'To the Lacanian, whatever I call mimetic must correspond to..."capture par l'imaginaire". . ..

With the post-Lacanian fissiparous tendencies of his "schools", the term can perhaps return to the general culture, as when the philosopher Deleuze defines the imaginary "by games of mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification and projection, always in the mode of the double."[25]" . . ."^ Deleuze (1972, 172)"

When I send you to Wikipedia at this stage of site development, I mean for you to recognize Wikipedia as a developing resource. This Wikipedia page gives you a good sense of how "the imaginary" seems to me to be used by postmodern therapists, who work with Lacan. I expect this resource to be used by self-motivated adults who will explore the topic further or e-mail me to ask for more extensive sources. No intention to endorse as "correct" the interpretation given.

I understand the imaginary in this noun form to suggest the importance of the visual to our communication of meaning. It is a part of my understanding of the many-faceted authorship of concepts and understandings that we assume originate with any visual object, signified or not. jeanne