About
What’s The Mossy Skull?
The actual, physical mossy skull depicted in the sidebar to the left can be found on the West-facing wall of the ruined structure known as the tzompantli platform, or Platform of the Skulls, at the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza.
The abstraction “The Mossy Skull” is something else. A blog. I am always entertaining hopes that its content will be intensely focused and literary, an aggressive, engrossing synthesis of angry environmentalism, gleeful pseudopagan spirituality and far-flung magic-realist ambition. Most of the time, though, my vision exceeds my capacity, and The Mossy Skull ends up just being a blog, featuring shining examples of my mediocre photography, news of my failures and triumphs in the publishing world, rants of widely varying subject and coherence, and the occasional long, comfortable silence.
Who’s The Mossy Skull?
That would be me. Michael J. DeLuca. Writer, reader, dreamer, designer, photographer, philosopher. Would-be ecoterrorist. False prophet. Liberal.
Why a mossy skull?
It’s a symbol for the resurgence of things. Resurrection, reincarnation, beauty from ugliness, idiocy from profundity, fecundity from decay. Nature is amoral, yet we, the only moral beings, spring from it. We apply our morality to nature, preserve or destroy nature at our whim, and yet at the end we go back to it, back to amorality and mud. And I’m happy with that. In fact I love it.
The mossy skull is a metaphor for my existence. If a rolling stone gathers no moss, then I am the kind of stone that plunks itself down in the middle of a field and lets moss grow, and watches the moss grow, and refuses to get up or budge until it comprehends why moss grows, how the moss grows, and what it means that moss grows.
I like perspective. Let the moss grow on my bones. I am not in them, and though I am of them, I am of the moss too.