There is an arresting description in
Zen-Brain Reflections by James H. Austin that calls to mind over a wide arc of reading about the "Siena Sieve" portrait of Queen Elizabeth I that serves as a frontispiece to Lowell Gallagher's
Medusa's Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance. One mentions a sieve; the other depicts the monarch holding one.
The GABA cap can close and open, acting sometimes as a shield, sometimes as a sieve.
No other connection but the "sieve" as a concept or representation for the workings of the mind. And culinary memories of sifting or of draining, of actually shaking a sieve.
And so for day 418
04.02.2008