...come, come, follow the pantheon of gods dancing and melting into a golden orb rolling up ahead, now only a dim glow, then darkness, as we churn the input inwardly while reflecting on, and constantly correcting, the media of reception, exploiting all the faculties of illicit (according to the status quo it threatens) discovery, from rigorous reason to irrational visceral convictions, inchoate intuitions, blind faith, sometimes inundated by images in acute visual attention, sometimes fasting from forms in a labyrinth of logic, now strictly submitting words to the self-effacing service of things, now surrendering to their siren songs to find the treasure at the ocean bed -- all in hard, rule bound, anguished mental labor thickly laced with much irresponsible wandering and free play by the rules of no known game or even the constraints of common sense (as newly discovered truth defies it until it becomes it) -- to arrive at and pinpoint the vortex of the modern world as scholars generally define it, its pure and generative source in one very particular fresco by Giotto, the view from the vanishing point. This fresco as a pentimento bleeds up ever more vividly in the otherwise paling palimpsest of the present. It calls us all to rescue it from the past, as we also ride it back to recover essentials that were left behind. The spiraling journey spiraling forever like an old-fashioned barbershop pole. My life long journey as a cipher to culture's quest for quiddity finally crystallized only to melt, evaporate, re-crystallize, melt, evaporate... in the river of this fresco, truly a river of knowledge and un-knowing in perfect measure, a fountain of spiritual youth (I notice my friends keep getting younger and younger), even as, paradoxically, when it floods the banks (to water the desert, you later notice), it turns the hairs of your soul, and possibly your head, quite white. This river reveres revery, and after living by it for a while, I remembered that I had at the age of three asked life what it wanted to be, and it showed me quite specifically and (though using different words) told me : (what it was before the trains bored through the mountains and tore up the plains to speed things up, but now trains take you back there (the wedges are the bridges)), a slow drip acid trip. And despite all the opposition I encountered, I decided to obey life. I found the sweetness of the carrot quite irresistible, but still, given the obstacles -- nobody can believe you're serious, and if they sense you are, that's worse than hilarious, you're subject to waves of nausea, trips can get dark, sometimes the only way out a forty years trek through a desert of arid linear logic in whose tangles time travels backwards and sideways -- I wouldn't have gone for it without the stick, that it seems a rather serious sin to disobey and betray life. The very thought one might do such a thing stirs up tidal waves of fear and trembling in any soul as such. (Whether or not you have one, you are one.)
Or just look at the pictures.
As you prefer.
