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The Skating Minister by Henry Raeburn |
As the ways
of chivalry,
so the current ways of doing commerce will one day be arcane. The mysteries of the round table were also the tabulations of exchange. And in days to come, should those days arrive, then the mysterious manner of knighthood may be at least as distant and at least as impenetrable as the current urgency of exploitation and electronic usury and the leverage of false scarcity.
Yet the troubadour sung trail of the chivalrous is a dream which still marks our trail. The city is mustered around heraldic banners and its names are heaped atop of old stories, and those squeezed out, paled, redrawn, elaborated and once more forgotten memorials still run their course within our consciousness.
Maybe these stories, sunk just below that which can be approached in the presumptions of rationality, are actually those forms around which the new myths of finance and banking take shape?
It all comes down to a moment when the red knight, the green knight, the white knight, and black knight commingle in a quantum affray. The white sheep are black sheep, the black sheep are white, they cross the river and reverse, they cross the river and reverse: the black sheep are white sheep, the white sheep are black.
I stand at the Cripple Gate, a solitary beggar awaiting sustenance from trade. Elusive trade of the city, my rags speak me as a poor traveller, a stranger. My manners are alien.
Grand towers arise, sparkle and glory, the king-in-deed. The architecture is sovereign in expression, and its role is to make beggars stand at a gate through which royalty will never pass.
Ownership is a drapery
and the deep is an act of the imagination
which cuts
a hole in the drapery.
I see through a hole the clouds. The enormous volume of these clouds, stretched height and length, give to the panorama an assurance of the land’s enormity.
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John Constable, “A Cloud Study, Sunset,” ca. 1821. |
And the volume of the land below, stretched and pushed, still conclude in the vastness of rock below. The visible land drapes across an invisible mantle.
The roots underneath and the clouds above and my time as a smeared volume running between.
There is a mereness to the meeting.
We can peek; these the meek scales, these the timings we cannot attain; these are journeys already made, the length which continues
beyond and outside of the seen moment.
Our imagination is continually absconding from the tumult of dimensions, but vastness is the duty of imagining.
Here is the urban drapery.
Here is the studded surface of attentiveness.
The chemical and the electronic gather as the armed do muster in the feld and as castle formed the manor. The robes of the legendary are not long enough to cover our immodest awareness.
Often the shallows are as impenetrable as the deeps.
Often the greatest depths will flit away without note, entirely insubstantial.
Often the surface of a building will stimulate one’s memory. Memory is another drapery.
The imaginable shallows are a drapery of heavy grief, sometimes lifted in order to flirt with the disowned and unseen depths.
Vastness is the calling, the horrified call. And response to the call devastates chronological time.
These devastation are moments of transition.
We are in transit.
We are devastated
therefore the drapery has been lifted ruffled cut
or otherwise
disturbed
other-wise is
and will be therefore
the irruption in moment.
Non-time in time and no-place in this place. Therefore the irruption of moment in moment is this
and this is forever transformative.
Estate map
The map of the estate is an eulogy for Utopia (which retreats with each brick laid down and yet might nonetheless exist, beyond the design, in some lived proportion not yet detailed and never quite imagined). The map of the estate is an epitaph (that architects and planners will habitually erect before some others’ tombstone while never once suspecting how they designed it for themselves). The map of the estate is an epiphany of symbols and silence in the long _ alarmed _ night.
Sorry, copyright restrictions prevent us from showing this artwork here
in a rainy town.
Thus – Thought will erase itself in event – Pattern.
The liquidity of thought will erode or otherwise attack any concrete expression. Through the dumping ground of brain and mineral heart this fluid, disallowed from common or open flow, is a leachate in which magnificent and terrible residues are dissolved, to be then deposited in the elsewhere of our attempted communication. If you cannot bring yourself to God then at least be wary of all other substitutes.
There is an injustice in having to be in one place at one time. One suspects that we are creatures destined to be multiple and connected; all points, all places. It is discovered that a window in a gothic cathedral can be described as “not a hole in a wall but the abolition of the wall.”
The concierge says that the key is functioning perfectly. Perhaps it is the door that is causing you problems?