#191 Les muscles célestes

The cavity in the
skull over-
flows with
the training routines
of Italian body-
builders. But where
is its zenith in
relation to the observer?

#190 Titanic Days

Torn from Picasso, &
further torn—bather
from sea, or mother

from baby. The clothes
torn from her. Then
ravaged. About to be.

Victim & aggressor. A
classic dialectic. Shadow
given substance, form

taken on. Is classical.
Modern. Zeus in a
business suit? No

less likely than white
bull, white swan, a
shower of gold. He

falls across her, he falls
upon her. One outline.
The form taken on is

taken from Goya, Kronos
devouring one of his
children. Titanic days.

#189 The Use of Speech

"A nondescript
form can often
replace the
image of an
object." &. "Some-
times the name
of an object
can replace an
image." Linnaeus
double-coded.
A personal
taxonomy.

#188 The Betrayal of Images (2)

               for Michel Foucault
          There is this
          treacherous space
          between the image
          & the text that
          many have misread &
          fallen into. I stand
          well back, let others
          with more sure footing
          describe it to me.
 

#187 The Famous Man

Inset in velvet in-
side a box, the
bilboquet morphs. Chess
pieces, skittles perhaps. The
tower is de Chirico. The fourth
wall of the theater is partially
open. The back wall
is night. All around
an Escher frame.
A wounded bison
has been painted on the
wall just around a slight
curve in the cave. Long
ago. Cannot be seen.
Water drips, has dripped
through the roof ever
since, maybe before
the bison, after it
was seen, was
captured. A city
has grown up. The
man is stalactite. Per-
haps bat. Either way
is famous. Not as
famous as the bison.

#186 The False Mirror (2)

Given a list
of words. Asked
to repeat them
back. A test
for veridical
memory. Eye,
reflection, looking-
& cheval-glass,
sky. Alice. All
synonyms of. Or.
Associated with.
Not included. Her
initial answer. The
thought made
visible. Mirror.

#185 The Happy Donor

Aporia. The man
a product of a past
which was. Never
his. Constructed
from: metaphors
in a language no-
one speaks. Not:
any more. De-
constructed to
display symbols.
Not symbolic of
anything. Are
reference, points
to earlier paintings.
First used. Were
simple objects.
Given here. All
together. Symbolize
the painter. Not the
man. A bell. Out-
side the man. Is
real. Is the product
of a past. Was real.
Outside the man
the man is real. The
bell rings silently
to announce the dis-
mantling of its own
rhetoric. Aporia.

#184 Les Promenades d'Euclide

The first events in the nursery are metamorphosis & settlement. Vertical fluxes vary over various timescales but retain the essential features of prediction equations—satisfying the conservation of mass & total energy. Any method that alters the data, whether by swapping, random noise or erasure decoding, is rejected by the differential circuitry. A monosyllabic type must produce harmony if the enclitic is unelided. As yet, there are no significant rock/non-rock preferences.

It's all pretty standard practice, but it's no surprise that a lot of money & brainpower are going toward customizing supply chain solutions. Restrooms are open to the public & are wheelchair accessible—motorcycle seats can be very uncomfortable. The saving grace of the nuclear family in history was the extended family that surrounded it.

By the time that David Bowie took his final bow from the whole touring scene at London's Hammersmith Odeon in July 1973, efforts to bridge the gap between phenomenology & the principles derived from perturbative & nonperturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD) were an essential part of American pop culture.

New Year's Day this year fell on the Day of the Rat. The structure of the Euclidean algorithm defines a family of rhythms which encompass over forty timelines from traditional world music. The force between quarks does not diminish as they are separated.

#183 Clear Ideas

Returning to the Moon is the key to humanity's long-term future in space.

It is a vertical project, akin to climbing a ladder. Each step has its own name, its own symbol. The symbols are not visual representations of the naming words. Nor are the names descriptive of the activity of the step. There are no milestones, only spaces between the steps.

Memory retains them thus, & can produce them to the mind whenever it has occasion to consider them.

The first step is called "A control toolbox automatically loading for no reason." The sea is its avatar.

#182 The Ready-Made Bouquet

Ever the
bourgeois, never
daring to be seen
out wearing Botticelli's
naked Venus. Leave
her at home on her
halfshell, with the
clip-on ties. Wear
the clothed one. &
even then embarrassed.
Worn behind. So that.
One or the other. Her,
or his face. Never
both together.

#181 The Discovery of Fire (2)

In the evening, before the sun set, she would write down those things that had caught her interest during the day. At one time or another she had noticed that she could tell how long she’d been away from home, how long before she had to head back, by the length of the shadows & the direction in which they pointed; how when seen through the smoke from bushfires the sun had a form to it. She noted the way animals tracked & trapped, or how they hid from one another, beneath surfaces or assuming the colour of them. She worked out the cycles of plants, & was no longer surprised by the way fish would reappear from beneath the surface of dry lagoons when they started filling with rain.

Today, as the heavy rain clouds moved down from the north — direction was a concept she was still formulating, but she knew where the sun rose & where it set, & she also knew that, at different times, if she stood facing the sunrise, the hot wetness would come from that side of her face, & the even hotter dryness would approach from the other — she saw a bolt of lightning strike a tree, setting the oil inside it alight. She recalled a smaller spark she had once seen, when a flint axe brandished in anger had struck a cliff of a particular rock rather than the head at which it was aimed. She extrapolated; & realised that if she could find something combustible to trap the spark in she would no longer have to wait to find fire in the wild, would be spared the task of nurturing it, keeping it alive, something that took her away from the composite act of gathering food, information, insight. By forcing two objects into contact with one another she could produce something greater than them both, usually invisible, but there in the air, waiting to be called forth.

In this way Promethea discovered, first, poetry, & then fire.