I am asking, and my hands work in service to the questions. Even when the question is, how to feel into present and yet unobserved space, into the invisible.  No one has ever asked me what I like about Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc,

perhaps they think it’s the scented realism of her soft peach flesh,

or her listening, crackling faith,

when in fact it is the knight and the angel painted

knock knock knock, fading in and out of the real better than any Magritte, in what’s the year please, 1879, because the vision is the vision.

I see my red boots empty of me, the right one fainted with a sock over its exhausted eyes, and the left one asleep standing up like a short order cook on the night clock.  They cast cool blue diagonal shadows alongside the metal legs of my tall bench.

What does the maker think, except to make?  Perhaps to solder?

Buckminster points out that ways of calculating evolve to include new abilities to see into certain inquires. He cites the fact that division and multiplication are impossible with Roman numerals, and that it wasn’t until “Arabic numerals came into the Mediterranean world” that calculation with numerals became possible, by way of the notion of cyphers.  Roman numerals were used entirely for scoring, as in tick, tick, tick, a mark for each sheep, or wooden log, or night.  The shift from Roman to Arabic numerals is the shift from numerals that only work by keeping count, to numerals that work for calculating.  And the difference is of course conceptual.  It’s not that all those Roman sticks don’t line up right to enable calculation. or that the curves in Arabic symbols make certain mathematical functions possible. Maybe the shamanic sense of Eastern thought, of these numerals as mystical portals to the minds that penned them. Needless to say it’s not a simple blending of the numerical and mathematical, and Buckminster gingerly unweaves our blind assumption that numerals as we know them today reveal reality and its limits.

The place, this layer where the fascia separates from the flesh,  the tooth from the gum, the lip from the cheek, this place where the together comes apart like layers of mica the traces the pictures in these traces, the sequence of development, anti-accretion, deconstruction, these are the record keepers, like triangles in a quartz crystal, multiple axes, the triangles in the mineral reveal particular possible planes with the axes on so very many dimensions, let’s not forget the ones we don’t know how to measure yet.

The mind will find a picture in the branches, the clouds, the 26 letters of the alphabet, the light, the mind will find stories so real they really happen.

Machine you would gently weep if you could turn your eyeball outside the confines of your aluminum tray, to the north, you would see all our screen and wire materials sorted in a lovely workable fashion. There is still a barracks of wire and screen and electrical wiring, and even four glass objects, that needs slow, mindful sorting.  Taskliness.  In the great infinite beyond it will not be needed, and until then, if you want something done, give it to a busy person.  I will be completing six pods by 1:45, yessiree.  So that I can be done with them, box checked.  All this tending to pass through it to a more creative, less beholden mindspace,  don’t separate them, I know I know but i’d rather be doing the optics.