I went down to run the body, sank in the colored maps of arteries and veins. I ended on my belly descending a massif of a million lights, cities, hotbeds, houses, colored streets. Top-built labyrinths and lightning rods, cones of light flashed like streets and sky. Scattered about its limbs were cities, to show the scale no one can see. The eyes saw ancient quarries, tunnels and caverns underneath. It was a city of dreams made fertile from the paradise fallen to ruin. Waking existence led down millenniums written in a century, a year, a day, aware and unaware of thought put before in words.
You had to slip through holes to wriggle out in evening. Scissoring out dripping red insulation, cutting black bags out of the wall like stones, I pry the cracks between concrete, metal and wood. Sometimes mice droppings fall out at my feet. I push up, rebalance, ease down another yard, feet sticking out among fans and chairs with the smell of rot musk. Thinking to dismantle the image of the word machine, sighs of breath get me up and the blast feels good.
The Cherubim Collection houses survived exiles in warehouses, industrial residences of many stories. Passages unguarded above and below form a colony of clapboards large and abandoned. It is a dream yard of roofed parking lots, shacks and another warehouse unsecured, never locked, occupied by vagrants, migrants, gypsies, tenants, homeless, squatters, working men, blacksmiths, artists. They set up tables under the eaves. With so many people in small spaces and close quarter the shops in this bazaar are posters of resistance. We first see the paintings in the apartments below but tour the upper stories too, unfinished, rickety, dangerous with catwalks but traversable. The house has never been properly finished, just enough so it won’t get too wet in the rain. I have been up there myself so it is more or less possible among so many more parts and pieces, a little like the old Barnes Museum in Merion, the only other collection where pieces cram and crock together, crowds milling shoulder to shoulder to pass on. Obviously they can’t do that without apology. The name tags are also missing. As for the photography, it is a variable cloudy day when we pass through.
Anyone returning after years of absence will know this place with their eyes closed. It won’t matter if it’s only imagined. We feel the rhythmic beat. People who arrive wonder how they could not have known. That is always so. One person in this crowd had loosed a bull that ran the street without a leash. If you think that in this Taurobolium is the knowledge that you could be gored, know that when you spend the day chasing the world in front of you as a tail in the sky, and when you see it in the air you repeat with Noah, Daniel, Job and the wise King of Tyre, as if you precede them when you follow and live in a fall of Jerusalem that leads captive those who know. They know the thing you sleep beside is a prophetic topography and a restructuring of moral geography/geology on the other.
To forget something that doesn’t officially exist, this state as an end in itself that sent a flow of expatriates to flee to the West—not quickly, but in achingly slow motion advance from its camps among wolves where dark purple blotched the eyes and rumors were rife as the numbers swelled, various authorities demanded papers of refugees from their big briefcase. Doors opened and closed to the possibility of laying hands on the right piece of paper to enable escape, that salvic lure before the border closed for good. Changing the direction of the compass, the collective to transfigure the human overcame all relation, escape was uncertain, but it was not by paper.
The Cherubim Collection combines geography, morality and prophecy into a Taurobolium, a sacrifice of a bull. The eye and snout are Seattle Amazonia, but parts of CA gone. Some think Baja is the tail, but it’s gone. Seattle is the head, but people see different tails. Where states and nations represent moral agencies the question is open as to what it portends. You can look for where you live in this country and prophesy yourself, figure out how it’s going to go for you in the life and afterlife posed. Impose a latitude and longitude map on top and check your coordinates, but be aware that the map is always moving slower than the eye can see.
Consider the sacrifice of nations in the Taurobolium, which is more than just nations, but continents, world and space. To be clear, this is all a concept of segmentation. Sometimes it is called allegory or symbolism, but the literal facts take a literal reading, even if these are as unbelievable as if Henry Ford had started his own race of men. These together form a Taurobolium sacrifice of space, the cosmos, which entertainment is as real as its plan. The absolute denial surrounding these ideas is charged with irreality justified by the opposition that opposes them. In the sacred texts of the beasts coming up from the sea we are being asked to understand that animals represent nations and that nations represent a complex of states of the mind of evil, not of good, and that the sacrifice of nations by the global world priests serves the purpose of their conspiracy. So America is the bull sacrificed for this world to achieve.
The Taurobolium continental U.S. nicely contorts as an east west rectangle figure of a bull. Contrast it to Chile north and south, the land figure of a sea horse. These always emerge from the work at hand. More naturalistically not a hundred acres of first prairie exist. Ten feet of topsoil washed to the sea. The impervious runoff of desert cities might be the white waste of Houston or Dallas, barren a hundred years. How much myth is fact? Buffalo gone, the mountains behind? Can the Great Lakes drain, the sea, Austin sink? And what of these myth mountain that geological physiognomy most distorts, the Orocopedia blue schist assemblage and the Pelona schist along the fault, like the piercing point used to construct the first offset?
Down and down I followed the years of this descent. That’s what they called Abel descended from Adam and Eve and Isaac and Ishmael descended from Abraham, Jacob and Esau descended in Isaac. Backtrack forward, up and down the Cherubim, palm trees and every cherub a two faced lion and man. The doors that open from that House have two leaves and thick planks, three stories and other garments. To walk the vision where they put away the carcass of kings that the dream kidneys hide in plain sight. Looking east from the House and the law of the House to the way of the gate the Prince will appear. Rest in peace to measure the pattern, the difference between the body and profane. No wine offerings or blood worship here. The river comes from the east and flows to the sea, rises first to the ankles then to the loins. Many trees on both sides fruit according to the months, one each for food and medicine because the water flows out from the House of Oblation, holy, four square possessing the city and the name of the city, for Jahu is there.
Jahrusalem! As if commanded, a cup bearer entered that city with Alexander, toured the walls with Darius the Persian, Darius Nothus, intermarried with inhabitants of the land. I have Nennius for consolation in Britain for artist talk, but not words. At port we pass for the sailors, images pretext light, reshaping escapes, fantasy boats and fable captains, visas for the countries of Atlas and passports for countries that do not but will exist.
Captives in the last phase of this perigee, like pilots shot down who bombed cities and crashed and were brought to account for execution, I fall to my knees. My culpability and others whose dust swirls the wind is cast into sea. I am carbon and gas reassembled. We should tolerate such a contrary state in the conduct of our lives. Tramped alive with marching feet, a reconstitution of the world repeats, whose grave is this, this one and this? Ask me, I know them. I know the space and time where Hierosolyma (32f) precedes my own. Antares that bother and Betelgeuse were pressing on my head. The solar system too, planets and moons. Man, they cannot decide, but every memory helps. One transcendent, some good dreams, the list is long. How did Adam sustain his teeth? How do I weep for the stones in the building? The west wall of Jerusalem is on my head. The geologic layers, the Babylonian Talmuds. The Lehmann discontinuit, the Mohorovičić discontinuity. I am walking on its surface, walking water in which I sink, which gives some meaning of Leviathan and Jonah. And Jesus! 45 stone courses, 28 above and 17 underground.
Blue Labyrinths 