Things have sped into a blur...It's both good and bad to be a foreigner...Our identities...given a certain context, are plastic,(perhaps, that I believe this, is my greatest failing, or maybe an asset...)...malleable, fleeting...Coming to this part of the world for the first time has warped me...like a fresh cut plank of green hardwood (or, balsa?)set in the sun...The twist may just be useful...what can make the shape take practical form?...Time, and our perception of it is such a funny thing...Sitting, looking out across a countryside that is geologically no older than any other tract of land I've had the pleasure to contemplate...It's the patina of man, the weight of human time, that has come to bear...Over two thousand years of human experience made visible...in worn rock and hewn marble..layers over layers built up and excavated and remade, reused, reinvented...things lost and found..ages of ideas burned up (Alexandria)and slowly rediscovered...taking physical form.
Time...
...lost in the overwhelming sense of it...what foolish, wonderful little creatures we are...a billion blisters of slaves and artisans in bricks and smooth stone... the eyes of bishops and cardinals staring down from cracked canvas...standing helpless before an impenetrable monument of pure human desperation...Venus rises from a shell, David's massive, disproportionate hands hide the stone meant to slay the giant...
...to slay the giant...
wow...
Filippo Brunelleschi, nearly 1400 years after the Pantheon, after the loss of much of the knowledge of entire civilizations... considered the form of a dome and how it may be constructed...good story...and history continues to repeat itself...
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