Too Strange

Nothing surprises me anymore. The Pope was a Hitler Youth and now it seems half of Ireland was sexually abused by repressed priests looking for love in all the wrong places. The Vatican is suspect. The devil, it seems, was a destroying angel that took advantage of our children. You trust the collar, then discover Sister Mary doesn't wear underpants. A rude awaking. In confession, she tells you she's wet, you're bound by your vows, still, you'd like to touch her, to make certain something was real. Voice becomes vibrato, breathless. I can hang out a shingle, but it doesn't mean I'm a Doctor, it only means I have a shingle to hang out. I'm a perfect example, a failure in so many ways, sometimes at night I can hardly live with myself. I know, I live alone, what would seem the ultimate argument is just another form of denial. Silence says very little, often a dodge for what needs to be said. Fence posts in the dark, a duck that satisfies carnal knowledge. I don't know. Everything is called into question. Maybe I need a break, too much with the world; spring is such a shock. What does green mean? Warmth is always something dying. Maxwell's silver hammer. The second rule of thermodynamics. You can bounce balls until you're blue in the face, the fact remains: it's you against the universe. Doesn't matter if you have a great ass or a winning smile, can cook or not, well-heeled or down on your luck. Camus was correct, what it comes down to. Life is a mess, then you die. Not that that's a bad thing, just that that's the way it is. Writing earlier, thunderstorms tonight. Extra trip to town, cheerleading D on the important membership brochure, clam chowder and a small beer for lunch at the pub. Back at the museum, I change the day calendar (Sara got from the Met, a holder with each day being a photo of an object or painting from their collection) and today's image is of a bronze, Southern Netherlands, circa 1400, "Aristotle Being Ridden By Phyllis". A story, apocryphal or not, with which I was not familiar. Seems Aristotle had warned his pupil, Alexander the Great, that he, Alex, was spending too much time with (either his wife or mistress) Phyllis, but in due time, Aristotle also fell under her sway and she agreed to satisfy his lust if he'd get down on all fours, with a bit in his mouth, and she would ride him around her garden. There's also a 1510 woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien, much less elegant than the bronze but quite funny. D's doing a paper on the painter Veronese (1528-88) touching on the restoration of a large altarpiece. The technology is amazing. Reading several off-prints and watching a couple of short videos, I feel like I just woke up in another century. More questions than answers, because I don't understand how some of these things are done, but I can certainly appreciate the results. One sidebar is the making of archival copies, so that we have an accurate record at least starting now. Copies used to be flat drawings or photographs, straight forward. King Tut's tomb as an example. Like the caves in France, is being destroyed by the very presence of viewers. So why don't we make an exact copy of the original, EXACT, and let the great unwashed walk through that? Money is not an object, because a thousand people a day go through Tut's tomb. First you modify very sophisticated equipment to fit in the space. Maybe a million dollars worth of equipage. Then you filter out the actual image and 3D scan the sub-strate, then, using a computer driven cutter, you carve the exact field in a medium, archival, than can be hardened. The you photograph everything, 1 to 1, from six inches away. All of this is a huge amount of information, such a large amount, many hundreds of gigabites, or whatever they are. So large, it must be discreetly sliced into pieces and sewn back together, and we can do that: you match up the field and then lay on the image. I'm dumb-founded. It makes so much sense. Even paintings, almost two-dimensional, especially those artists that use thick paint and pallet knives, profit from attention to the ground. Dog is dumber than a sack of rocks. My off-again, on-again, relationship with the fox better suited me. I like to be alone outdoors. Pets are so needy. Probably not an issue anyway, because I'm pretty sure Little Sister is dying, I can't put any weight on her, she's got some several internal parasites. In his dotage he ran a hospice for animals. He produced results that have never been duplicated, so his conclusions are suspect; at the end, he was working on a large manuscript that would include everything. The perfect map, he often said, would indicate exactly where your foot would fall, an 'x' as it were, a mark on the page. I don't doodle, I don't draw anything, I can't, I don't know how. My wits are sorely tested. I draw a line through most things, eliminating possibilities. The Red Maples are leafing out, does that mean anything?