Part Three

In some country everyone is blind from birth. Some are eager for knowledge and aspire after truth. Sooner or later one of them will say, “You see, sirs, how we cannot walk straight along our way, but rather we frequently fall into holes. But I do not believe that the whole human race is under such a handicap, for the natural desire that we have to walk straight is not frustrated in the whole race. So I believe that there are some men who are endowed with a faculty for setting themselves straight.”

NICHOLAS OF AUTRECOURT, Exigit ordo

The grandiosity of “paper buildings” like Brueghel’s tower of Babel, Boullée’s funerary temples, Piranesi’s prisons, or Sant’Elia’s Futurist power stations have been realized, and by an amateur, a fanatically motivated little lady from New Haven whose dream palace was crafted with Yankee ingenuity.

JOHN ASHBERY

…and as the disputational .44

occurred in his hand and spun there

in that warp of relativity one sees

in the backward turning spokes

of a buckboard,

then came suddenly

to rest, the barrel utterly justified

with a line pointing

to the neighborhood of infinity.

ED DORN, Gunslinger