eery green, speckled with a blood-red that submerges our vision
in the sixteenth century's turgid red, a dark red not without its
restless warmth, but desperate nonetheless: and the despair is
confirmed as we stumble with thickening history into the
seventeenth century, a pestilential coal-dark purple threaded
with faint silver (turbulence, exultations among skulls),
although matters become more orderly
towards the end. There's a door with a promising glow beyond
it, it opens, and we stand in eighteenth-century orange light–
perhaps more a rich beige, a broad indoor splendor that might
persuade us to linger if we didn't know that soon we shall pass,
with well-concealed relief, into the examination-book blue of
the neighboring nineteenth century which beams down its busy
expanse with determined self-satisfaction,
through gusts of demolition and machinery. At its far end, we
easily find the gate in the standard picket fence through which,
taking off our jackets, we stroll into our very own, legal-pad
yellow age, on whose pale lines we can, if we aren't careful,
unconsciously slide through sumptuously codified disasters
right past
this moment. We don't. We stop.
You are standing in front of us, in the light, with a pad and
pencil.
You have written down your name, and your new age.
The latter is a point in a progression that approaches as its
limit
Not theoretical infinity but existential zero. You are about
To reach it, again. You hold the pencil point
Close
to
the whiteness of the page. The calamitous moment of
inscription
Is at hand. What else will you set down? You set down
Those tools and turn away into the darkness. You put away
ideas
