Big Bill

William Faulkner wrote about the things which lay hidden under the materiality of the world, the spirit, the shadow, or - I should say - the shadows, for those evanescent entities are many - as the ancient Egyptians taught us: they had used all their hieroglyphs on spirit and soul, and when they had come to shadow, they had to turn to homely items, like umbrellas, pajamas, and tin cans in order to depict in writing the many kinds of shadows. But I digress from the object of my essay, which is Faulkner.

It is like the case of Dark Matter in the universe, things unseen and things undreamed, but must be there, and are inferred, just as in the Middle Ages the brighter minds of the Sorbonne inferred from the faint hints in Scripture to the large yet sober crowds of angels dancing on the ballroom heads of argentine pins.

Let us write today, then, about keys, house keys, car keys; being objects in the world, they must possess a hidden layer of meaning which supports form and shape, combatting the natural tendency of mass to collapse into a formless lump of quicksilver; keys with their fractal bodies, the large cuts into the metal substrate being replicated ad infinitum with smaller scale cuts, themselves being cut into bays and fjords on the nano scale: keys - the buck-toothed outline of the front door key, the descending escalator of cat's teeth on the club house door key, the two mirror-imaged, smoothly contoured ledges of the car keys.

The unseen nature - seen only by Faulkner - was the genesis of the ancient gods and powers, for was there not even a god of keys? or at least of the front and back door? Janus, looking-two-ways?

The souls of everything lie in an escape-time equation, pixel by pixel washed in a flow of color. The souls of the universe, this universe here, not some parallel offspring or avatar, lie in the keen gravitas of the shadow world which exists in the summer's day picnic between Mass and Synapse.

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