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May. 18th, 2017 07:52 amThe lucky boy. The boy in love. The wise boy.
A corner and much of the core of a great, high-seated marble heritage building at the University of Michigan had been given to the wise boy but, by carefully integrating his own work into what was already there, he managed to take much more. The food court and children's area at the top floor he colonized with a glossy brown-gray chocolate fountain, its folds contrived to resemble a hatchback-sized rose. It was protected on the outside and, from all I could tell, formed its drapes against internal ridges of a lovely, near-amphitheatrical contrivance of sculpted glass, which sent out from it a spiral becoming a tunnel for the children that ran about through the immediate air among inset chocolate streamers, above the leaf-like seats and smoothie stand and neatly gleaming waste disposal consoles he'd designed. The syrup spigot was at the taper next to a wicker pterodactyl's-nest of halved coconut shells to catch it, while the other end ramped down then around against the inside of the building's own shell to reach the wise boy's special corner, his real project, his life's dream. The glass ramp reached the opera house, but that was at the far point of the L from where we entered. The proper start came at the top of chrome-railed stairs that themselves were no doing of his, belonging instead to an underground mall resembling the nightmarishly extended lobby of a fancy downtown bank. These stairs took one not to a floor but a rise, a sort of wall from which the tops of each of his works could be seen, packed so neatly against one another they made the space seem larger than it was, but each standing out so sharply in color and un-yet-guessed purpose that the sprawl seemed both as of a piece and as disparate as a model of the solar system or the vista of Dante's Hell. First came the museum, a maze of tall, tight marble corridors shadowed and sharply and frequently turning enough that one never knew a display window'd come until stumbling upon it. Some of these you really did stumble upon - puddle-like portholes set into the floor - but others were glass cracks or gashes or missing marble bricks set at unpredictable heights of the wall. No class of thing in particular was focused on. The objects, plants, dioramas, what-have-yous seemed either utterly ordinary or unaccountably strange at first, but they were never put there for what they were but for what their contemplation led to, some vision or knowledge floating just free of the ordinary world of thoughts that, discovered, made work for itself filling gaps where no gaps had been known to be, structuring, reorienting, retinting those things that one knew. Past this there were the battlefield, the indoor train, the cave, the coat room, the electric waterfall, the dead room, and the opera house, and circuiting through them the Shakespeare company performing nonstop at a rather brisk walk - dead characters falling wherever they died and staying on the floor till the next run caught up with them. The wise child himself, thin and seven feet tall, wearing glasses and the blue clothes of a janitor, would always be somewhere, talking, friendly, attracting a little group of experiencers like bees. They'd circle him, have their moment or two, hear a few momentous words, for him casual, revealing their world just part of the one that there is. Exhilarated, slightly suspicious, they'd regretfully detach and think and wander, till all was forgot in the splash of the next surprise.
The wise boy. The lucky boy. The boy in love.
A corner and much of the core of a great, high-seated marble heritage building at the University of Michigan had been given to the wise boy but, by carefully integrating his own work into what was already there, he managed to take much more. The food court and children's area at the top floor he colonized with a glossy brown-gray chocolate fountain, its folds contrived to resemble a hatchback-sized rose. It was protected on the outside and, from all I could tell, formed its drapes against internal ridges of a lovely, near-amphitheatrical contrivance of sculpted glass, which sent out from it a spiral becoming a tunnel for the children that ran about through the immediate air among inset chocolate streamers, above the leaf-like seats and smoothie stand and neatly gleaming waste disposal consoles he'd designed. The syrup spigot was at the taper next to a wicker pterodactyl's-nest of halved coconut shells to catch it, while the other end ramped down then around against the inside of the building's own shell to reach the wise boy's special corner, his real project, his life's dream. The glass ramp reached the opera house, but that was at the far point of the L from where we entered. The proper start came at the top of chrome-railed stairs that themselves were no doing of his, belonging instead to an underground mall resembling the nightmarishly extended lobby of a fancy downtown bank. These stairs took one not to a floor but a rise, a sort of wall from which the tops of each of his works could be seen, packed so neatly against one another they made the space seem larger than it was, but each standing out so sharply in color and un-yet-guessed purpose that the sprawl seemed both as of a piece and as disparate as a model of the solar system or the vista of Dante's Hell. First came the museum, a maze of tall, tight marble corridors shadowed and sharply and frequently turning enough that one never knew a display window'd come until stumbling upon it. Some of these you really did stumble upon - puddle-like portholes set into the floor - but others were glass cracks or gashes or missing marble bricks set at unpredictable heights of the wall. No class of thing in particular was focused on. The objects, plants, dioramas, what-have-yous seemed either utterly ordinary or unaccountably strange at first, but they were never put there for what they were but for what their contemplation led to, some vision or knowledge floating just free of the ordinary world of thoughts that, discovered, made work for itself filling gaps where no gaps had been known to be, structuring, reorienting, retinting those things that one knew. Past this there were the battlefield, the indoor train, the cave, the coat room, the electric waterfall, the dead room, and the opera house, and circuiting through them the Shakespeare company performing nonstop at a rather brisk walk - dead characters falling wherever they died and staying on the floor till the next run caught up with them. The wise child himself, thin and seven feet tall, wearing glasses and the blue clothes of a janitor, would always be somewhere, talking, friendly, attracting a little group of experiencers like bees. They'd circle him, have their moment or two, hear a few momentous words, for him casual, revealing their world just part of the one that there is. Exhilarated, slightly suspicious, they'd regretfully detach and think and wander, till all was forgot in the splash of the next surprise.
The wise boy. The lucky boy. The boy in love.
