To the left: the municipal pillar of Batalha in Portugal. The model is 4-stepped and implies ascent in its design. In Hinduism, a pillar which is "surmounted by a crown is the architectural symbol of the highest point and is the most direct way of spiritual ascent, but is only possible for those who ascend from the center, having overcome duality and being able to ascend from the darkness within to the light above." But Pooler says that symbol dictionaries are all "hineininterpretierung" or hindsight history. Writing history backwards. Portugal, in fact, lends itself to such a histoire; it's a place where everything means too much - a place where the bones are buried too close to the surface and every off shore breeze uncovers the story lying at your feet.

The pole slipped into the earth at Tex's house without a hitch. In the dark Kenny moved around the geography like Vasca de Gama mending routes to the Spice Islands. We were synesthesiacs with tasty vowels glowing in the dark and lighting our way.

Slag took to a tree which was operating as our TPO Junction - gathering the separate streams of our cordage & ropes. Within a half-hour we had tendrils out in 5 directions securing us to the center. Years of Block & Tackle had shaped Kenny into a master of the belayed.

In a Buddhist monastery, the priest who "superintends" is called "Kancho." Slag is Kenny's Kancho. Ever since Pig Iron fell he's the first one up the tree. Only Skippy's camera flash lighted the Oh-Dark-30 scene in the heart of Northport, America. So the pictures lie. It was dark. True, there was the soft glow from the muted neon from Woody's Tavern but such incidental light never crawls too far back into the shadows and the trees.

"The mystic 'Center,' or the 'unvarying mean', is the fixed point which all symbolic traditions concur in designating as the 'pole', since the rotation of the earth takes place around it." Cirlot goes on: "The 'unvarying mean' is, nevertheless, the cause of all change." Such a Pole is also the Zenith. "In ancient China, it was represented by the hole in the center of the jade disk known as Pi."

The I-Ching "shows that the continuous metamorphoses of matter are generated by the great pole - a Oneness located far beyond all duality, beyond all occurrence and equated with the 'unmoved mover' of Aristotle. This contradiction between the immobile and the cause of all movement was expressed metaphorically by the alchemists in the saying: 'At the pole lies the heart of Mercury, which is the true fire."

Maurizio Cattelan - an Italian artist working in New York - did a life size wax figure of Pope John Paul II "in white robes felled by a meteorite that crashed thru a skylight." The piece is called "The 9th Hour." It's part of a trilogy of images about power. The 2nd piece, called "Him", is a sculpture of Hitler in the scale of a ten-year old, on his knees asking forgiveness. The 3rd is 2 life-sized wax New York Cops [Frank & Jamie] propped upside down along a wall. Cattelan is also famous for: a dead dog in a chair - called "Cheap to Feed," and a recreation of the Hollywood sign atop a Palermo garbage dump. To the right is another Portuguese Pillar in the cloister of a monastery. Cattelan would just about fit.