Welcome to Adobe GoLive 5

The Abbot Suger might have made a good shaman. Hell, he was probably even a good priest. But he lived in the last age where you could believe that Vitraux - Stained-Glass Windows - could and would be a catalyst for Transubstantiation. Up North, along the 45th Parallel, our sitz em leben has shifted like the wavelengths of light do when you pass them thru "colored" glass. Our shift has been away from the Magical towards the Metaphorical. We have in fact shifted so far from our center that an Ideogram like that to the left of this decorative print must remain mute in most Postmodern minds. We keep wanting images like this to "say" something to us - the way words do. But they don't anymore. Like most messages from our "original" state - where senses and their attendant means of fabriking meaning freely mixed in a orgy of Synesthesia - they must remain forever foreign and untranslatable. Just outside our Ken. The QWERTY layout of the keyboard is from 1873 and manual typewriters where frequently used letters could become entangled as they struck if you placed them too near each other. If you kept your "e" away from your "n" you could pound keys wildly. The computer keyboard maintains the QWERTY not because there are any moving parts to get entangled but because we are psychologically comfortable with that layout. QWERTY is a Skeuomorph - Like Jesus trying to Shine thru his Windows.

The Captain is a Doctoral Candidate in the College of the Passers-By, so he does not now, nor will he ever look his age. In front of his son and his grandchillin' the Captain scampered fearlessly up a 40 foot rope and attached a quarter ton of cold-rolled steel, rocks, wood and Monkey to one of the ancient trees which ring the Cathedral. Up near the canopy of the trees which for so many eons formed the mind of the Monkey and his Skeuomorphic antecedent: Man. Up next to where the Blue begins and the Green ends - at the line where the upper world and the middle earth meet. The Captain was singing as he worked - some Johnny Cash shit from the old days when most of us were younger. He sang: "How high's the water, Mama?" and then he sang: "Call him drunkin' Ira Hayes, he won't answer anymore." And then we all sang: "I keep a close watch on this Heart of mine," and we do. We have to. Because the Rose and the Heart are One. Suger's problem, like all Metaphorics and failed Magicians, is that he was trying to look thru a material medium at a metaphysical reality. How could we all have forgotten that god and man and the window and even the fuckin' Monkey are One. Trying to look thru each other - like metaphor and all media - we miss each other in passing.

St. Thomas Aquinas was in Paris about a century after Abbot Suger. Aquinas was a Dominican with all the baggage that brings. We owe the freedom to read pagans like Aristotle and Plato to Aquinas, who was a student of Albertus Magnus - together they rejuvenated Scholasticism. Aquinas fought against Double Truthing.

The only way to teach Aristotle and other Pagans at Christian Universities was to insist upon the doctrine of Double Truths. Reason could show one face while Faith showed the other. Both must remain true; you could not let reason collapse a religious doctrine based on faith. As long as Jesus was free to Trump Aristotle you could read the Greek without being a heretic.

Once the Window was in the trees it immediately became natural. You could start to understand that the archetype of any Cathedral or Mandir or Temple was our lives in the forest. It is the forest which our wide Naves and high columns reproduce. It is the forest which the Vitraux try and suggest with their filterings of the colored lights thru the media of green and blue, branches and leaves, sky and clouds. Physiologists and Neuroanatomists claim that 60 million years spent in the canopies of trees has molded a mentality we are not likely ever to outgrow. The Captain can't get old but neither can the Monkey climb down from the trees. Aquinas killed the medieval tradition of Double-Truthing, but he cannot stop our minds from falling - naturally - into this condition where opposite things existed like Mirrors of the Other in a Synthesis where it might still be possible to see Matter and Spirit as One - both of them simultaneously True. Each still functional and not yet a media-ploy to get you to buy Oxyclean because things are not Pure.