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Pooler Jones says it with his best Christopher Walken sneer: "Fuckin' Monkeys." He's juggling his conversations again and trying to say too many things at once. First he wants to bitch-slap Kenny La Roche for getting sucked away into making Temple Bells for a whole year and thereby skewering the timeframe for the Athanorian Rose Mission. We had planned on having the Rose Window of our Cathedral "well hung" by the fall of 2002. Our new plan is to hang it sometime in 2003. Other things have changed also. We are going back to a cleaner, less busy, model. We're stripping it of some of its Jewels - leaving out the Stained Glass and Fabrics - in favor of a cleaner design. One that emphasizes tracery and stones. Second, Pooler is reminding us to heed the lesson of the Window's theme: The Fall of Spirit into Matter. Like the Monkey here offering a Peach to a Sage. Fucking Monkeys. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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At the heart of the concept of the Rose Window is the Rose itself. According to Cirlot a rose is "in essence, a symbol of completion, of consummate achievement and perfection. Hence, accruing to it are all those ideas associated with these qualities: the mystic Centre, the heart, the garden of Eros, the paradise of Dante, the beloved, the emblem of Venus and so on."
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And so on. Then there's all that Mandala Energy of the radiating center as it pushes out in a backblow which fills the circular form of the window. The way that the Rose is to the Center is the way that the Rose Window is to the Cathedral - the unfolding heart of the matter. A Rose Garden is an Icon of Paradise; it's a still place to have a Sacred Marriage: a fruitful union of opposites. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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One of the changes we have made in the design of the window is to move from the iron athanor - for the center of the Rose - to the wooden model on the right. The Captain laminated strips of pine and mahogany and set them to bend in a mold he constructed around the figure of an incomplete semi-circle. He then turned the finial/axel into an octagon to accept the 8 arcs. We will figure out a more elegant way to hang the seedstone than shown on the prototype. Kenny loves the way the incomplete arcs speak of dactylic and grasping things. Angeli Neri come to mind. At the same time as the Captain was prototyping the wooden model of the athanor, Slag was freezing his ass off in the atelier prototyping our new cold-rolled steel athanor. The Captain's woodshop up on top of Monastery Ridge is better heated than the atelier but then Slag is way more Nordic than the Captain and he thrives on the sharp cold & the little icy needles which make his nipples hard. In matters like the cold we give Slag all the rope he wants.
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T. S. Eliot said that "the fire and the rose are one." Other Alchemists have known things like that for a few thousand years. Abbot Suger, standing under the jewelled glass in the first Gothic building - which he had designed - claimed his art possesed "the ability to transform that which is material to that which is immaterial" and he saw himself "in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven."
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The Rose was sacred to Isis as it symbolized the alchemically refined love which had been freed from the carnal.
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We tend to generate a lot of heat and smoke during winter shop missions. That, and having to forge our own parts, keeps us alert & warm. We've upgunned the atelier with a bunch of new tools and systems. We can bend steel now with greater accuracy, within 4 decimals I'm sure. Give or take a quarter inch.
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"The centre of the rose is the sun and the petals the infinite, but harmonious, diversities of Nature. The Rose emanates from the Tree of Life." Chakras. The Blood of the Prophet. In the Rosicrucian world view the Mystic Rose is both Wheel and Cross. In a Cathedral a Rose Window is hung between heaven and earth, between the vaulted roof and the cobblestoned floor.
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To the left, Iwojima offers himself as a ground for the arc-welder. He once claimed that he would "take a bullet" for Kenny La Roche. All myths find their moment. To the right, Slag tests a 4 foot diameter athanor with the last Nipple Rock of the Grandiflora Spike. Officer Bob gives us the all clear.
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