There was going to be a problem with the Shmird [Shekhina-Mirror-Device] - the enchanted island we were going to install it on was covered in birds. Gulls and Cormorants. The Îlot des Mouettes was well named. We needed a way to discourage the Gulls especially to stay off the Shmird. Pooler and Skippy are Veterans so they immediately remembered Pongee Sticks and how effective they were when Charlie wanted to mark his territory. Slag saw them as Kether because there was no mistaking that we were toying with the Kabbalah. We cut 19 small steel rods in 3 heights, sharpened them to a killing point and welded them to the crown of the sphere along the top curve of the 6 ribs. They graduated in length so as to form an upward arc - like this they would fit the sphere like a Helmut or at least a fanatically aggressive Crown. When Slag welds he mumbles under his breath: Jihad, Jihad, Jihad. It gives him a rocking movement and he swears this wave motion of the heat produces a finer temper on the finished steel.

A Speculum is a mirror. The word itself is Latin where it also means mirror and is an inflected form of "specere" - to see. The oldest scholarly journal on the Western Medieval pubbed in America is called Speculum and it's logo is a hand holding out a mirror to the viewer. In the medieval a Speculum was also an overarching treatise or summa on a topic: Roger Bacon's infamous Speculum Alchimiae comes to mind, as does Vincent of Beauvais encyclopedic Speculum Maius. In works like these the Mirror is seen as a reflection of the world and thus a compendium. In metallurgy a Speculum metal is an alloy containing copper and tin. The secondary feathers on the inner part of a duck's wing - often very brightly colored - are called speculum feathers. In medicine a Speculum is an instrument for opening up a body cavity so they come in many flavors: oral, rectal, vaginal. So a Speculum is a device for opening up a hole into which you can see - a connotation which also covers a Mirror. To "speculate" is to open up a possibility. Specula in Latin also means Watchtower. So the root of the word surrounds the act of seeing, watching, and observation. All of the cognates still use that code. So does Kenny.

"I have lingered in the chambers of the sea," Eliot wrote. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," is the jewel in the crown of Modernism in Literature. T. S. Eliot coined the term: Objective Correlative in 1919 in an essay in which he deconstructed Hamlet. Art speaks thru emotion but emotion needs a vehicle with which to metamorph from emotion's silent syntax into objects and things in the world. Here, emotion plays the role of Tenor, while Tits for example, play the role of Vehicle. Meaning is abstracted from their tension. Eliot wrote: "the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an `objective correlative', in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in a sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." Semiotics knows this as Sign Behavior. The Blonde Art Chick next to this functions as an Objective Correlative [OC]. She flashes these contradictory and Necker Cube messages: white, innocent, young, virginal, unsullied and pure. But also: willing, open, lust. Her proximity to the other works lends her status as Art. Thus combined the meaning can be read as: the Sacred and the Profane are always One until a viewer forms an emotion/attitude which opens a hole and in their unity and separates.

So all the gods all the time are made to the image and likeness of the men making up the gods. Bricolage, the French call it, a rebuilding from the shards of the last system. "Bricolage from the French-language verb bricoler, meaning `to tinker' or `to fiddle' is that language's equivalent of the English phrase `do-it-yourself'. Bricolage is also often contrasted to engineering: building by trial and error rather than based on theory. A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur. A bricoleur is a person who creates things from existing materials, is creative and resourceful: a person who collects information and things and then puts them together in a way that they were not originally designed to do." Fuckin' Monkeys at Wikipedia.

The gods are given their forms by bricoleurs & menschenkenners. God has no form without man and therefore can have no insight into himself. God needs man as a Mirror within which to see and know himself. Without Man the Speculum god could never reach consciousness and become a moral god.

Pooler and I were planning several trips within Ireland during the month we had in the Ould Sod. We were day-tripping to Mellifont Abbey, the 1st Cistercian monastery in Ireland, where the ruins of a 13th century 8-sided Lavabo were well preserved enough to imply the original. And we were going to the monuments of the Boine valley, especially Newgrange with its evocative rump-presentation AOA. And then finally back up to Skippy's favorite space in Ireland - Beltany Tops up near the border with Northern Ireland. Ireland feels young and rich these days, the Irish show more optimism then their sad bloody history should allow. Still it is a haunted Island and often an enchanted island. It wears well the Shekhina of an Island which is kissed by warm seas in the south and pounded by icy breakers in the north. Such a duality has produced a people who understand things like poetry and correlatives naturally.

Skippy took this photo above 15 years ago. It's from an ancient Romanesque Irish Church - it's in the Romanesque where images like this one have found a receptive home. It's carved on a column in a church associated with St. Brendan the Navigator, a 6th century Irish Monk whose myth overwhelmed his history. He is said to have sailed to the Isle of the Blest, the Paradise we know as Eden. Or to have sailed to Avalon, or any one of a score of mythic Enchanted Isles. Other myths say he ran into America. Every white man who first bumped into America was chasing a myth. Blinded by the covertext of the allegory. The image depicts a Melusinian figure holding both a mirror and a comb. All over the world there are a handful of instantly recognizable symbols of Consciousness: a mirror, and a lit candle. "In mythology," Manuela Dunn Mascetti says, "the sea represents the unconscious, a dark and fluid expanse ... The dread of the irrational and the fear of annihilation by unconscious forces are the root of the myths of female devouring monsters." So let's, for the moment, put aside vagina dentata and focus on this: if this halfling is the means of movement in the unconscious that what does she gain by adding a mirror?