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Visions In The Night
by Paul Garner
...it was like rolling, rippling clouds constantly flowing and folding in on themselves, like the spread of dye through turbulent water, or mint-chocolate-ripple icecream-in-motion, or cooling lava losing it's plasticity and bunching up at the base of a volcano, seen in cross-section... but most of all like the atmosphere of Jupiter. Sometimes I felt a little like the Galileo space probe flying past the great planet taking time-lapse photos of its thick soupy clouds in constant and rapid motion... other times I was more lost in the ripples and layers themselves, as they rolled and wrinkled like chaotic silk sheets in a breeze. Everything was illuminated by light of ever-changing but rather ungroovy primary colours, like you'd get by putting different coloured gels in front of a lightbulb, as if for a school science experiment on wavelengths, or something. Most important though was that everything in the visions was in fact made up of numbers. A wave of fabric would roll past with a row of black '3's at its leading edge, each one extruded back to infinity in green... all the other details of the clouds would similarly be made of numerals - numbers arranged and superimposed cunningly into amazing and complex patterns to give the illusion of, not reality, but of something, anything, many things. At times the vision would be strangely intersected by lines of kaleidescopic refraction, as if in a cubist attempt to render the multidimensionality of it all. I received a vague impression that certain shapes-of-darkness in the the night outside, plus the form of certain car wheels, and also the form of certain Lego pieces I'd known as a child, were all somehow connected... or even one and the same, as if in fact their shape was the basic visual building block by which I perceived the world. I started seeing this shape more and more in the visions so that, while still like the clouds of Jupiter they also started to resemble a sea of multiplying Lego bricks. Dancing, tesselating, multiplying Lego bricks in fact, creating hills and valleys and waves and wobbles, yet synchronised, almost like some extravagant nineteen-thirties musical production, like a zero-g Bollywood epic in space, but with Lego bricks. And all the time it was an illusion created by the clever arrangement of swarms of numerals...
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Copyright © 2002 - Paul Garner. |
