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ArtistBaroque through the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you No dirt, no text.
Inspired by
https://deepdreamgenerator.com/ddream/69cd1npbhqd
Which was inspired by and text lifted from post inside.
Inspiration and prompt from @Debbie Eh?
https://deepdreamgenerator.com/ddream/75nu6hobnoy
Collective recursive kleptomania
I lived in Baroque Italy for reasons nobody has ever satisfactorily explained.
It was 1673, or perhaps Tuesday.
Rome was overflowing with angels. They clung to bridges, fountains, ceilings, tombs, and the enormous marble skirts of saints. Every church looked as though God had given architecture too much wine.
I rented a little room above a bookseller. At night I could hear the books breathing downstairs.
I discovered that books do that after midnight.
They breathe the people who wrote them.
A dead poet would exhale from one shelf. A philosopher dead for sixteen hundred years would cough politely from another. Sometimes the whole shop sighed at once and the windows fogged.
This gave me an idea.
Perhaps dying wasn’t nearly as efficient as everyone supposed.
A violet dies, but something of it remains in the room. A rose collapses into brown paper, yet months later you open a drawer and suddenly it is June again.
Why shouldn’t people work the same way?
So I began writing.
Not because I had anything particularly important to say. Importance was already well represented in Rome. There were cardinals with twelve-foot paintings proving how important they were.
I wrote because somewhere, someday, somebody might read a sentence of mine and for three seconds arrange their thoughts the way I had once arranged mine.
Three seconds seemed sufficient.
A small resurrection.
No trumpets.
No Last Judgment.
Just somebody sitting at a table with a book.
Centuries later I found myself in an airport.
Don’t ask.
Airports are where the dead change planes.
I had several coins and bought the cheapest book I could find, Stories of Your Life and Others. Denis Villeneuve happened to be there, so I gave it to him.
“Here,” I said.
Then came Arrival.
He never even thanked me.
This is how immortality actually works: somebody gives somebody a book, somebody forgets somebody, and eventually enormous luminous spaceships arrive over Montana.
Bernini would have understood immediately.
The universe is one gigantic Baroque ceiling painted by people standing on other people’s scaffolding.
