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This Piece, Fairy, is obviously a riff on how different mediums are piled on top of one another, with each successive layer trying to clarify those that lie beneath. Yet the more they explain, the more convoluted it all becomes.
When the Earth had completed about 1637 revolutions around the Sun (counting from the birth of Baby Jesus), a certain ambitious Human named Rembrandt wanted to establish himself as a painter of Large-Scale History Paintings, which were all the rage in those big, Baroque days. He chose as his subject a suitably Biblical scene from the Book of Daniel, and titled his work Belshazzar’s Feast. Rembrandt depicted the moment when a Hand appears out of Nonsense, and writes four words on the wall of the palace. In the text of the Old Testament, the letters read something like this:
MNA MNA TQL UPRCIN
Alas, in transcribing them to canvas, Rembrandt arranged them like so:
C U T M M
I P Q N N
Z R L A A
Rather embarrassingly, he also misinterpreted the final “N” into a similar-looking “Z”, and so managed to paint one of history’s most famous typos. ([palmsmack] what a moroz!) Intentional or not, this colossal pigmentografarcical error seems to prove the point of my Nib, that each successive layer of mediation brings with it the hazards of misinterpretation, obfuscation, and confusion – an endless game of Broken Telephone through Time.
So here, with stone and glass and wood and sparkly things, this PleasureBomb
seems to be calling on a Human painter named
Rembrandt, who, being "Christian,"
called on an ancient Hebrew text, in which was
contained the story of a handful of letters that were written on a Babylonian
wall, whose interpretation
eluded all the wise men of the kingdom. And,
despite ongoing efforts, still to this day no
one is entirely sure what any of it means.
