It has come to me suddenly that the vast conjecture we all call tomorrow is neither wallowing in the seduction of its joyous existence nor corralling its lone justifications in the radiant face of the sun. A harmonic repetitious presence hums low and monotonous in the walls of this home of fresh resonance but was it not for a tiny golden thread, a tether as it is to a lighter-than-air soul balloon, I might be off and crashing through the distant glare and glorious pain of Adventure. I tempt myself to read previous phrases and force myself to move on instead, to sever the thin gold rope for the dalliance, the guilty pleasure of looking back, slows the mind like a masturbatory haze and may indeed render me a statue of salt, and after all coffee is a temporary drug one must use at its moment. Adventure!

I see a vast sketchy object as space-devouring as a pyramid, but unlike a
pyramid it has no economy of form; it rests upon a terrain of no detail, but the object itself is all detail, an intricate baroque skeletal pillar and turrets and towers and spiralling always spiraling stairs and ladders and walkways and tiny windows and doors and pointed spires. I am drawn to the main steps that lead in no obvious or deliberate way upward and I am fascinated forever with the beauty of the detail of each and every step, for each is different from the one before, and they are constructed-as is the entire Object-with a variety of materials-steel (rusty and rust-colored and flaky and glowing steel), wood (dark and damp and in places mildew-stricken and therefore blessed with the sweet scent of rotting wood), glass (of many colors, translucent greens and dark blue-corrupted yellows and blood-burgundy with occasional crystal flashes and cracked and random shards of star-like glass), stone (polished and unpolished and broken and smooth and round and jagged stones with mystical properties) and these steps draw me away from what would be the obvious quest of the obvious visitor-that is, to get to the top, of course-so that I am lost in the details, consuming them with my consuming eyes and lovingly I gaze and survey their multi-faceted colors, shapes and variations. The object is someone's child grown to a mature complex adult: an obsession-frenzied seductress who takes the voyeur such as myself to a bed of voracious visual stimulation. I am panning back and forth and up and down as if looking through the lens of a movie camera and the sounds of exotic music, a strange self-composed music with ravi shankar and hendrix and folk musicians from madrid and turkey and morocco all flinging paint freely but with admirable mutual respect and cajoling introspective competition onto an aural canvas. The object occupies my every thought. It is a place of finite space and is easily viewed as a whole from a distance; but up close it seems to have infinite paths; courses meander; rolling irregular catwalks, twisting stairs without handrails, dark and damp passages through yawning portals, ramps that lead to doorways that open to deep drops to the desert floor many levels below. I have travelled up some fifteen steps and am brought truly and completely to a halt by the sight of the 16th step, for it is even more mysterious and beautiful than the first fifteen with their glittering stones and miniature carvings of ancient monsters of dreams and dragons and delicate crystal leaves and flowers permanently in bloom; the 16th step is a voluptuous moving pattern of color, and in the center of this ever-changing mosaic is a window onto another time-a palm-sized television with no volume, channel or brightness/contrast controls because it's not a television at all but a device much more magical and open to the mind of those who gaze into it, participating in one's thoughts and imaginations rather than aggressively flowing out the flotsam and jetsam of a distant retail death-heart-worm intent on rendering your brain indistinguishable from your bowels-and this magic window held my attention as nothing before, giving me views of the object from different perspectives, distances, on, above and below the object, floating in the air above, hovering at eye level with the middle, complex sections, orbiting the object round and round, and travelling rapidly through as yet unexplored passages, along narrow ledges and up tiny-stepped ladders cut slyly into twig-looking spires careening dozens of feet into the haze and stars above. I gazed and drank the sights of the window and grew restless with guilty fear that I was defeating the purpose of this journey that was to experience first hand. This window was my first test-to resist being given images passively, no matter it had listened to my heart and I had participated in some way in its image gifts: I had to move on or return to the condition of the passive voyeur. I was a drinker of colors and smells and however beautiful these images were they were removed from me. Knowing only that the urge to was not strong but risky and therefore deliciously compelling I reached with my right hand toward the image giver and my fingers passed through the image and into it as if it were a flat and still plane of water, although it reacted to my fingers and their disturbances like an image-carrying cube of mercury-a viscous tide rose and fragments, round and beautiful and carrying a detail of the overall image, each broke from the larger mass and escaped from the frame of the image giver and rolled mercury-like across the unlevel step, caught on a lip of bamboo, bounced lazily along the edge like a pinball, seeking its own level, and disappeared through a seam in the step and fell out of sight, taking a piece of the image along with it. Drawing my fingers out of the magic viewer I allowed the clinging fragments of image stuff to drop playfully from my fingertips and plink into the ever-colorful mother image. I was momentarily lost in the fascinating details of images that scurried around my downward-pointing fingers and then I stood and looked away from the window of light and wanted to look again but stepped upward and forward, taking three steps at a time, three times, and came to a crossroads of sorts, where the stairway gave way to three possible routes: the stairway that continued upward curvingly and recklessly higher; a left-bearing passage that dove immediately downward into a hallway which I guessed led eventually underground; and a right-bearing walk that rambled around a whimsical dome structure that hunched overhead. I wanted to continue up the steps but the light of day began to bruise and as I had sensed a faint flicker of torch light in the left-hand passage I turned left to find the torch and return to the stairway and continue upward. The torch must surely be near the entrance, I thought; but as I approached the entrance to the hallway, I was surprised to find a gauzy fabric in tatters draped over a rusted steel beam to my right. I made to move toward it and lost my footing, falling feet-first and sliding downward; I now realized that the walk down to the hallway was slippery with damp green moss which came off onto my hands as I scratched for a hold; I slid freely past the torch I had been seeking (it winkingly waving me bye), and into a wet, fetid passage with stone so moss-covered I could not gain a hold. I could feel but not see the warmth of blood as my ragged fingers fought to slow me but I continued to slip down; I could feel but not see side vents (or alternate passages) open up on either side of me, their drafts of cool or warm air, stale and sweet, breathing gently on me as I raced by in the darkness. I looked upward and could make out the faint glow of the torch some distance upward, at perhaps a 20º angle. I stopped attempting to dig my fingers into stone to stop my descent, resigning to the fate of descending; naturally this resignation came just as the end of this near-free-fall came in the form of an open-up of the passage to a kind of well or sink; as I slid into the cocoon of the dark room and came to a stop I was most taken by the silence broken only by the plinking of droplets of water at various points in the room, and by the sounds of my own presence: breathless exhausted panting and the rippling waves plashing against the walls and back toward me. I could stand up, and did, and I looked up the shoot from which I had been deposited: there was no way to gain a hold and climb up that mossy slimey slide, so I looked around me; though it was dark I sensed an opening to my right and waded toward it. Distant rumblings vibrated through my feet and up my legs, a continuous din punctuated by sharp, more powerful clunks. I imagined that I was in a central intestinal hub of some gigantic insect and that all the sounds were indications of activity-the thousands-per-second beating of wings, the thud of landing, the crunch of chewing and the thunder of battle. The opening I had guessed at proved narrower, and shallower, and I had to crouch and twist my body to pass through it; I stepped into a second chamber, which I could sense was much larger-it was cooler, and the sounds were more airy, the echoes musical and tinted with the suggestion of many different distants and points of origin, as if a radar-like sense had been awakened in me because I could not see and I was now grasping the lay of the place by reading the many sounds which under normal circumstances I would have screened out; little dots of sound, like aural stars, tinkled at me from every direction; meanwhile my eyes seemed to be adjusting to the darkness, so that a dull, grey-scale image of this place began to appear...it was a domed cavern, naturally occuring but incorporated in the design of the object; the water was nearly to my knees, and as I waded I could feel the mossy slime on the smooth surface of the floor. Clenching my fists, I felt the thick drying blood and the moss, and the tears in my fingers ached and throbbed but did not distract me. As the grey tones of vision edged to a reddish amber, I saw what appeared to be a black disk, an opening, into a further chamber. Apart from that opening, the chamber in which I stood offered no clue as to an escape. I stepped through to the next chamber. A glow not sensed in the previous chamber could be attributed to my increasingly adapted eyesight but not only that: small vents, stars, speckled the domed ceiling of this new chamber; they were not openings, but tiny windows, dull and nearly opaque, but allowing enough light to give me my path: a stone tunnel of stairs began to my right, and they curved up and out of dim sight quickly. Go up, that is what I wished to do, so I entered the stair tunnel and wearily climbed, bracing myself with both hands on the gnarly sides of the passage. The way was steep. As I ran my hands along the walls of the spiraling stair, the pain in my fingers seemed to numb, and my hands felt as if I wore gloves of smooth leather; and as they glided over the bumps they found openings, in which I eventually became interested, after passing over the fourth or fifth. I discovered that these vents, when I stood perfectly still, emitted a variety of sounds all having one thing in common: they had a human quality, like voices from other times, spaces, regions and languages not now recognizable, but nonetheless familiar. The greenish black of my visual purple continued to be challenged by the ever fluctuating dim glow that served as the lamp of my way and which clung to my skin like damp wool.