When the dead look down at us we are as harpoon heads at the end of time’s arrow. They can see the line of our live’s, tethered to the umbellical chord of our conception – ending in a thud at the target. The target is the dirt under ground. This image reminds me of the characters… their harpoons have tangled tight while on the rivers of New York and togther they have traveled the Atlantic Ocean into the mountains of Switzerland. The Target they seek is indeed in the dirt, underground. It is not the grave. Nor is it Dante’s inferno. It is the tiny inferno of the Cern Large Hadron Collider. That is the end of their tragectory. This is the concentric circle target they are aimed at. This the White Whale they will pierce. We can see that, because we, like the dead, can see the characters as harpoon heads at the end of time’s arrow. We are above them, like the dead.
I started thinking about timelines and characters in time and space over the holliday, when I went with my brothers and nephews to the Bridgeport (there’s bridges and ports in that name, funny) Science center and we all got facinated with a Einsteinian gravity model, similar to the penny spinner video below. I didn’t bother to shoot it, as I knew there are tons of similar videos on vimeo. I regret it a little now as Ithink I could have made something rather pretty in the editing and music, but it is sort of fun to just pull stuff of the web like a readymade (I did make the rubbing and the pendulum orbits drawing, however, and they seem very related and part of my thinking). Anyway, seeing the dangerous orbits of the ballbearings (instead of pennies as shown here) reminded me of individual characters traveling with and colliding into eachother as they arc down into the deep dark hole of time.
Spinning Pennies on Vimeo