This piece was written in praise of Jan Svankmayer,
the animator ue, and his film of Alice
Iy ue, o was winter.
Outside the curious room, there is a sign on the door which says "Forbidden". Inside, inside, oh, e ahe celebrated DR DEE.
The celebrated Dr Dee, looking for all the world like Santa Claus on at of his long, white beard and apple cheeks, is plating his crystal, the fearful sphere that tains everything that is, or was, or ever shall be.
It is a round ball of solid glass and gives a deceptive impression of weightlessness, because you see right through it and we falsely assume aioween lightness and transparency, that what the light shihrough ot be there and so must weigh nothing. In fact, the Doctors crystal ball is heavy enough to inflict a substantial injury and the Doctors assistant, Ned Kelly, the Man in the Iron Mask, often weighs the ball in one hand or tosses it bad forth from oo the other hand as he pohe fragility of the hollow bone, his masters skull, as it pores heedless over some tome.
Ned Kelly would blame the murder on the angels. He would say the angels came out of the sphere. Everybody knows the angels live there.
The crystal resembles: an aqueous humour, frozen:
a glass eye, although without any iris or
pupil -- just the sort of transparent eye, in
fact, which the adept might strue as apt
to see the invisible;
a tear, round, as it forms within the eye, for
a tear acquires its characteristic shape of a
pear, what we think of as a "tear" shape, only
i of falling;
the shining drop that trembles, sometimes, on the
tip of the Doctors well-nigh se, tending
towards the flaccid, yet heless sustainable
and disible m ere, and
always reminds him of
a drop of dew,
a drop of dew endlessly, tremulously about to fall
from the unfolded petals of a rose and, therefore,
like the tear, retaining the perfe of its
circumferenly by refusing to sustain free fall,
remaining what it is, because it refuses to bee
what it might be, the antithesis of metamorphosis;
a, in old England, far away, the sign of the
Do Drop Inn will always, that jovial pun, show an
oblate spheroid, heavily tinselled, because the
sign-painter, in order to demonstrate the idea of
"drop", needs must represent the dew i of
falling and therefore, for the purposes of this
parison, not resembling the numinous ball
weighing down the angelic Doctors outstretched
palm.
For Dr Dee, the invisible is only another unexplored try, a brave new world.
The hinge of the sixteenth tury, where it joins with the seveh tury, is as creaky and judders open as relutly as the door in a haunted house. Through that door, in the distance, we may glimpse the distant light of the Age of Reason, but precious little of that is about to fall ue, the capital of paranoia, where the fortuellers live on Golden Alley in cottages so small, a good-sized doll would find itself cramped, and there is oain house on Alchemists Street that only bees visible during a thick fog. (On sunny days, you see a stone.) But, even in the fog, only those born on the Sabbath see the house anyway.
Like a lamp guttering out in a retly vacated room, the Renaissance flared, faded ainguished itself. The world had suddenly revealed itself as bewilderingly infinite, but sihe imagination remained,