Before The Face
In the beginning was the Wordâwhat word it was weâre not too sure. Maybe it was more of a belch than Word from a mouth smelling like a dead rat and missing a few important teeth. But Word nonetheless! A pivotal and transcendent sound that breathed our existence into being. The holiest of holy vibrations! It gave us Bach and Bukowski. Mario Brothers and Marvin K. Mooney. Charlie freakinâ Chaplin! When the music of the spheres spiraled out of Nothing, you bet your pocket lint there was silence to fill the cracks, and a few âyour momâ jokes thrown in for good measure.
Word solidified our abstractionsâon papyrus and Panasonic. It gave us substance. Made a this out of a that. Fantasy from hair follicle. Waves of information poured in and out every mouth, eye, ear and rearhole from Mesopotamia to Manhattan. Imagination ran wild like horses over a hill! Symposiums and symphonies and sitcoms, oh my! All in their own time, of course. But since our awakening from this primordial song, the walk from cave to video game on the road of history hasnât come very far at all. Itâs been a stroll, really, where along this boulevard there are still hints of Plato written on the wallâor screen for that matter.
So who was it that first organized this information? What kind of wiseguy thought up such an idea? What sorcery ultimately pressed these menacing pools of atoms to a page and bound the Infinite like a book?
This wasnât some flaccid daydreamcatcher. Nuh-uh. It takes the likes of an early bookmaker to capture tone and pitch and symbols and compose and compile them into rows and stack them volume on top of volume, lifetime after lifetime. It takes a certain creature of mastery to sew streams of consciousness between the sheets, a true mystic of mediums to bring it all together with a cosmological Coptic stitch! (Thatâs cymatics with needle and thread.) The kind of magic that can move the stones of Giza and Stonehenge and give order to your underwear drawer.
This brings us to the story at hand.
People will say it never happened, that the events in this book are too fantastical to occur in reality, that nothing like it could have ever occurred in this life, in this world. And theyâd probably be right! Although there are someâit might not be manyâwho will know it to be true, that it is at once as real as the tartar in their teeth. For them, the pages of history turn, and between the folds all the magic of the human mind comes to life. Language. Art. Beauty. A dream manifest! It is a parable woven between the fibers of existence by a steady hand, thee hand with thread and twine and paper and glue to ensure a sturdy spine. A bit of backbone to prop up chaos for a spell. This tale is a truth for those who can understand it, and a fable for those who cannot.
When the Poet, the Painter, and the Bookmaker came to stir the pot of Paradise Point, who knew theyâd be cookinâ up a recipe for Disaster stew. To turn the page is to watch it all come to a boil.
