Meaning? 10/26/16 • Carthusian Tryptic.

Our brains really don't come empty. Millions of evolutionary years have wired in some instincts - which are sort of neuro-rules. Apparently ancient ancestors who were best able to make sense of a given moment, were more likely to live long enough to pass along an instinctual track in their babies' minds.I'm guessing that it fueled our ability to spot the tiger in the bushes, or the villain unsheathing his knife.

Anyway, what happens when there's really no order in what appears to be a simple moment? Granada's Baroque Carthusian monastery's like that. Its pieces won't fit together without some sort of key. But where is it? How to explain this happy couple, the dead clown and relatively ancient holes poked into walls - and an eye-fooling altar setting that's actually a painting? In fact, while the doorway steps there on the right are 'real', that alcove to the right of the painted altar piece was also, I think, painted to wickedly deceive the mind. 

So is there order among the couple and the tryptic behind them? Can your mind assemble the pattern, the order, the moment's reason and therefore its meaning? Or is this really a surrealist's romp? One thing's certain... Blown up to 7' on the horizontal edge - Here's an image that will ask everyone its questions each and every time they enter the room it dominates. 

Bourbon St. • 1968

Still diving through the slide trove I found a couple of weeks back. They're coming out at random: Like the way miners find veins with explosives? Except for Kodak Carousel projector rings that were ordered, the rest are a jumble... memories smooshed together with the melange of Bingo balls in one of those tumblers. And like them, I reach in and pluck a moment out... Some ignite memory lights in wherever my brain stores things. 

Others seem to be part of someone else's life entirely. 

But here... here... Of course is our New Orleans honeymoon... Yep... Yep... I was there with Rita... Uh-huh... But this image? This instant? The colors faded away from the slide... and I cannot find them in my memory's storage bins. Why was the street so deserted? Was it too early for people? It was the first week of June so Summer'd happened way down there in Dixie. Maybe this was midday and only visitors like us were sufficiently weird to be out in the sun?

For sure it wasn't nighttime. Nope, nights in the Latin Quarter are NEVER this empty. Night's an open sluice gate on this street... Where people just keep on flowing like the ancient river a couple of blocks away. 

We've gone back to this creole place a few times. Even after the flood, this part of town's still a honkey-tonk constant. It's good that some things don't change in a world that's nothing but. Still, it's a city that's so culturally and climatically foreign that living there'd kill me. 

Up here in the north, the circus used to come to town every couple of years. They did that because customers wanted the break between visits. New kids had to grow into a appetite, and old appetites had to be resuscitated... Time allows both of those things. Both for the novelty of traveling circuses and traveling to circuses, like New Orleans.