THE SHEET

THE SHEET

Four is a good number, the number of the seasons, the compass points, the wheels of a car or legs of a horse, the dimensions it takes to map any point in spacetime according to Einstein. I mention this because it is time to reconsider the experiment designed by my younger brother James.

He left two sheets in the barn. One of them, if I remember, contained a diagram of a sunflower made of Badly Drawn Boy lyrics, slightly imperfectly quoted on purpose:

sunshine inside of you

old sun warm sun

spreads over you

soleil all over you

It’s a nice song. We notice the sunshine is inside. That it is what is inside that counts. The next sheet contained what I call the new da Vinci circle:

@

<BEE> [long squiggle]

Infinity symbol

If I could quote my sister Hannah I would say the new da Vinci circle is a discrete system containing the international language alphabet in 4 Points of Difference. For it suggests <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet.

There were burning candles on top of the box we used as a table, drawn on the underside of one of the pages, which was placed face down on the box with burning candles we use as a table.

I went down to the barn. I read the documents where they were left. On the Badly Drawn Boy one I was inveigled by the sunflower pattern. And yet on the <BEE> one I could not see James’s discrete system… I could see only a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes containing the whole international language alphabet. One of the characters was

[backward f,

forward f,

equals running

through.]

So I left the document alone, thinking James had designed a whole alphabet in a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes. But when I returned to reread it – not in jealousy but admiration – the tabular arrangement was gone and the <BEE> document remained as initially designed. I left it alone again, and then, one day, when our father passed I went down to the barn again and found the first sheet, the Badly Drawn Boy one, had bloomed or grown pictures.

The pictures seem to depict the lyric to a song I wrote way back in Oedipus Wrecks, and some have tried to pin the shading of the sheet on me, but I am not so sure myself…

The pictures appeared at places where James had left crosses, indicating that he could project where they would arise.

I have looked into it all and can report that by now that the equation for the ratio between sunlight falling and Gravity pulling down on the sheet where pictures grew still eludes me; but if it is “c over G” we are dealing with, I’d say it equates to

backward f,

forward f,

equals running

through…

L to the pregnant snorkel.

O is the key of the babbling unicorn.

The symbol [R] might still represent the stance, the large R, Romantic stance that Creativity in the synapse gulf is possible, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.

If mother’s flower-press ending on cannabis

could be said to = a dialysis,

a love poem only hoping to impress

poor Flora still = a motor.

Rah the sun-god sleeps upstairs.

For it was for Flora that my brother contrasted the flower and the <BEE> and he was lucky enough to know of her kiss. I suppose she is the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh.

Back when I wrote the song in question which the pictures seem to depict my game was not the sheet at all but the face, I mean the island of penguins and it was said I proved the island of penguins in the first verse of my first song of my first ever live gig. It was also said the lines I used belong to the house, so I might have to go Anon with that number, but in taking it away from me, one would make attaining the island of penguins a regrettable event. I don’t really mind either way and am easy with that number belonging to the house, just don’t want any other numbers to go that way.

Anyhow the point remains that James’s idea concerning <BEE> is original. The only original ideas I think I have had myself are that I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too, which is worthy of a place in the ladder though not as good as <BEE>, and that Lucy in the soul w/ demons might happen to be an actual substance, which is not for the ladder for obvious reasons. So it is my younger brother James who should take the plaudits for coming up with a mind-bending, original idea that still to this day resonates with possibility.

Whether <BEE> is capable of making that mark that was left I do not know, and so repeat that there are people in academia who think the pictures that grew were my own work.

I think any further discussion of the sheet where pictures grew should be the responsibility of my brother considering he started the experiment, and showed us his genius in doing it.