Notes from the dome

Abstract

A condensed story of how I came to understand how I understand, a perpetual struggle of identity and difference, a deconstruction of the taken-for-granted. An imagination which eventually comes to rest in the sculpture Mappa Mundi Universalis, a glass tetrahedron held together by an updated version of Peirce's trinity of signs: the dialectical symbol (/) of internal relations; the icon of the semiotic fraction line (––); the logical index (=) of ontological transformations. Three projection screens specially prepared to capture the projected messages of religion, the arts, and the sciences. From beginning to end an illustration of Shakespeare's saying that “as imagination bodies forth, the poet's pen gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” Cusanus's Intellectus undressed. In addition, a double self-portrait of David Harvey and myself. Face to face, every day a new wrinkle. A palimpsest of layered meanings, the octogenarians revealing truths about themselves rather than inventing stories about others. Not an ideological manifesto but a Mallarméan Coup de dés. Such is the tain of the mirror, such are the representative figures of a generation still surviving. The precariat waiting in the wings.