ETERNAL CONSTRUCTION SITE ONLY MUCH BIGGER

First I must say where I have been.

Imagine a mansion in eternity. Would it have a make immaculate or ruinous? The merit to perfect bricks is aesthetic, its mode ideal: a perfect brick is what we aspire for bricks to be, with edges sanded smooth and corners exactly pointed; a mansion constructed as such will be a perfect mansion, but would it describe an eternal one? Immaculate polish, maintained according to immaculate conception, does not stand alone without manual upkeep. And a mansion, as a construction, must stand alone (or else we are describing not a mansion but an eternal construction site).

So then, the bricks must be ruinous. Crumbled, imperfect, whittling away towards nothing. Right? Does that hold up for eternity? In a matter of time, the mansion would be a heap of heaps, and later still not even that, the grains of dust blown by wind(?) into the grand temporal circulation patterns, more a part of eternity itself than of the intended construct. Does that describe a mansion?

Obviously this exercise is linguistic, then, and there is no clean answer. Surely? But, if there is no answer, where have I been? An abyssal plain? The unanswerable strand? The perpetually temporary Street of Roads, on the outskirts of the center of fabled underscore? I exclaim, I have been in eternity's mansions.

In truth, I still do not know which of the two makes these mansions were (ideal, or dilapidated), and I present the above to you as condensations of suppositions that had entertained my mind in moments of lucid contemplation. I know only that these were mansions-- at least while I was in them. I was not only in the mansions. My pilgrimage has been winding, and you can find my footprints on many an eternal sand. I am here now speaking of the mansions.

Did they have purposes, or owners? What purpose does any mansion have but to present its inhabitant? A house is designed to be inhabited, and so if a mansion only needed to be inhabited, it would have been a house and have no need for the extravagant size. Adding extravagance to a house, even simply making it much bigger, is like installing a frame onto a canvas: it brings explicit presentation, it emphasizes the presence of presentation. The eternal mansion eternally presents whoever inhabits it.

I inhabited, for a while, an eternal present. That's a slightly different sentence where "present" now qualifies "eternal" rather than "I." The future could be seen from the back windows, the past from the books I'd read. For me, the inhabitant, it was hard doing to focus on either of those at all. The mansion, trappings and all, took up my time. I suspected, and even now think back and wonder, that I was not the only inhabitant. Maybe there were others, maybe there were to be others, and I was alone during my allotted stay. Maybe I was not alone and the mansion was simply that big. One is allowed to question-- anything, in fact, including-- whether I was "the inhabitant" and not a guest.

Where did the mansion come from? Where its materials, its constituent parts? Suppose an eternal mansion has eternal parts. Well, which kind of "eternal mansion," the immaculate or the ruinous? Whichever one the bricks, that one the parts: either way, they came from Earth, from Time as we have known it. I did not stay long enough to be absolutely sure of the specifics, though I have made observations. They are all of this sort: 

- I slept on a bed.
- It remained the same bed for a number of days, months, more.
- It would eventually change to a different bed, and never back to a previous bed.
- I never saw it change, though I was not in the same room as the bed all of the time and did not make a concerted effort to see it change.
- It was not always a particularly comfortable bed. Sometimes it was.

It is reasonable to assume the nature of the eternal mansion's bricks is the same, with imperfections being replaced when necessary. I did not observe those changes happening either, which on one hand may be more surprising, as there are a lot of bricks in a mansion and I ought to have seen the change happen at least once, but on the other hand may be just as you'd expect, as I do not make a habit of regularly and rigorously watching specific bricks in a wall all day every day. And, for that matter, this is rooted in an assumption. Perhaps the bricks operated differently than the materials of the interior.

I was not the perfect witness to the mechanisms of this mansion, as I spent the greater portion of my stay invested in my own thoughts and activities, those activities usually being further thoughts. I do not have a list of the things I thought about. I was there for a very long time. Many of the things I thought about, I will bring up in natural course in coming posts, blogs, websites, compositions.

It was, they were, mansions.
Yet it was not peace.