6/23/11

Burn.Question

I move with a relentless force that radiates while staring out the window at clouds, Cooper's hawks, the limestone cornice, and terra cotta rosettes.

I asked: What is your experience with or how would you define freedom?
You looked back with cautiously expressionless eyes.

This is where I engage movement and it articulates and defines me. This is where I achieve validity with constant motion, constant, and it's my only understanding of being free. It's an abstraction that I glimpse when moving, the abstract movement of contrasts, the gentle rub of resistance that is hot and comforting.

You are extensive like light or gravity, a massive incontrovertible force. Substantial. Fluid. Moving.

Freedom is just more capitalism.


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Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
- T.S. Eliot


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The site:

View from the window:

What's left of Mo State Hospital retains some fascinating details: limestone columns, limestone dentil molding, capitals with melting eagles, rotunda roof (painted, that's not copper patina), massive terra cotta rosettes. The original arched windows are missing. They've been replaced and a concrete lentil rests above each window. Arched windows still remain in the rotunda roof.

I estimate the superb limestone capitals on the front of the building to be 5 feet in height.









3 comments:

Chris said...

Oh. My. God.

Did he or she answer your question?

I know you don't ask these questions casually. You must be fascinated and what a gift it is to be on the receiving end of your exquiste focus.

I'll never forget your kindness and valor.

Christian Herman said...

Answers are always contained within questions.

Yes. I am fascinated.

Mary Lynn E. Longsworth said...

I teamed up with Charles Brown, the assistant director at the Mercantile Library and tracked down the name of the manufacturer of the "P R M & M Co St. Louis XXX" bricks.

Starting in 1894, Progress Press Brick Manufacturing and Machine company operated at "Kingshighway and the Oak Hill Rail Road," later 3205 South Kingshighway.

Hope this helps.

marylynn (dot) e (dot) longsworth (at) UMSL.edu