Why I Made “The Armour Of Infinity”

4 min readOct 23, 2020

If you’ve been reading these essays in the order I wrote them, which is also the order I made the pieces- and thank you for bothering to read them at all- you’ll know that the small circle image, “The @ Clock,” told me what it was; the background, “The End Of All Our Exploring,” emerged like a dream on a hot August afternoon; the large circle or zero, “Moontomballoon,” is just something I borrowed and scribbled on and the one or left column, “The Planck Plank,” kind of talked its way out of my head.

A bit of figuring, a bit of fettling, and there they were. Easy births, all four.

“The Armour Of Infinity”, in contrast, was a problem child from conception, with a nativity less like the Christ child and more like Macduff.

In fact, there is a lot of hacking and dismemberment in my thoughts about “The Armour Of Infinity”. It is, absolutely, procrustean: a thing disfigured to make it conform, like the feet of Yao Niang or the victims of the Attican bandit*. To make it fit I had to beat the devil out of it harder than Bob Ross drying a brush while, all the other pieces arrived as happy little accidents.

Which is obviously why it’s my favourite.

I am a contrarian by nature. Argument makes me feel strong, makes me feel brave. It’s probably the only area I have any technical expertise in (I’ve studied propositional calculus), I’m good at it and I enjoy it. It’s also one of those things- like smoking, going out on school nights and wearing drainpipe trousers- a gentleman really should give up if he wants to grow old gracefully. So these days, I limit myself to arguing with artworks that refuse to do as they’re bloody told.

So, for starters, here I was at de Champaigne’s hourglass.

Still Life With Skull or Vanitas by Phillipe de Champaigne

The flowing hourglass is the USP of this particular Vanitas, because it frees the image from time by anchoring it to time.

Still Life With Skull is not still: the hourglass is running.

But it is a still life: it’s a painting.

It lies outside of time by the very fact it insists it doesn’t.

And that’s how I justify making an hourglass, traditionally associated with the brevity of life and limits of time, represent eternity. It had to represent eternity- deep time, mineral time, the big bang and the big crunch, the cycle or circle or zero that represents both nothingness and all things- because I needed something to and everything else was used up.

And the hourglass’s very awkwardness, it’s refusal to fit a conceptual framework, meant that although de Champaigne had made the Procrustean bed*, Unrealcity was going to lie on it.

The first job was to mark it as mine. So I branded it with my symbol, Wei-Chi. Both an ancient game and the 64th hexagram of the I Ching, representing fire over water and the task uncompleted, I’ve worn a tattoo of Wei-Chi on all my adult life. The game never concludes, and we only get to play for a while. For me, though, that’s enough: that sense of defiance; that scrawling of graffiti on the grave; that understanding of human consciousness as essentially being an argument with nature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UwLDmJRU5s&feature=youtu.be

I managed to get a five onto the Wei-Chi hexagram, which I then backed up by selectively guilding the armour of my lizards.

Yes, because I made the hourglass of a brace of armadillo girdled lizards, which bite their own tails when threatened so only their spiny backs are exposed, incarnating the ouroboros of mythology. The animal’s taxonomic name is Ouroborus cataphractus, which can be (generously) translated as “armoured infinity”.