Larry,
> Interesting idea. I'm forwarding this to a friend of mine, John Agnew...
good morning... interesting Mr. Agnew... I like his 450 million year old 
Ordovician marine fossils in the backyard. Will spend some time browsing.
> He did the cover for my book.
>   
got it
> A. Huxley in Doors of Perception mentions cathedrals and stain glass as man made psychedelics that transport the mind into a religious frame of mind. It may be that these soaring spaces convey a mixture of safety and risk (vastness) as do large spaces in caves. I had a similar feeling in the rocket assembly plant at Cape Kennedy back when they would let you go there.
>   
Long time since I read that book. Thank you for the reminder. It is 
difficult for anyone to not have a feeling of something when they visit 
a sacred place. And it is this sense of presence in space and the 
stimulation of the senses that I feel is important to the art of 
architecture. The story of the silver gate of St. Sophia of Kiev, and 
the play of eastern light through the windows behind the iconostasis and 
how they shine through the gate provides an aura of the supplicant 
communing directly with the light of wisdom of the divine. Then ad in 
censers of incense and chants mumbled prayers and the echo of sound from 
the surrounding masonry. Difficult not to be transfixed and/or feel 
transcendent.

I had a similar feeling when as a boy I walked with my brother and 
stepfather through the donut tunnel of the synchrotron at Cornell. I get 
the same eerie feelings when I visit the reactor up the road from us at 
Brookhaven Labs.
> Another thing I notice in art that I enjoy is a mixture chaos and order. Too chaotic = not understandable. Too ordered = boring.
I agree on the pleasure of the mix. This discussion can be come at from 
a whole slew of directions. In writing I enjoy the sequential nature of 
the mind of the reader (my mind in reading also) to have to jump from 
word to word, thought to thought. If the jumps are too close together, 
too obvious, then the writing feels slow, if the jumps are too far apart 
then the reader cannot assimilate a sense of meaning or flow -- and it 
is chaos that occurs [and why I suspect that I tend to detest Pynchon 
and a whole lot of his derivatives]. But there is also a pleasure for a 
reader in the challenge to make a series of successful jumps. It is 
similar to moving pictures in that respect. We can show each frame of a 
movie very slowly, or we can speed them up beyond real time, but there 
is only a small range of slow or fast timing in which we can hope to 
maintain the interest of the viewer, or the reader. And though we want 
the viewer to be responsive to the timing, we do not want them 
necessarily to be conscious of it as an artifice. I reflect on this when 
reading older literature in a time when readers had less media to 
stimulate the senses and writers would go much slower, would take longer 
to get to where they were going, I think in part that these writers 
resonated with their readers being in a mode to read slowly. When we 
pick them up with our internet fueled reading habits they seem to go on 
forever to get nowhere, or at least where they get to we are so worn out 
that we are not sure where we had wandered. A bit how we have 
discussions re: the comparison of television with radio, how with a 
radio drama the mode of experience is to sit back, shut off all the 
other senses but to focus on our hearing, and to recreate the scene in 
our mind's eye.

Later,
][<en

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