The Ins and (consequently) Outs of an Italian Klein Bottle

I am not posting anything coherent right now, so don't expect as much.

My life is like the shadow of a four-dimensional cube, a representation of an impossible image, a glimpse of the unseen thing, but not the thing itself.

My metaphors are like my science-overwrought with obvious conclusions, thus offending the whole logical process.

My style is like the smoke off a Humphrey Bogart cigarette-taken for granted, but would be missed if it weren't omnipresent, filling the air between the stars.

Fractals are jumping out of my mind. Don't be scared, they often break through into the infinities beyond our comprehension.

My mind is awash in monks: Monks from the apocalyptic future, who toil away in desert abbeys, saving scraps of siliconian blueprints and illuminating manuscripts of algebra texts. Monks from the past who hide in their Italian monestaries, in fear of the giants who hurl bolders like manna from the nearby mountain.

New Rome, Old Rome, and above them all floats My Rome, the idea that became corrupt even before I left the city, yet is somehow pristine in my mind. The Rome of fruit vendors, performing bums, and clashing layers of history gently peeling from within crumbling city walls...it all exists in my mind and assuredly somewhere out there, beyond the sea.

But the more I think on it, the more I realize that Rome truly is an idea as much as it is a place--and not every place can be said to have an idea attached to it, let alone one that rivals the meaning and importance of the place itself. Yet, Rome does have an idea, nay, many ideas attached to it, many ideas, which both blend together and peel apart like the layers of history from the city's buildings or the paint on the aging facades of those very buildings.

And what's the end result? A harmonically-fused "idea-place" named Rome, which has multiple meanings and layers, a fractal pattern of "Rome-cities" begetting "Rome-ideas" over the centuries twisting in on itself like a double-helix, never straying too far from its core, yet all the while evolving and growing.

Perhaps somewhere in a Platonically-inspired, higher dimensional realm, where ideas and things are conjoined, the Rome of All Time exists, in a state that- like the four-dimensional cube whose only representation we can understand is its shadow- is so far beyond us that we can only dream of it in tiny, disjointed pieces.