Lingua Tactus Nebula
from the Metaphysical Maps series

mixed media on paper20" X 29"1995

Of all the frontiers within the human metaphysical universe, the most mysterious frontier is the one we ourselves inhabit - the tactile universe. Like a jungle in the backyard, the language of touch, so mysterious and fragrant, is reduced in our culture to the merely practical - and robbed of most of its expressive richness. Some of us pass entire lives in the presence of the wonder of skin and nerve and pulse, yet we engage only the remarkably limited vocabulary of the handshake, the fistfight, the kiss, the friendly cuff, and call it a good life.

Numbingly familiar are the well-trod trails in this wilderness that take us through violent, the ritual, the sexual. Each of these realms involves steep, crumbly stretches that can plunge the unwary into danger. But how many of us even so much as gaze across the vast, verdant meadows of the Aesthetic? Few of us venture into the aesthetic realm of the tactile universe; there are no charts or journey's logs to go by. I proscribe what I know, mark the angles, compass the differences, scribe thereto a scale and orientation, all with a prickly-sharp pencil, but find I'm still as lost.

We've listened with rapt and captivated horror to tales of those who have skirted the perimeters of this terrain, but even they scurry from their thin-aired heights back to the comfortable shores where they know their business. They can lay all their deeds before us, but what could they see from there? Was there a precipice? a black void? a pool boiling with monsters? And where might I find myself, if I could force my heavy feet out of these pounded ruts of our tactile traffic and escape over this hedgerow, or beyond that gentle rise?

Fellow mariner of these wild waters, what is your tale?