Process
Notes
- Medium: Technical pen on paper
- Date: August 2017
- Size: A4, 21 x 29.7 cm (8.3 x 11.7 in)
- Fractal design based on the Sierpiński triangle
- Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The House of Asterion”
Fragment
From Jorge Luis Borges’s “The House of Asterion”:
I know they accuse me of arrogance, and perhaps of madness. Such accusations are derisory. It is true that I never leave my house, but is also true that its doors (whose number are infinite) are open day and night to men. Anyone may enter. He will find a house like no other on the face of this earth. A ridiculous falsehood claims that I, Asterion, am a prisoner. Shall I repeat that there are no locked doors, shall I add that there are no locks?
All parts of the house are repeated many times, any place is another place. There is no one pool, courtyard, drinking trough, manger; the mangers, drinking troughs, courtyards, pools are infinite. The house is the same size as the world; or rather it is the world. Everything is repeated many times, infinite times, but two things in the world seem to be repeated only once: above, the intricate sun; below, Asterion.
Perhaps I have created the star, the sun and this house, but I no longer remember.
Every nine years, nine men enter the house so that I may deliver them from evil. I hear their steps or their voices in the depths of the galleries and I run joyfully to find them. The ceremony lasts a few minutes. They fall one after another without my having to bloody my hands. They remain where they fell and their bodies help distinguish one gallery from another. I do not know who they are, but I know that one of them prophesied, at the moment of his death, that some day my redeemer would come. Since then, my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will come. I hope he will take me to a place with fewer galleries and fewer doors.
What will my redeemer be like? I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?
…and the morning sun reverberated from the bronze sword. There was no longer even a vestige of blood.
- Would you believe it, Ariadne? -said Theseus-. The minotaur scarcely defended himself.