The Monk’s Vineyard closed at ten-thirty, but this was a chilly Tuesday night and it must have been a slow restaurant night. Thinking Kerk might get home a little earlier I headed over to Spanish Street a little after ten.
Kerk’s apartment was on the second floor of a narrow, late 19th century house, typical of ones scattered in clusters all over downtown. There are two front doors. The center one enters the downstairs apartment. The one on the right leads to a narrow staircase up the side of the house to the second floor and the other apartment.
We sat on the upstairs porch, overlooking silent Spanish Street below, drank the bottle of wine Kerk brought from the Vineyard and the one I picked up on the walk over, and talked.
During the wandering conservation the statement was made that the Castillo is one of the three points on a great, global triangle of great power. The other two is the Great Pyramids and Stonehenge. The three are representative of something. There is a common thread running between them all. They are tied together, but just how I don’t recall. Giza...Amesbury...St. Augustine: points of power in the Ancient World...the Old World...and just a couple of blocks from our porch, the New World.
We realized that the porch on Kerk’s house was actually outside the triangle of power, and wondered if that mattered. Kerk said that we should not worry about borders, that the universe, as a Mobius strip, allowed a borderless, single dimensional world from a three dimensional reality.
I asked him what a mobius strip was.
I did well in 10th grade geometry. I liked the neat and logical way space could be understood with a toolbox filled with proofs and theorems, and I understood using all the known-to-be-true concepts, but I had never been shown a Mobius strip.
He left and returned with a sheet of paper, scissors, tape, and a red pen. In a moment had shown me the world outside of planes and points and rays and lines and proved to me the world of the non-orientable.
We determined that it was more important to have the triangle in us than for us to be in the triangle. Perhaps that was the message of Mobius.
I put the Mobius strip in my vest pocket, and kept it there for a very long time.
