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Premise
The foundation of the Monument has been developed from a simple Awareness Exercise called Rock Gazing.
As the quasi-fictional, quasi-historical narrator continues this exercise for a year and a day, each episode of meditation or Rock Gazing opens into a state of consciousness, with its own characters, narrations, styles of language and historical settings and times. The monument not only illustrates, but models the “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics: that time or reality bifurcates in endless branches, and that in addition to the reality that any given observer experiences, all other possible realities are also experienced in different perceptual dimensions.
Structure
A Monument of Wonders has a simple basic structure: the seven days of the week, plus an interregnum period that divides and completes them. These eight comprise an octave, which is repeated with variations 52 times (the number of weeks in a year). An introduction and a coda complete the work.
In this way the Monument has both the character of a dairy or a calendar as well as an octave in music. This diary begins October 27th, 2000 and ends October 27th, 2001. Thus the chapters consist of 366 days, 52 interregnums, an introduction and a coda, or 420 sections in all. These eight basic components are as follows:
ThemesFriday's Rock, Moby Polyphemus — the feral, intelligent, but brute forces of nature, the uncontrollable
Saturday's Rock, Aesklepios, the Folly Master — the role of theater and pretense in healing
Sunday's Rock, Fergus’s Druid Dreamstone — sacrifice, disguise, shape-shifting
Monday's Rock, Sandro Lingam — love, lust, betrayal
Tuesday's Rock, Serenity Pitt, the Zen Master — practicality, recovery, sympathy
Wednesday's Rock, Grace Maryanka — style, art, politics, the recovery of the femine
Thursday’s Rock, Giles Nagual — magic
Interregnum: Week’s Summary — disintegration and assimilation
The surface timeline of A Monument of Wonders is the pivotal year in American and world history that begins just prior to the (s)election of George W. Bush as president to the destruction of the World Trade Towers on 9/11/01 and the decision by the Bush administration to set the country and the world on an Orwellian course of perpetual warfare.
Beneath this surface, time runs through other places and events, through alternative histories, through parallel present events and through many possible futures.
These other realities are comprised of all those things we have rejected or ignored, and yet the Monument shows that they still surround and imprison us in their increasingly uninhabitable debris.
We live in a Monument of trash, and resurrecting and alchemizing this debris back into spiritual gold is the art of A Monument of Wonders.
In the Monument, historical characters interact with fictional ones. Pasts, presents and futures are altered, deformed or intermixed. Humans, animals, angels, demons, animate and seemingly inanimate objects from different historical periods collide, merge and/or interact through dreams, fairy tales, altered states of consciousness, lost and found letters and manuscripts. The rejected — the realities that we chose not to experience — are disinterred and illuminated.
A Monument of Wonders ranges through different time periods — 4th century Greece, the time of the Troubadours, World War 1, the Russian Revolution, Colonial America, the late Reagan era, the Roman occupation of Britain — to name a few, and through different styles of speech and language — slang, specialized vocabulary, snippets of foreign phrases, etc. — the Monument illustrates how the intersection of time and language creates consciousness, which in turn creates our experience of reality.
These bleed-throughs of other realities into our habitual one are experienced as miracles, eccentricities, oddities, preposterousness, outrageousness, folly, etc., in a word, as wonder.