The Fabulous Riverboat

I was looking at this architectural drawing of the Etemenanki ziggurat - the biblical Tower of Babel - and it suddenly began to look like a ship to me - viewed from dead ahead. Blame the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, everything looks like a ship right now - heading for an iceberg on the event horizon. It's almost perfect, the stacking of the decks, the prow and cutwater, the columns representing the smoke stacks. A ship of the desert, plowing through time.

Time, flows like a river, to the sea. The Alan Parsons Project

Maybe that's why, when I visited the Great Architect's Taliesen West in Phoenix this winter, I felt compelled to do my Jack impersonation, perched on the "prow" of the monument.

The ziggurat as the riverboat of human consciousness, on the river of time. Samuel Clemens was a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, This occupation gave him his pen name, Mark Twain, from "mark twain," the cry for a measured river depth of two fathoms. I began looking at those twin columns, those twin towers, those twin smoke stacks.

Hit it, Tina:



Title inspiration from The Fabulous Riverboat, by Philip José Farmer, from the Riverworld series.