Konrad and Alexandra (PDF) - Rolf Gross

away.God is timeless! whispered an inner voice.She shrugged. I know that they show a timeless God, I am no longer looking for the all-pervasive God.She rose and went along the walls scrutinizing the paintings up close, as if she expected to find the answer to her puzzlein their detail. The magnificence of the chiseled gold ground, the intensity of the egg-based colors! But then the distortedfaces, the horrifying scenes of martyrdom in the fringe stories of the saints stared at her—you are too close!What you are searching for is in your own mind not in these panels.If not God, was time the key to her conundrum?She chose time as the center of her meditation.She walked into the room of the early Renaissance. Here God was no longer the overriding subject. The Virgin and thesaints had been reduced to ordinary human beings with emotions and earthly bodies. The Christ child sucked his fingers.The saints, clutching thick volumes, faced the beholder with dark questions in their eyes. Are you a sinner? Repent andwe offer you salvation.She gently pushed them aside. What had happened to time?Her favorite Giorgione in Venice appeared to her. Here time stood still, was defined quite precisely. One could tell thehour of the day: it was late afternoon. The baby was hungry, his mother was feeding him when his father returned. Fiveyears ago she had not noticed that. She smiled, Otto had taught her that.Fleetingly the picture of Otto’s birth passed her mind, but Botticelli’s Primavera a few steps further overwhelmed hermeditation by its elusive beauty, and she discarded the fireworks of Otto’s birth.She took a step back and sank her eyes into the painting. The ravishing beauty of Botticelli’s women made her dizzy,threatened to drown her. Almost bashful, she lowered her eyes, and her inner voice said, they are caught in fluid time.She tried to rescue herself along Walter’s perspective lines and discovered that the painting had three different vanishingpoints. And they seemed to move as she moved. As puzzled as years ago she had the feeling that an unseen heathenGod watched her from behind the painting. Only this time there seemed to be three.She walked back to her bench, sat down, and closed her eyes.A picture of Easter at Zedazeni rose. She heard Konrad’s voice. "In Arcadia Pausanias found a horrifying female trinity:Demeter, Kore, and Yakkhos".She shuddered. Drunk Persephone floated by."The Gods behind the painting are female."She focused her mind on the center of her meditation. And in the next image her inner voice insisted, "Your time is fluidtoo".The vision of Otto’s birth passed by a second time, and resisted her attempt to discard it."Your time is circula,: lunar cycles of birth, love, and death."Her intensity ebbed away, the images stopped coming. She put her chin into her hand and with blind eyes stared at thetimeless gold surfaces of the Byzantines.She had opened a Pandora’s box of paradoxes.Konrad found her, sitting lost among the glowing panels of the Primitives. "What happened to you?" he asked surprised."You are still here, at the place I left you!""I am afraid I can’t explain it. I lost all time."35.Alexandra's Time1905"Friedrich," said Alexandra at night, "a few weeks ago I overheard you discuss a new theory with Niko that postulates afour-dimensional world. I had a curious experience in the Uffizi today which I will try to explain later provided I can clearmy confused mind. It would help me, if you could describe that theory."They were having coffee after dinner."You ask for an explanation of the latest ideas in physics. Are you sure you want to hear these esoteric speculations?What happened to you? The theory of Relativity in the Uffizi? You are not trying to goad me into a theosophicaldiscussion?"Alexandra wrinkled her brows. "Don’t mock me, you know that I pay no heed to the theosophists. No, I am serious, myquestion has to do with the concept of time and with what will happen to our thinking in the future, after we have114