"Touch"

This is the connector between the two parts of Elementory. So it needs to focus on the Inversion, as much as possible within the limits of this fictional context. Why not make an Escher print, then, the focus of the story? Because it's a connector, it's already out of the narrative pattern of the rest, and can be more free in its structure -- like to find a way to move in a spiral-like trajectory, starting from a very high altitude (where the preceding, "Earth", left off), and circling down into a self reference of some sort. Perhaps opening out again on the "other side" -- i.e., the inverted side -- in preparation for "Skin" that follows. ("Touch", of course, referring to the contact of self and world, flesh and earth.)

Could Nick (Air) be the protagonist, making him a sort of central figure for the whole, perhaps the only character who actually goes through the Inversion?

Consider an incident: the discovery of mind over matter (memory/flashback of an early acid trip) -- by a mere exercise of will, the grasping hand on the end of an arm can be raised and extended, its fingers opened and then closed around the cylinder of a glass, and the glass thereby brought to the table.... Ghost in the machine, and also ghost as machine, machine as ghost.

As for the Escher print, see "Print Gallery" for an example of a spiral at least, with its enigmatic blind spot at its impossible center:

Here's the that center itself, animated -- a kind of fractal perhaps:























P.S.: What's the difference between this and simply putting an exact copy of the same print in the gallery -- a print within a print? That too, obviously, has potentially infinite depth, but it's banal. What distinguishes this is that the print in the gallery is not a copy but is the same print as the one we're looking at. Escher has found a way of taking a part and merging it with the whole. It's impossible on a literal level, of course, which is why there's a hole in the center -- but it's a visual display of an idea that wholes and parts are mutually implicative.

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