"I'm busy designing a new print showing a staircase that goes on endlessly ascending - or descending, if you see it that way. This would normally have to be a spiraling thing in which the top would disappear into the clouds and the bottom Hell. Not in my version … Nevertheless, it's possible to draw it with the correct perspective: each step higher (or lower) than the last one. A large number of human figures walk on it in two directions. One procession climbs wearily up ad infinitum; the other descends endlessly …
That staircase is a rather sad, pessimistic subject, as well as being very profound and absurd. … Yes, yes, we climb up and up, we imagine we are ascending; every step is about ten inches high, terribly tiring - and where does it all get us? Nowhere; we don't get a step farther or higher. And descending, running down with abandon, is not possible either.
People don't like to talk about falling; they'd much rather talk about ascending. Well then … I'm working my fingers to the bone, believing I'm ascending. How absurd it all is. Sometimes it makes me feel quite sick."
- M.C. Escher
Isn't this a very interesting thought? We attempt to climb higher into the heavens at times and find out that were are only humans and just fall back to earth, the middle where we walk endlessly and then at times we seem to want to sink into hell but it is impossible also as we are still among the living.... only when we die will we move on to one or the other... and I think that depending on your lifes overall direction either towards knowing and loving our god or towards self and towards embelishing in sucking life from self, that is the direction your momentum is built up towards once you die and your spirit is pointed in that direction.
Anyway whateva... just a thought I never know how much of myself I even believe. I love M.C. Escher's work... he was a genius. If you ever get the chance pick up a book of his prints and not only look at them but read his commentary, it will send you into a world you've never ventured out into before.