Frank Turek's Twelve Prophecies

Each of the Twelve Prophecies assemblages contains two cylinders with collaged text. These scroll-like pieces are wrapped with text from pulp romance stories. I had a few parameters, like the entry starting at the beginning of a paragraph—typically with the capitalization of the first few words—and I tried to avoid people’s names. I was mostly successful. I like that a series about prophecies has a scroll element—a pair of scrolls no less, which is almost a trope. These cylinders are each capped with number discs which work as a kind of random indexing. The choices of the numbers used have no underlying meaning or code, that is unless I intuitively stumbled into a complex fractal!

Here’s the text used as the scrolls for the first box of the series:

Box 1. 7-45

“So the initial stage of our honeymoon was spent in a cross-country train in a compartment—I’ve never traveled in the compartment of a train—and I didn’t return to the city. I wired a friend to close up my apartment and pack up my clothes and send them on—to tell the personnel manager that life had caught up with me and that I was on my way to Arizona. And then all at once, I?was?in Arizona. And existence took on a new pattern that was too exciting.”

Box 1. 22-82

“She sat down on the bench and gave a big sigh, ‘What a day! Mobs of people, and children all over the place. Spot wouldn’t behave. He simply ruined my new white skirt. And I was saving it for you. But we did have a lovely lunch. It was clean and sunshiny in the hills and there is a kind of amusement park.’

‘I know. I’m sorry, honey. But there’ll be other days. There’ll be lots of picnics.’ “

I will continue to go through the parts of one of the Twelve Prophecies assemblage boxes. If you are just discovering this, please go back to the earlier entries to get a look at the bigger picture. Stay tuned.

Cheers, Frank