Not sleeping

I slept for about half an hour, then woke up abruptly thinking that something in the room had moved. That was an hour ago, I've cleaned the kitchen and made hot chocolate, and am now (in theory) winding down to try to sleep again.

The competition takes shape very slowly, we still haven't managed to fit all the required spaces into the restaurant area. We've all had a turn at planning it now, and none of us has managed to make the thing work properly. My instinct when faced with a problem this close to intractable, is to assume that we have overlooked something pretty fundamental, but that does not seem to be the case. It's just a difficult problem. Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

In other news, I went to the Staatsgalerie on Saturday afternoon for another look at the Picasso exhibition (pretty much as I remembered it, no surprises there) and went on to see the Herrenberger altar again, where I found a surprise and a revelation. First the surprise: in the second panel (depicting Christ's trial and scourging) I noticed for the first time that "Levit. 6" was written along the upper edge of his loincloth. I had to read the chapter twice to figure out the reference, because it is not in any way prophetic.

The revelation was appropriately in the last (fourth) panel, depicting the Resurrection. I had always been puzzled by the posture of one of the guards at the sepulchre (the scene is from Matthew): lying on his back with his feet in the air, coins tumbling from his pockets, jamming the butt of his crossbow into the ground, he appears to be tumbling backwards head-over-heels - but where does he fall to, and why? I had previously noted that the sepulchre stands on a section of ground that appears to be rising out of the plain, with sharply defined cliff-like edges: pushed up by the earthquake that opens the sepulchre (Matthew again). This time I noticed what was beyond the edge in the utmost lower-right corner: blackness, nothing; a very significant nothing, a non-barking-dog of a Nothing. The background to this panel is the Last Judgement, and the breaking up of the ground around the sepulchre is not an earthquake but a reference to this. The soldier is falling backwards into damnation, and neither his wealth nor his weapons will save him.