Descending from its pre-existent dominion in Cyberspace is a land filled with milk and honey. A land where peace and prosperity are as common as the wind and rain. The land is vast and the horizons are limitless and beautiful. The mountains rise invitingly and majestically from the lush green valleys, saturated by the crystal clear streams and rivers gushing and freely flowing in abundance, crisscrossing the verdant land like a lovingly crafted patchwork quilt.
The people of this land are all artists, musicians, and craftsmen and are busy creating and constantly beautifying their homes, villages, towns and cities and they are industrious and happy. The name given to this glorious and rich world is Artopea. It is easily recognized now as a separate but accessible world because of a faint golden glow rising as a mist from the green lush valleys and hills: In the past, Artopea was a hidden and secret place, and only rarely visited by the few that stumbled into it by an accident of fate, through their dreams, visions and inspirations. Songs were sung, paintings were hung, poems were read, and the Scriptures said it existed, but it was so fleeting and inaccessible that it was called a legend by the ones with thick, black shades over their eyes that groped and roamed throughout Earth in far greater numbers. Within the shallow and narrow annals of what we can now call the Little History of Earth, the gifted ones would occasionally report the existence of this wonderful and fabulous world. The glimpses that have been recorded in the journals and documents created by the eyeless priests and chroniclers of our Little History were treated like lies and were taught to the young as fables and fiction, not as fact, throughout the millennia. But now the truth of Artopean existence is being revealed everywhere, all at once, through the golden cloud that has enveloped this ball of mud since the dawn of creation.
We had to wait for the learned students of Aristotle and the practitioners of Science to catch up with the motley visionaries of Artopea, so we could fashion the means to perceive it collectively. Artopea has only recently been discerned as a result of the sudden visibility of the bits and bytes, the zeros and ones that register the tiny infinitesimal quanta and packets of light radiating from the wondrous land. This discovery came through a golden apple that had fallen from a tree. The apple was eaten by a man with sense and imagination whose shades fell off when he bent over to pick up the apple. After biting into the apple he had a vision of the Artopean delights, and he built a box and filled it with quartz crystal chips so that we can now capture, compress and display the packets of golden quanta emanating from Artopea. He placed a screen of silica on one side of the box so we can view the landscape of Artopea and explore and participate in the wondrous pleasures of living there as its lustrous light passes through each of our eyes to fill our skulls. He created many, many Jobs. Come one and all to Artopea, the land of plenty, where everybody who travels here, young or old, rich or poor, healthy or halt, creates beauty, and joy fills their hearts and Artopean light illuminates their minds and spirits. Everybody that lives in Artopea has no fear of lack since they all pitch in together to work, create, build, plant, harvest, distribute, and share in the commerce of Artopea. The spirit of cooperation and care and concern for each other prevails. The people from outside the realm bring their treasures to trade for the precious and unique commodities created in Artopea by the citizens of Artopea.
The travelers throughout Cyberspace that stream into Artopea to look, learn, buy and trade, will leave a bit different and changed for the better after spending time stopping, browsing and studying in Artopea, and they will all have a souvenir tucked under their arm to take home. Some of the souvenirs will come from the main market, named the Kasbah, located smack in the middle of Artopea. The Kasbah is where most of the Artopeans congregate daily to display and hawk their wares under the brightly-colored patchwork of canvas awnings seen everywhere up and down its alleys.
Many of the visitors will fall in love with and remain in Artopea and become citizens with their official passports stamped and approved by the Artopean Tourist Bureau and Royal Department of Immigration. The only requirement for moving in is that the person must love beauty and desire to re-create it at all times wherever they are.
Artopea is composed of many villages, towns, a few monasteries, a castle or two, remote and isolated cabins, and even one city to accommodate the Artopeans that love the hustle and bustle of lots of traffic, night life, Internet conventions and trade shows, large production and distribution centers, shopping malls, museums, high tech novelties, gadgets, and mass communications hubs for catching up on the news throughout the realm and beyond.

The Artopean Gazette will soon be available weekly and eventually daily, with all the latest gossip, economic reports, births and deaths, entertainment schedules of Artopean theater and forums galore, interviews, inner views, (religion and philosophy), crackpot theories, new fangled inventions, weather, and anything else of note that the Artopean want to be informed about. Except the ball scores. Those they find in the outer realm, the Old World, where the less fortunate non-Artopeans, with their TV. schedules and pollution, wars, rumors of wars, knaves, marauders, dope fiends, and all the many other bored, tired, and distressed people of the wasteland still exist.
The villages, set apart from each other and spread throughout the land, are each inhabited by Artopeans of similar beliefs and artistic styles in their creations. Some of the citizens just want to express their beliefs and interpretations of pure Artopean society around them. They prefer to respond to the beautiful Artopean environments and history. They observe their natural pastoral scenes, retell the stories, re-interpret the traditional music that best describe their immediate natural surroundings, people and friends. They tend to congregate in one village called Cantelopia which the avant garde jokers down the road call Myopia . On the other hand, some of the residents of Artopea want to create and describe their own personal visions and dreams of an other-worldly or transcendent nature and.they are the Dreamers.
Their town has spawned many surrealists, an idealist or two, visionaries, and aviaries (half bird half man creatures), usually in January and February, their favorite months. That is also when they have their festivals that go on and on for two months, around the sundial.. The name of their town is Craziariopia and they are always very happy and dress funny every day for their own reasons. Some wear ear rings, some nose rings, some lip rings, some toe rings, some finger rings, and some people wea a ring in unmentionable places. . Some Artopeans, who still have a concern for the citizens left behind in the Old World and worry about its calamities, consisting of trials and tribulations, political oppressions and injustices, conspiracies, wars, and warmongers, diseases, pestilences, plagues, craven parasites, priests, and politicians, poverty and the last vestiges of the last gasp of the Little History exhausting itself over in Terraterantulla, commonly called snivelization, tend to congregate themselves in a village called Arkotopea to inform and save those that want citizenship or more accurately Zen ship in Artopea. Arkotopea is nestled in the foothills of Mount Bohemia. Arkotopea is where many of the artifacts from the Old World were brought in and are worked into the Art and Architecture, to be remembered and cherished. Jazz music, berets, free verse, free love, and black leotards, and tie dyed tee shirts, are seen and heard and experienced everywhere. There is even some splattered paint, splashed helter- skelter, appearing everywhere, like graffiti, on the walls of the coffee houses, reminiscent of a Polack named Pollack. The coffee houses are where the residents and visitors of Artopea and the mountain climbers of Mount Bohemia gather together to share their observations, philosophies, poetry, coffee and wine.
No Smoking signs are artfully designed and posted around the rooms. Berets, leotards and other quaint clothing are for sale at the Arkotopea City Lights bookstore and Mount Bohemia coffee houses. Allen Ginsberg has been given a free web site and Poetry Temple, and honorary CitiZenship, as the honorary mayor and Poet Lariat, to lasso all up-and-coming poets and bring them into Arkotopea. For the Classicists, the artisans, troubadours, musicians and stonemasons that fondly remember and emulate the artistic techniques and disciplines of the Italian Renaissance and the secret Hermetic traditions that brought it on, we see the village of Grossintagold, where the alchemical sciences and mystic arts have been taught by the wizards and alchemists, and have secretly and continuously been taught and practised to this day.
Apprentices and students are initiated into the secret arts of turning lead sinkers into gold. All the mystic signs and symbols proliferate here and are seen everywhere. Alchemical laboratories, and their symbolic beakers, bunsen burners, bars of lead and tiny traces of gold to be used as catalysts are available for sale to those that qualify by passing the tests and climbing the mystic mountain barefoot. Of course this is a secret society and, as such, has a severe set of disciplines and complicated training manuals to learn from and adhere to, so only the fittest survive. There is a monastery high on a pinnacle, rising like a silver spear above Grossintagold, to which only the winged ones can ascend. Eagle warriors and warrior monks are seen circling above in the azure sky.

Printer Friendly Page Here