Have you heard of Francis Picabia?  Picabia was a French artist whose life spanned two centuries.  Born, in 1879, he died in 1953.  Picabia's art takes some getting used to, but when we juxtapose it with some of his prose, we venture into some intriguing dimensions of the human imagination.
     Picabia once wrote a short piece of poetry which he titled "I am a beautiful monster."
     Here's the text:

     I am a beautiful monster who shares his secrets with the wind.  What I love most in 
     others is myself.
     I am a beautiful monster; I have the sins of virtue for suppport.  My pollen stains the 
     roses from New York to Paris.
     I am a beautiful monster whose face conceals his countenance.  My senses have only 
     one thhought:  a frame without a picture!
     I am a beautiful monster with a velodrome for a bed; transparent cards populate my 
     dreams.
     I am a beautiful monster who sleeps with himself.  There are only seven in the world 
     and I want to be the biggest.

    And one of his most famous paintings, "Tetes Superposees" ("a head set above all else"):

     Picabia says he is a "beautiful monster."  Perhaps he is.  Perhaps we all are.  Perhaps we all wander through life focused solely on ourselves.  Perhaps we are all disjointed selves, broken beings, disconnected amalgams of body, mind, and soul.  Perhaps.  In truth, we all are a bit narcissistic, and in truth we all are a bit fractured.  We are broken selves who live in a broken world.  If this is so, we must ask ourselves:  how do we know? In a broken world, a world torn asunder by existential form and folly, we measure our brokenness by our brokenness, hardly a reliable guide. 
     We admire Picabia's insights into the enormity of our human condition, we learn much from his theses about who we are.  But where do we go from here?
     If we are, as the Smashing Pumpkins suggested, "rats spinning in a cage," there's nowhere to go.  On the other hand, if we live in a personal "somethingness" from which all things have come, we have real and meaningful direction and vision.
     Whether he intended or not, Picabia should make us all think about our point.