‘Tis all snakes and ladders, isn’t it?

Oil painting garnished with touches of bubble-wrap, of a misted nocturnal gameboard with a central eye-like sphere inside a tesseract grid. A skull and serpent hover above. HEXACO tokens ring the field. At the bottom, Alice and the Infanta appear beside a magenta ladder; a ghostly sitter lingers at the right edge.

 The Magic Phantom Drawing Workshop

There is a verse in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that stays with me—a rough paraphrase goes: “For in and out, above, about, below, ’Tis…