Instructions for Constructing a Tesseract

A tesseract has forty-eight faces	Like the Janus of a twenty-four-fold doorway	With a different line written across every face	Like phrases written on a page	The relationships are more important than the content	The space between the lines is even more important
Being made up of eight cubes, each with six faces	There are forty-eight cells in this matrix	My grandfather read them across	Poetic images juxtaposed at random	Arrange that they are all commutative	Like the spaces between the lines of a net
You must write one line on each face	My grandfather wrote them down	When he built his universal traveling device out of	Rigorous progressions of logical syllogisms	You can read them in any direction	A net can be folded in any direction
The order must be precisely correct	Like the columns in an account book	Rigorous and painstaking numerical calculations	Forming a map, a key, a spell	Once they are folded into cubes	So that the sums carry over the gaps between columns
The relationships among the lines determine the destination	Organized for the desired result, they	Arrive at a set of numinous coordinates	A card to the library at Alexandria	Where the cubes are joined with n-dimensional tape	To create what is called the net of the tesseract
The space between the lines determines the distance	Sum carefully over the intervening time and space	Read your way to the hanging gardens of Babylon	An answer for all the riddles of the tribe of Sphinxes	Which is only an aid to understanding the mystery	A shape that approximates the reality
But remember that it's only an approximation	To get you at least close to where you're going	The tree under which Gautama still meditates is guarded	May not be reached without giving up something	There is an algorithm that specifies the creation	Of a permutative labyrinth containing a logical Minotaur
My grandfather warned me	You must be wary of the seductions of permutation	Infinitely differentiable manifolds of illusion	You thought precious; revealed to be empty	There is a revelation that destroys the perception	Of a tesseract folded into itself and disappearing altogether.

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