tower of babel © Lilly Schwartz 2012

I have a sort of strange obsession with towers lately and especially the Tower of Babel seems to follow me around as well. I wanted an Escher print for my wall and originally I was trying to get one with some sort of strange animals and stars, but in the end I was happy to find the Tower of Babel. Only a couple of weeks later my mum came to visit and we went to an exhibition of Soviet architecture just after the revolution. There right next to a model of Tatlin’s tower, an attempt at a tower bigger than the Eiffel tower, was a reproduction of an illustration from Athanasius Kircher’s book Turris Babel. Then, just a few days ago when I was looking through my typical music blogs I stumbled over a goth rock single by a band called Tower of Babel. The cover of this 7″ from 1988 with the title Sunrising has the tower from Escher’s version of the Tower of Babel in red. Strange. There is probably no special significance to it, but I quite like it when my life starts to rhyme in some way.