There's a particular kind of vertigo you get standing in front of a picture by M.C. Escher. Your brain insists it understands what it's seeing, then quietly panics when the logic refuses to resolve.
Staircases ascend forever. Hands draw each other into existence. Birds become fish become birds again. It's not a trick, exactly: it's something stranger and more unsettling. The feeling that the rules you thought governed reality have been politely, bur firmly, suspended. It's like the best optical illusions meeting art.
