Was it your liberation or your annihilation?

That there is a message at all is enough. Just consider how we are, our ears turned to each other, to the march of history, to the genome, to the edges of mathematics, to music and the arts, to the very echo of the cosmos, for a message. Any.

We think the message is revealed to us, but it is the opposite, we are revealed before the message. The symbols I have been straining over, have laid me bare.

And as for the message humanity hopes for, whether or not there is any divine author to go with it, we can be sure the gods we have imagined are apparitions of a collective mind, inventions. It is madness to think the God we contemplate could be confined within our contemplation–we cannot even visualize a four-dimensional solid or an imaginary number. Even in the ancient stories, it is said the glimpse of Him would make one blind. And still we are naked before this drawing of ours, this As-If-It-Were-God, literally and emotionally, as revealed as in a painting or a song.

So how frightened are we, and what exactly of, that the moment we turn from the work of art or from the notion of the divine, to face each other, we immediately conceal and repress ourselves?

I hope I never do manage to decipher this message I found, waiting in this bottle someone once left it in. There is no limitlessness without mystery.

Why reduce to one result something that could go so many different ways?

I want to dance between the monoliths we raise, chase you and be chased. I want the fire always burning, though it is already hot. I want us to flinch faster than the scorpions–they try to stab our hands we dart away. I want us to sing until we lose our voices. Our conversations are written in sand the wind erases. They are recorded on air the wind blows away. They are burned into memories the peyote confuses and the madness destroys.

We will not know where the water comes from, but it will come. Seagulls will dive into the spikes we set for them. They will not know what compels them. The authorities will look, but they will never find us. Our visions are not legal.

Have you ever been someplace so strange and foreign, where everyone acted so unerringly, so eerily, starched and normal?

The last of four close-ups on a larger picture. The first is found here.

The third of four close-ups on a larger picture. The first is found here.

The second of four close-ups on a larger picture. The first is found here.

The first of four close-ups on a larger picture. They’ll appear at five day intervals.

Have you ever stared at something and stared, always at the point it was just about to make sense?