My Epiphany (in the National Gallery of Art)

The insanity of longing and the motion, motion of all of it! And how he was blessed with the gift of letting others see through his eyes! See the quivering of every moment and understand the pain that I have always understood but have never been able to adequately express.

And now I stare into the dead pale cheeks of the past-- hollow eyes and spun gray hair wrapped in rich fabrics of pink and white (although I have lost AIR7 and Scheisser) and the shadowed winds of the storm sweeping nature in to terror means nothing against their cold, plastic stares... These two women and her children (Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough) and the death against the memory of Van Gogh so poignantly teaches about vision and about how all of our truths create absolute truth.. that no one being can understand it and very few can even present their own piece of it, but all together convinces me that truth exists... in form less tangible than emotion and impenetrable by language an though.

Is that what they mean when they say "God?" Is that the presence I see etched into the sorrow of her blank stare and the glow of her white neck against the wind?

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Okay, later and in the quiet darkness of gray and black, illuminated by reflections of bronze and rosy kisses of light spun with blue and broken by the black of winding tree limbs. Four small patches pressed into the wall and winding leaf motives (La la!) climb in swirls of smoke and fall simultaneously in gentle arches and crests. Shards of yellow and ribbons of pink, rocks of turquoise (Peter) and washes of blue... and I am so in love with color and I long to be locked in the same way, but I am reminded that I dream it and the pain that it causes then...

AIR7 and Scheisser are gone and I am supposed to meet them in half an hour...

But I stood in that room of fantasy and whispered (anachronistically against the glass)

"Look at yourself now, Hyde! Look at yourself now!"

And her hair falls in two great thick golden ropes and the blazing eye on that ceramic goose (powdered faces tuning brown) and Gabriel's feathers match those of the gold candle sticks (moulding like the Fleur de lys) and I wonder if anyone still knows that it's the symbol of annunciation... that Chinese fortune that says "the philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next" but it clearly works the other way too...

And that kiss keeps coming back to me (or should I say those "kisses") and I am really worried because I sense the start of something bad, and yet I can't (don't want to?) stop it... and these glowing images promise peace, but I can't reach out and take it... not yet... I'm not ready

(Open and read! Open and read!)

I am still sucking the sweet juice of that stolen pear, but with the fearful knowledge of that day in the garden. (The Christ child's sorrow!)

God, what am I going to do about him... about myself... everyone has given their warnings and yet the lion's teeth invite me still.

(They are all broken Cassandra's! Eyes stained with the blood to come!)

I think she will be my theme for now (Sweet Mary, I am sorry!) and Gabriel is brown now and the lights here brightly dim (My eyes burn from the bronze reflections!)

And all I need is "air, air, air!" (Thanks, Porfiry Petrovitch)

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CASSANDRA

Screams but is not heard
Sees but can not explain
Warns but is ignored
Knows but is not believed

STABS BUT DOES NOT DIE!!!!