Radiance

So come in. Let your eyes adjust. We need your eyes. Let the chartreuse pop of the sun’s afterimage fade into the blackness we have thoughtfully provided. The floor creaks underfoot: slick, yielding wood, green as an olive in a martini, fresh from the forests of Ganymede. You can smell it lightly, under the lime polish. Ashes and copper. Let the dark scoop your ears clean, scrub out the bubbling champagne-cacophony of the world you have only just left behind. We need your ears. And we want your hands as well. We are all primates, after all. We love to touch; we love to interfere with objects. Nothing is real until you can touch it. Your sight will sharpen in time; the shadows will lift and separate like curtains. You will find pages under your eager fingers: pages, phonographs, objects great and small but mostly small, resting on pillars of Uranian saltrock carved into cresting, foam-gnarled waves, trusting their flotsam to your keeping.

Come in, come in, there is so much to see.

No sitting down, though. We need you standing. There’s a projector here, just there—have a care, sir—to your right. Another—mind your hems, madam—to your left. But you will find no screen. You’re it. If you’ll gather in…yes, just so, all in a row like good little daisies. Tall folk to the rear, small folk up front. Now, if you are comfortable, we can begin.

This is a story about seeing. This is a story about being seen. All else is subservient. The ears assist; the hands comfort. The only verbs that matter are verbs of vision: look, see, watch, observe. Gaze. Behold. Witness. The eye is our master, and the eye worships light. That which makes light is good, that which takes it is to be feared. We have taken it from you, but we will give it back again. Make of that what you will.

God—if you will forgive such sweeping pronouncements so early in our acquaintance—is an eye.