THE CITY OF GOD

Once more the darkness is only apparent. The scene recalls a reversed Creation myth in which all the action occurs before light, in which light - as a mere decorative option - drops by to see whats been achieved, to neither illuminate nor explain. Creation here continues to be done, in the belly of the first-created whale.

Crystals initiate theology, pushing the dumb light from one facet into another until it stumbles, confesses, seeks absolution, is otherwise drawn into their moral colloquy. Each crystal disputes the existence of soul in the other. This energy is employed to drive the light more rapidly around the page, a violent sterile Pharaoh ant smuggled into the room, its virus distilling animal profiles.

Revolving spheres cunningly hint at the fourth dimension and entry of colours, a barely understood legation conveying messages from their concealed source. Cogless, these planets reveal an aweful machinery and we hurry to make our observatories square and windowless, retaining our first impression of space as the fairy godmother or giver of good things, the resolver of whimsical trials.

Each figment seeks form in a colour, the most appropriate at this stage; although, later, attempts will be made by even the least gifted as the world imagines its own processes in reverse. Inventing art, it forestalls the invention of dream: the red canoe.

The blue heart. The artist, drunk with properties, walks up to the bar and whispers into the ear of God the shabby dreams of the crystal. God, amused, inaugurates a mural in which the crystals are tiny puzzled figures in a landscape peopled by lines. The crystals make love not war. The artist glumly recharges his brush.

But these steps were taken too soon, in the absence of love and the figure, the ludicrous burden. Next to the whorled shell hums the body of the bee, their mutually pleasing disguises fooling no one. Yet clearly they are designed to please, to focus the attention on something other than themselves. One way ahead for the figure is to seek the embellishment it knows as loss.

They are beasts of burden but the weight is not divided among them equally. As always, the central figure, a woman, has the ear of God. An impression of air is conveyed in the curls and fronds, artistic echoes of course, but no less divine for having heard that airlessness is the true light, still.

Their geometric features are nothing but the memory of a chained beast, for the paint is under the skin, its camouflage the dreadful invention of a world love-sick and without resources, the damned spot of art and the starers around the shadowed walls. The world is a cave. Historys brave face defies them and their sacrifice, but I too shall be eternal.

For ever and ever the arbiter withdraws. Pink buttocks that disappeared inside a cloud are part of the same trappings, theatre to the nth degree as it cuts up through the folding and contorting curtains where his sooty finger draws. Black bird too makes wing, the rooky wood, the king lamenting his visionary and corrupt sons contract with the senses.

To return. To redeem in the earth-light mortal affairs, our virus is bled from the martyr for a bland inoculate of colour and form. One of us, who carries death like a brush, is quiet, admitting no guilt. With his picture in our wallets we shall track him down, hang him, defeat him, cover his face with kisses, unzip the bowl from which darkness tumbles into light.