a thin black line line becomes apparent. Cutting its way through gray and brown, it shapes itself into the appearance of something recognizable by cultural memory as an artwork, the kind named profile. Named, the work becomes instantly, intimately known. The gray and the brown now appear always to have been part of a work in purposive progress. They take on the additional definitions of fur and shadow, and in that two-word lexicon there is no order of priority. It is, and it seems never not to have been, a single meaning of gray and brown.
Of course, as Aristotle teaches, that particular meaning is intelligible only within its outline of silhouetting fur. Outside outline there can be nothing but the endless: the void prior to beginning.
But when vog modulates light, it reveals a furry penumbra where light lingers for what we realize is a next-to-last time. We become aware that we have seen and named it before. Along the no longer entirely black border between a dimly glowing cloud without and a dark, momentarily beating heart within, memory creates an image.
Two years later, it’s obvious that my Photoshopped optimism was incoherent. I had appropriated an architect’s rendering of the telescope in its rightful elemental night, but during the hours of his waking Martin Heidegger oversaw from the windows of his squat sturdy hut a mountain landscape brimming with illumined fog. Because I had left the night unmodified as a single layer of dark around the telescope, the image I manipulated couldn’t withstand the next two years. Image-fogging light overspread, innuendos of divinity took effect, and as of 2017 the sky has repopulated itself with horoscopic cartoons and there is a real possibility that the telescope never will be built.
