Dear L.,


Your figure uncovered a set of photographs last night which I will tell you about. The images were old, perhaps twenty years. And they were startling, though really, nothing, but I’m saying. They were approached by your figure not directly, but with nonchalance, like glancing at the door whilst tying bootlaces. They appeared on the screen in a line, thumbnails of someone else in blue. Forgive me the list:

Half an image burned in two, a harsh orange flame.
Behind the scar, a statue, mute, huge.
Steps, steep hills, stretched at the edge of the frame.
The next, and the next, slow rotations of the scene, concrete and water and then, an engulfing green, stripes of vine from above, swathes of fields and in the distance the glimpses of a town, of pale grey buildings, tight-lipped elegance.

The sequence is a journey in flight, the swing in a cable car, the absence of sound, which is likely why it’s so compelling. No-one in the fields below, or on the roads between them. And over the edge of the image, throughout the sequence, the curious pinky-black blur of a finger pushing its way into sight. This overwhelming haze compelled an inadvertent rubbing of the right eye, a pause in the scroll that went round and round, because something something, something is missed. . . And there—a small shake of a single figure in stride along the road, loose t-shirt, facing the photographer, facing you, whose forefinger touches and smudges the screen.

Around it the evening fell, and the room in which your figure sat turned invisible aside for its halo, hovering there, just above the floor. The final image, a tangle of wires beneath a canopy of pines, and an eagle tethered to the ground. A bucket of black water and the battery died, flooding the room into darkness.

The view from above does not tell us anything about place. But I found it later by zooming into plaques and patiently dragging my cursor over the map. The banks of a river in Europe; a little boy’s tour with tanks.

Music plays through this interlude, soft strings, swelling, see the figure hero, cigarette, and bingo—she’ll write about it.

Tell your figure here, is this the real thing?


            A.