Far above in the darkness of the sky and the storm there are obscure beings whose bodies are composed and ordered by great sets of parallel lines that stretch away into the darkness. There are thousands of them, maybe millions, since they do not seem to be extensive in space, and they recede in series, held between the bars which correspond in some obscure way to the architectural lines and surfaces of the captial. Their bodies are enormous. They fill the sky. Their flesh is the same dark translucent colours of the rain in the nighttime. You cannot see any faces. Each one adopts its posture, dictated by the bars that hold it in position, and each of these is unique. They are composed in reference to contingency, sufficiency, survival; a pure survival even fixed here, unsheltered in the teeth of forces that would crack stone and level buildings. There is no rupture of a scream. Each is a copy of a copy of a copy. If they could be made to remember the pleasures of eating, the smells of cooked meat and of fat popping from the charred bones of the communal spit then perhaps they would come back down among us to feast— a chastisement for pride, for the vanity of our separation.
Above and around the figures the space of the air is carved into by wind that moves across the sky in enormous sheets. Between the sky and the earth the rain coheres into its programme of vertical bars. There is the verticality of the rain and the horizontal substrate of earth and sky, and these compose her body as surely as they do these others that have been brought forth from nothing, from vapour and obscurity, to illustrate the poverty and the autonomy of saintly beings.
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