Issue 106

This isn’t about objects, really. It’s about narratives of humanity, where objects are merely tropes for human experiences.

Cal Freeman on the mythological cockatrice, which kills with a glance.

Photographing helped me see the small light in this epic darkness, to find a conscientious perspective.

In Ibn Arabi, a totality of faiths were convened. His heart contained within it pastures for deer, monasteries for monks, a temple for idols, a Kaaba around which to parade, tablets for a Torah, and a Quran, as he said in one of his famous verses: “I follow the religion of love wherever its caravans go.”

This is how the movie ends in movies­—
The fade, the retreat, image dissolving
into the bath that bore it.

I was fine with the ceramic statues of Mary, flaming heart jumping out of her chest. I liked the bright blue robe, gold stars, and shell-like halo of the Virgin of Guadalupe. But the big wooden crucifixes, that crown of thorns digging into Jesus’s brown locks, skinny white arms yanked above so that he’s pitched forward—they spook me the way Dracula spooks me.

Prayer is silence, / spirit-bones and soul-blood fluctuant as breath.

I remember you in your final atonement, how calm you were. 
Though you couldn’t tell me, you understood the names hidden in the dusk. 

Such is the mule, muscled with self-knowledge,
wiser than Aristotle.