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Again | Sep 28 2002

Again, so that it is remembered. You stand in a dark room looking at a round concave surface perhaps five feet in diameter. This surface sits on a three-legged stand in the center of the room; on the surface is an image of the ocean.

As you look, the image moves. It is like watching a film, but this is not a film; it is a magnified reflection of what you would see at that moment if you stood on the roof of the building and slowly spun, taking two or three minutes to complete a single rotation.

The image moves from right to left, so that it corresponds to what you would see if you spun the other way on the roof, left to right. I am not describing this right. The image itself does not move but change. In this respect it is, again, like a film, like watching a film; or perhaps like a window, like standing at a window and looking out on the ocean. But it is different than being at a window, for only a small section of the ocean is visible at any time.

Here is a way to see it. Imagine a room by the ocean with curved walls made entirely of glass. You stand in this room looking out, a large box over your head. The box has a sizable hole in front to look through, so that it serves as a kind of blinder, limiting your vision to what can be seen though the hole. You stand before the window with the box on your head, with your head inside the box, and slowly move along the perimeter of the room, stepping sideways. Imagine what you would see if you did this; this is what you would see in the dark room.

Of course the ocean is only half of it, for as you watch, the image reaches the place where the ocean ends—or where it begins, rather—and continues without pause up the shore. This is the progression: first a long slow pan across the ocean, and then the shore, and then trees, and then the buildings behind the building you are in, and then the shore on the other side, and then the ocean again, and across it.

The image is too light at first, but soon your eyes adjust. There are birds flying above the waves. From the shore you cannot see them, but here they are plain. Birds above the waves. It is like the part in the music when you come to a feeling you cannot come to any other way, a feeling that only the music makes possible, although you believe it is always there, this feeling, dormant, waiting for the music.