Visitation--Skyscraper with Pigeon
September 11, 2023Observations
Jonathan:
Only tourists look up--That's the mantra in NYC--so no one noticed the mirror,the pigeon, or the visitation. How briefly it opened a holein the narrow slice of sky,disturbing one bird, threateninganother office tower with a 9/11. The routinely realwas broken open--we sawbeyond the envelope of blue--but after three flaps of wing,air healed up, and we returnedto hot tar and the extravagant onrushof multitudinous real individuals,who passed just as fast as our visitor.
The Professor:
I was a streetwalker on that morning a lifetime ago when disaster struck, (Dis-aster from the Greek word for star and its prefix suggesting down, meaning the disaster of a falling star).
But it was not a star that day, but death planes colliding with towers, smiting them. I walked again today the same street over which new towers gleamed. I hate them in their arrogance.
Yet today, there was no disaster; there was a pigeon—a dove---and the sighting of what I now think to call them, ”enigma.” That first event was a terrible human calculation that caused more war and death. This one…what causes it and what is it causing?
In me, these strange states, these novel knowings---the bench on a vanished Pineapple Street---or the conjunction of the hallucinatory object in the sky and a pigeon which in my mind I saw as a dove---are enigmatic.
Who was it who wrote: “Signs are taken for wonders, I would see a sign.”? I am an old man of words who is becoming a wonderer.
Crazy Jane
I was sobered by the sight this morning. My heart did not leap up---it was that bird, as if it was trying to fly up to meet the disk as it winked in the sky, then vanished like a mirage.I must have been quite near the Professor.
Apparently, he does not know that I am “following him.” Not literally. I mean I wouldn’t know him if I bumped into him, but I can see what he writes, but I don’t know how. It just comes to me in an email. The picture, the comment, and what he says. None of my friends are getting anything like this. It’s spooky.
At first, I thought it was some kind of spam, but no, either he and I are seeing the same thing at almost the same time from the same place, or we are being sent an email with one another’s comments, or …I don’t know what to think.
I pay attention to what he writes---or can it be that some thing writes what he is thinking, and he doesn’t even know his thoughts are bring recorded? And that I am receiving them. But perhaps the Professor is a fiction, designed by some diabolical AI to make me mad. Perhaps these visitors, as the commentator calls them, are generated by a computer program. Or perhaps the visitor is inviting us to make connections, like a dating app. I feel a little crazy.
He seems not to have no sense that I am shadowing him. I would like to meet him. He lives in Brooklyn. He walks on something he called the “promenade.” Maybe, I will go there one morning. He and I are so different, but my heart goes out to him. He seems to be suffering, doubting his sanity perhaps, and lonely.
That’s one of the things I’ve noticed. The sighting of these things is common now, and the scientists have exhausted all their theories. These visitors have become almost commonplace in their frequent occurrences; we have become somehow used to the strange. We are oddly both more connected in our bafflements, and at the same time more alone: each of us to make up her own mind what these things mean. For me, they are miracles; for others, they are dark omens; for some they bring about sleepless nights, for others strange dreams. I wish I had someone to talk to…like the Professor.
Maybe there is a place where crazy and sane are so mixed as to become something else. What could that be?.
--Jonathan Reeve Price and Peter Asher Pitzele
To explore the sequence of Visitations:
Visitation on a Clear Day
Visitation in the Smoke
Visitation in the Haze
Visitation Arriving at Dawn
Visitation on the Rio Grande
Visitation on a Maine Summer Day
Visitation in Brooklyn
Visitation in Midtown
About Jonathan
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanreeveprice
MuseumZero site: www.museumzero.art
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https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41600924.Jonathan_Price
About Peter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peter.pitzele/
Scripture Windows: Toward a Practice of Bibliodrama, with Susan Pitzele
Our Fathers' Wells: A Personal Encounter With the Myths of Genesis
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