Visitation--Blocking Traffic
Observations
Jonathan:
A sudden intervention stopped traffic, twistedthe manhole cover free,and sent it rolling down the avenue-one disk playing with another--steam roared forth, stinkingof tunnels, wet leaves, and rot.In that grey cloud, piecesof our visitor evaporated,leaving its black silhouette--an impression on the air,a sign to the unwary.
The Professor:
I was there, on 7th avenue and 54th st. My ear had been caught by the clop, clop of horse’s hooves and I turned and saw the horse-drawn Central Park carriages moving slowly uptown to take their stations at the Park’s entrances.
And suddenly, there was no sound and, with no sense of process, of something coming down or up, it was there, huge and menacing. That’s what I felt, a kind of fear as if I were suddenly in a closed room with the Angel of Death. And I did not see it roll down the avenue. I did not notice whether others saw it. I did not think they did.
Because life went on, the horses clopping uptown and the tinselled carriages with their jaunty drivers proceding across the intersection as light changed to green.
Was this event just for me? If so, how could there be this photograph? How could be there be this “Jonathan” who “makes his “Observation,” and who seems so inhumanly detached, even amused?
And equally suddenly with the arrival of the Observer and his photograph, I read my own comments after his, and then, following, the comments of some character called “Crazy Jane”. Who seems to know me, or wishes to know me.
I fear I am going mad
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
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JonathanRPrice
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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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