Incense hangs upon the boughs.

To have your eyes open and to sit up straight. But you open your eyes too wide and for too long to see more than is good for your body. Your eyes dry up and strain and you have to squeeze them shut. Now your lids together feel like your hands do while on a washcloth's tight twist when wringing it out.

And I would say a plague is the opportunity to think far ahead of a moment. And that this is brought out of pasting together what drips out, into one interpreted picture, something which turns the crisp of that present moment into translucence. But it may just be a thing of this life, to see pieces that are floating about separately and severally, yet to see them as already come together. The image of this dimly lit metaphor I offer, this candle, would be of a figure looking at the parts of a photograph, standing still as if before a camera, and watching them fit into place. To see a lense through which to see.

The whole of the photograph already exists, then, for each piece to be fitted together. There is an inverse of this, though, and though still flickering dim and noiseless. As if it is that photograph's puzzling pieces that peer, and see the person as if they are instead the object of view. The photograph taking the person. Where, and only analagously, if you think of an intervening camera being brought into an event, when standing within the sudden frames of a candid photograph, one blinks, and suddenly that candidness means more than the moment being captured. As if that blink is letting down, disobeying the camera's flash that has shot out, reaching, choosing only you. There is, always, more than that. And those eyes can open as wide as they can to see as much as they can, only to blot it all out with the longest blink.