Today is the day we celebrate!  All the births, circumcisions, birthdays, marriages from the past week are rolled into one–all fall on Shabbat!  A cheer goes up.

Shabbat:  we have lift-off.  Mankind rises on a platform, cranked upward, past the Tower of Babel, higher and higher—to where?  Heaven?  Into hidden rolled-up dimensions?  To the unused parts of our minds?  Through the attributes of God? That one.  Wow.  I’m in.  But that’s a big lift. 

I’m giving body and soul to a massive project.  It will take months.  If it works out, it will change my life, my family’s lives.  But every little thing would have to go right.  Friday was…Friday was…I think it might have been a disaster.  Or a breakthrough.  I’m ecstatic.  Or destroyed…

I can’t remember!  Turns out, I was born this morning, just before they opened the Ark.  I went, ‘Waah!’, then found myself cheering for people I don’t know.  Somehow, I came out with these songs on my lips. 

I look around.  Our voices have attracted, or created, angels—disembodied bundles of joy.  They gleam over the women’s section, over the men’s.  And the Chazan is singing within the plasma of an angel.

They’re pushing us upward, toward God’s compassion, and even, maybe, if we can go beyond ourselves, to his wisdom.

In the silence between readings, the whispered conversations.  I see every word written in the air.  The words that heal are written in light.  The undermining words are scrawled in black; they form thick masses, attract flies.  We’re better than this!

Help us!

Now we close our eyes and pray for the sick.  I see my brother’s heart, nearly identical to mine.  I’m surrounding it with light. 

Suddenly, the face of a stranger invades my meditation!  I’ve never seen him before.  Buddy, you’re ugly.  To be honest, you skeeve me.  I try to dwell with the features.  I fail, I fall back.  You rub me exactly the wrong way.  No!  Please!  My wheels are spinning.  The angels are waiting.  The scales are balanced.

I’m through.  I’m there with that face, that odd energy; I’m smiling.  Now I’ve reached the heart.  With my cupped hands, I surround it with light.  Yes, the right ventricle, the left.  Aorta, be clear, be cleansed.  I was at my limit.  Someone pushed me upward.  A teacher, a leader? 

“The rest of us helped you.”

Oh.  That sounds right.  Thank you.

Now we come to the Haftorah.  The portion is paired with a prophet.  A storm blows into the voice of the Chazan.  God’s throne, 4 faces, creatures of sapphire, amber—what are you talking about?!

You’ve quenched my logical mind.  Last week’s mind.  Prophet, that vision didn’t descend; you rose to that vision.  You’re pulling us with you.  The wild beauty is battering me.  The air is thin up here, on the border of Knowledge.  I seem to be hallucinating.  The people around me are a globe of light, the same globe I pressed to my brother’s heart…

There’s so far to go, but let’s pause for wine and challah.  As I say thank you, I say thank you for everything.

Let’s have a good meal, then belt out some songs, in tune, out of tune, like karaoke.  I think I may be drunk.  But also content.  And in awe.  I smile at someone at the next table.  It’s the repulsive stranger!  How did he get in here?  His features are subtly different.  Wow.  He also was lifted, he also was revealed. 

This day is sustenance for the week.  Shabbat will brace each day.  Without Shabbat, come Wednesday or so, the world would crumble.

I’d like to tell my story, but I don’t know a single language.  And I have no one to tell it to anyway.

I roll these photographs into a tube, place them in a bottle, and try my luck.  At least, objectively, they’ll outlive me.

Here in the heart of the city, I leave the bottle against a wall.

Looking back, I still don’t know—what was the way in?

I had endless time, but I couldn’t figure out where to go.  I never ran into that person who would help me, or wandered into a place that seemed familiar yet heightened, like all my thoughts were already there, dressed beautifully, in tuxes and gowns, and shining at me from the ceiling, from even the corners of the ceiling!

And I could never get it right.  How you wave to each other.  And give each other a thumbs up.  The palms pressed together and the slight bow to say thank you.  The fist raised in rage.  My hands wouldn’t obey. 

I’m human—shouldn’t some of this be instinctive?!

To your credit, many of you looked at me, and tried to understand, interpret.  And then, with a smile of regret (which I could never mirror), you moved on.  I count you as friends and lovers; those are my best memories, and of course my most painful.

So in these photographs, I wear the costume of Pierrot.  Sort of.  I wear the clothes of a convict, but the stripes go a different way. 

I wear bandages, but even these are in the wrong place.

The one thing I can do—I can curl up in the fetal position.  Thank God.   This you’ll understand.  This will bond us.  No?  There are too many of us like this…

The background in each image is ash.  The ashes of Pompeii.  Here you can see me, just as I was–all my major emotions, from my time on earth. 

And as best I can, I show you my ending.  I obliterate myself with an X.  A glowing molten X, that I hope you’ll feel as passion, the passion that always survived despair.  The urge to communicate.

I had to go inward.  And this is what I came up with.

Leon, who has rented an Airbnb, standing in front of a row of blue vases on a shelf, staring at the second from the right. 

LEON (mutters to himself):  Why is that shade of blue so insanely beautiful?

Silence.

LEON:  I mean, fuck the vase—it’s the blue!

As he stares, a figure becomes visible next to him, likewise fixated on the vase.  The figure is naked, his proportions like those of ‘The Thinker’, his skin a pale blue.  Leon is startled and jumps back.

FIGURE:  Oh, you see me.  All right.  So that happened.

LEON:  Get out of here!

FIGURE:  Yes, yes.  Calm down.  I don’t want to leave, so I’m going to explain.  I don’t know if you’ll believe me.

LEON:  I’m just a guest, not really here.  Please.

FIGURE:  Give me a second.  Open your mind.  Now.  Look at the vase.  It’s okay.  Look at the vase like you were.

Leon stares at the figure who smiles and shows his hands in a peaceful gesture.  Slowly, fighting his instincts, Leon takes his eyes off the figure and looks again at the vase.

FIGURE:  Now:  I was once that shade of Cerulean, and I will be again someday, I hope. 

LEON:  Your skin was once that color?

FIGURE:  No.  I was that color.  (Pointing to the vase). I was right there.  But they move us through the blue spectrum.  To keep us fresh, I guess.  Because we each, in sustaining the exact hue, the archetype, are like Atlas holding up the world.

LEON:  This is…?

FIGURE:  How things work.  I’ve been midnight blue, and indigo, and now they’ve got me as robin’s egg.  I see the trend—getting paler and paler.  But I was happiest as Cerulean, most at home, so I still come back sometimes and, I don’t know…

LEON:  You’re the genie of the vase?

FIGURE:  Wow, you are…Fuck the vase!  The vase doesn’t matter.  I could be a roll of blue masking tape.  What matters is the archetype!  And the archetypal Cerulean happens to be that glaze, a few molecules thick.  

LEON:  So you’re kind of reminiscing, like, reliving…?

FIGURE:  I mean, I’m not proud of this behavior.  They tell us that every shade is beautiful, don’t look back, be in the moment…

He lowers his head and thinks.

FIGURE:  But yes, I’m skiving off, because the ideal robin’s egg is the paint on a car inside a garage with the whole family away.  ‘Robin’s egg’–more like corpse blue. 

He smacks his own cheek, and recites as if indoctrinated:

FIGURE:  No, every shade is beautiful!

LEON:  Why do you think you were happiest as Cerulean?

FIGURE:  I could feel I was vibrating at the perfect speed.  When I shone out from that vase.

LEON:  Huh.  And did it matter to you if someone was looking?  Was it different in any way?

FIGURE:  Absolutely not.  I took in some of the light, and gave most of it away.  Just outward, outward in general. 

LEON:  How do you feel as the other blues? 

FIGURE:  Not quite myself.  Either hyper, almost out of control.  Or else weak, like my blood’s turned to water.  Now let me ask you a question.   How did I make you feel?

LEON:  I don’t know if I was here for you.

FIGURE: That’s right, you all change too.

LEON:  But as far as the color….  These things are hard to talk about face-to-face.  (Pause.) There’s something about this exact shade that’s perfect for me.  Maybe it’s slightly darker than the others, I’m not sure.  For me, it has more power, more… 

The Figure thinks about this.

LEON:  Do you know who’s taking your place in there?  I mean, on there.

FIGURE:  Some dunce, some doofus.  I’m kidding, it’s one of my colleagues, I don’t know which, but I have nothing but respect. 

LEON:  It’s got to be tough to see that.

The figure shrugs. Silence.

LEON:  They say orange is your complementary color.  Any truth to that?

The Figure gets an erection, which he quickly covers. 

FIGURE:  I’m sorry.

LEON:  Well, this has been great…

FIGURE:  Give me a second.  Okay?  Please.  Just look over there.

Leon turns his back and stares into the far corner of the room.  The Figure talks strictly to his penis, which eventually deflates.

FIGURE:  Okay.  Forget that happened.  We’re good.

Awkwardly now, the two stand side by side again, looking at the vase.  The figure sighs.

FIGURE:  What I said about the viewer not mattering.  There was one exception.  Isaac Newton. Our most passionate disciple.  We all loved him.  Many a time I shone directly into the face of Sir Isaac Newton.  Into those retinas, into the blue receptors, and the even subtler ones that were like champagne flutes for what I had to offer.  (Pause). I remember the fervor of Isaac Newton–peering, straining his eyes, and smiling, even laughing.

LEON:  Sometimes I stand here and I want to go crazy.  I don’t know what to do beyond seeing.  How do I get closer to that color?  What do I do with it?

FIGURE:  I’m not the one to ask.  I don’t know that separation. 

LEON:  What about now?

FIGURE:  True.  You’re right.  There is a…helplessness. 

LEON:  Sometimes you can see something from a distance, and then walk into it.  Like the ocean. Or the woods.  But not here.

FIGURE:  No, not here.  (Pause). I don’t know if I’ll ever come back to Cerulean, or just keep moving forward, into the green, the yellow…

LEON (hanging his head):  I guess I can’t keep haunting this.

FIGURE:  Well, how long do you stay here?

LEON:  Another week.

FIGURE:  You’re lucky.  Most views are fleeting.

LEON:  You’re right. You’re absolutely right.  I’ll have three weeks total.

He looks from the figure to the vase and back again.

LEON:  Listen.  Every shade is beautiful.  I really do believe that.

FIGURE:  So do I.  I gotta say, the blue in the center…has something.  All right.  Take care.  Nice meeting you.

LEON:  Nice meeting you too!  Take care!

The Figure fades, growing paler and paler, but the after-image is Cerulean.