"There is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown."

---Flaubert.

Last week a dear uncle said: we're living in times when each bough, each branch, doesn't know what's happening on the other side of the tree. Is it so very different for human beings, for a single human being?

This accumulation of glances, turns of phrase, gestures, inflections, the thick and warm darkness of the past intuitively known that holds us together, like a single thread that shows up now and then in patches; the "patchwork heart" with its own territories, distinct laws. Our minds: a kind of play between shadow and light. Your hands a witness to what you are or have become, the self-revealing gestures of the soul, of a life lived underground. These timeless forms taking shape, linking us across generations...a hundred, a thousand years have passed and yet for all man's progress we remain strangers to ourselves. These solid, unknown selves. Is it me? Is it you? The rain in our lives; clay gapes; clay agape.

Take any man

Walking on a road

Alone in his coat

He is a world

No one knows

And to himself

Unknown

Yet, when he wanders most

It is his own way, certain

As spheres astronomers note

In their familiar motion.

---Menashe.