I'm about to take another short break, to do more work. But it's been a pleasure sitting in your galleries, and sharing all my thoughts. It's always such a joy to do that. I'll end with another tale, for those with the time...these are fragments from my exploration of Moses. If any of you are religious, please take no offense: It's just imagination coming to terms with ancient tales: I've done this with many, over the years...I was always fascinated by the loneliness of prophets; no matter what their culture, they struggled with their 'call'; and the spectacles of pillars of fire and voices in the night, and (for Moses) the burden of laws...they just drew me in...I hope you enjoy these fragments. Thank you for your wonderful support, and when I return, I'll get to everyone I missed. A wonderful weekend to all, Mark --------- (On Moses) …he’d carved the fronts of tablets, the backs of tablets, the sides, the cracks, even inside the tablets...he’d carved every surface, every crack, breaking the tablets, fracturing the tablets, for miles and miles of tortured stone, strewn across the desert floor. And he carved in Hebrew, Sanskrit, Chinese and Greek, using stones, fingers, chisels, anything; he’d even chewed the tablets---then spit them out---in an effort to release their secrets... He'd carved the circulatory systems of mammals. He'd carved the vascular systems of plants. He'd carved delta patterns and river patterns and sea-current patterns and climate patterns; he'd carved tectonic patterns, seismic patterns, planetary orbitals, the composition of stars; he'd carved epics from every culture, and poetries and musics, and astronomical, mathematical and economic theories: principle upon principle, code upon code: laws, laws, laws, laws, laws. Yet, with all this carving, this massive aggregation gouged into stone across this desolate land, you couldn’t help but feel these were the shards of a great mind gone mad, a catalogue of all knowledge on planet earth but not what he ultimately sought: namely, a key to that devastating voice, which taunted him in whispers and stalked him in the night, which no carvings could uncover, no storms could explain, and which left him more emptied and ravenous than before to plumb the mysteries of its call: Something was at the center of that call, some ‘final truth’, an answer-of-answers: Thus he carved and carved until his fingers bled, he carved until his hands swelled like pulsing balloons, and the vast expanse of sand behind his tent became a wasteland of torment and search... Yet, far beyond the carvings stood a towering arch: huge and glowing, and swirling in flame, which no scripture had mentioned and no history had described, yet which sat like a colossus declaring in fire: "This is the gate through which all must pass, this is the gate through which all will pass: If you've come here to save us, you must save us all: We are the Refugees of the World..." And names flowed up and down the great arch, and petitions and prayers and stories and pleas---in countless languages, and from countless hands---and Moses was among the names, and his peoples were among the names, and the people from all continents were among the names, and they'd all left entreaties, to be remembered and seen, to be taken from their place of darkness. And, in this pageant of appeals---this ancient roll-call of humanity---there was no distinction, no division, no race, gender, ethnicity, no ‘other’: just a multitude, a vast multitude which---according to the voice---were all in Moses' charge: "I cannot take them!" Moses cried; but the voice just said, "you must..." * * * (On Sinai) ...and we stood on a peak and looked every direction, and everywhere we gazed there were Hordes. They were silent and slow, and they glided off the ground, and darkness flowed around them like waves of dark smoke. And they cried to us from the deep earth's floor: We are the Exodus, the breads of affliction We are the paschal lambs and the sabbath loaves ‘A wandering Aramaean was our mother, our father': Our movements give motion to the stars... We’ve walked through the desert when the night was so thick, we used it as a blanket in the cold. We've walked through the night when the solace was so deep, you could feel the heartbeat of God. When a person leaves enslavement, we follow them there; when a person crosses the sea, we follow them there; when a person loses hope, we follow them there; our exodus is theirs, our journey is theirs---let us plant our journeys in your vitreous fluids so that everytime you blink, you’ll see us in your eyes; let us plant our uprootings in the fluids in your eyes so that everytime you sleep, you'll dream of us. In the closets and crawl-spaces at the center of the heart, our bloods, in great flooding, dream the rivers of the world: Where matter ends, mere photons thick, where numbers lay crumpled and crushed in a heap: This is the place where our journey is born, the place where all refugees begin... * * * (The Pillar of Fire) ...and they dropped me in front of a massive fire, and it was huge and swirled in a spinning tower; and children danced around it, eating scoopfuls of fire, flames dribbling down their cheeks like gold syrup... Then the pillar opened and apparitions flew out: They were naked and of flame, and they flew all around us; and they flew through the crowd, brushing all of us with flame; and when I asked, who are you? they answered, your ancestors! and when we were astonished, they cried, astonished! and when we were breathless, they cried, breathless! Whatever we said, they repeated it to us, and they oohed and ahhed and rubbed our faces, cooing like birds, whispering secrets in our ears; and when we asked what they meant, they flew away and made dazzling mandalas in the sky... Then an ancestor shouted: “Look---up on the hill!” And a figure appeared, cloaked in night: He was slender and pained, with burning eyes; when he moved his hands, the sky followed like scarves; and he whispered in a hushed and penetrating tone: Ani Moshe (meaning, I am Moses), and the crowd fell into a deep silence. And, wafting from his robes in an undulant hush, this is what you heard from its folds: the laws that governed the cosmos the sounds of inner knowledge and the sigh, deep from his hebraic heart: I’d give all the gifts of your endless creation to be free from this call one day... * * *