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In-sight/ Out-of-sight

“Lately you said I should write to you in order to give a sample of my handwriting…”

The writing was the essential thing, you said, irrespective of what was written – not the writing itself, I thought, but that I should be writing to you.

I imagine writing that you see what I see, as if looking through my eyes, as though I was hidden in the picture - behind the camera. But that wouldn’t be true. We both only see what the camera shows us: bricks and sunshine. And even then, we do not see ‘the same thing’.

How different would it be if the picture was a postcard? No question then of having been there - hidden – but only of having chosen the image, found a stamp, and written to you from there.

Imagine each brick here is a postcard, with the picture hidden from us on one side, its message and address hidden on another. Imagine you could find a postcard in this place, and a stamp – such as ‘a great collector in Prague’ and ‘a little Viennese boy’ once exchanged with their letters. Imagine one day your message, your chosen picture and the address, would be discovered hidden in the brickwork – on a day perhaps when it was all destroyed.

In this same city an amateur graphologist once proposed that “one day it might be possible to exploit graphology to investigate telepathic events…”

[Mischa Twitchin © 2005]