I’ve been traveling again, and as sometimes happens, through the long hours tucked into seats on airplanes, buses and trains, or queuing in passport controls, boarding zones and platforms, time slips and I fall into muteness and waiting.

Were we on a stage, we would feel a stubborn quiet before the world, and all abstractions would seem repellent. We would be anticipating some event, yet momentarily powerless to affect it. And as with your image of a boy standing before a crowd, we would break this feeling not by thinking our way through it, but first by moving – a finger, an arm raised, a step. And only later would we reflect, for thought follows motion.

I’ve been trying to find words to respond to your last image, the form of a body uniformly lit, such that he resembles a space cut out of darkness rather than something solid. I keep hearing “blast shadow.” And yet you speak of him as a statue, which implies weight and mass.

And I wonder what he opposes. Perhaps in his frailty he is preparing to confront a Goliath, or a cyclops. But in your image there is no singular giant, but instead an audience. And I am reminded that even as a contest between two champions is occurring, it is the public that stands in judgment. Perhaps it will turn out that those we think of as antagonists are simply ourselves in some other aspect, and crowds, or how we become when we join crowds, are our true adversaries.