Notes on Glass Tears
1. The print is of an eye; more precisely, the photograph of an eye. The eye presents in a state of abstract stimulation. Cropped tight, blown-up, and contextless, it could be communicating varieties of distress-- heartbreak, grief, or even terror, while tempting us to imagine its source. We would be less likely to register a pleasant sensation, owing to the thick tears complementing the lower eyelash.
2. Upon closer inspection, however, we might intuit a delight in hurt, a bittersweet enrapturement that could be self-induced, as in forms of sex or even at the emotional climax of a piece of music, television, or cinema.
3. Though extreme magnification and film grain precludes us from inspecting pupil dilation, it's easy to imagine the eye aquiver with feeling, the lids palpitating with blood pressure, blinking half-open and half-shut. Then again, we could also be looking at the aftermath of the thrill. That would mean the eye is resting, drained and weary, indicating reflection, calm after the storm.
4. The eye does indeed reflect something; the exclamation mark of a gleam below the pupil, that could be extended, with a red marker on the model's face, let's say, until it reached the similarly shaped shine on the left tear, is likely capturing the flash of the photographer's camera. It is at this point that we might revisit the work's title, and underline with our red marker the glass before the tears.
5. We can also discern no capillaries, which would be prominent after a crying spell.
6. Without its surrounding face, the eye also precludes us from deducing the model's gender. The carefully shaped eyebrows and thickly coated lashes could belong to a woman, but the English language is helpful in allowing the subject "model" to encompass multiple identities, such as female-presenting transpeople or simply feminine men.
7. The print now hangs opposite the couch, behind the coffee table propping up the laptop and thus serving as entertainment station. Endless hours of content stream into our brains, specifically the nucleus accumbens, known as the pleasure center. Our bleary eyes speak to an entrapment that can be termed neither ecstasy not agony. Sleep, food, and hygiene are forgotten to us.
8. Another cop show is on where someone is chopping up prostitutes. Swollen with the effort of decoding the screen's blue light and the simulated thrills it forever emanates, our eyes roll upward searching for any escape. Yet all they find is another eye, itself rolled upward in multivalent torment, the curse unbroken.
9. Context: the signature scrolled bottom-right on the photograph reads Man Ray, who conceived the piece as a form of revenge on a former lover and assistant, creating multiple variants beginning in the early ‘30s. Not only are the tears fake, but also the entire face belongs to a mannequin woman, repeatedly chopped up and probed in a state of ornamented duress.
Empty Houses
We reach the village on feet sore and heavy. Past the old woman, the stone houses carved out of the cavern’s sides are mercifully revealed, the stairs among them percolating from floor to ceiling. All is illuminated by some obscure species of slime or moss.
The guardian at the cavern's mouth bids no greeting. Black-draped and headscarved, she fixes upon us eyes that have known subsistence and cruelty. We request food and board, for the tunnels have drained us, and safe passage once awoken. Payment is a strange polyhedron from the belly of a slain troglodyte that seems to glow from the inside.
She doesn't make any inquiries or even inspect the barter. Come, she says, come. Most of the houses are empty. She gives us drip-water and sausages that restore our weary nature, and we sleep dreamlessly.
It's only after we have strapped our packs and paid that the thought creeps on us, that we've seen no livestock, no grass or produce to sustain it. We make our way and she bids no farewell, her gaze constant upon us as we press on and her frame diminishes, as the tunnel stretches between us and her village in the bowels of the earth with all its empty houses.
Sardine
He had of course many trials to complete for the Corps to award him the enviable rank of Killer. The cadet should first of all be able to run off a wolf using nothing but the ferocity of his Scream, be able to stand fully immobile for a moon with his feet ankle-deep in snow, be able of course to neutralize a real target: a lot which sometimes the mystical omniscience of military bureaucracy might percolate to a citizen or even a comrade-in-arms. The cadet was to choose his own method, a common preference being the clubbing of the nape and spine. Besides a person, it was also required to kill a woman, as well as rape a rookie, the cadet thus closing one cycle of Apprenticeship and inaugurating another. Only then would they brand his neck with the terrible fish-sign of Ichthys-- the coveted sardine. Then the oath ceremony: he’d have to execute with precision complex gun choreographies (of course, the firearm had been retained as a symbol of soldierly honor, wars being waged with weapons of mass or even non-physical destruction), popping and setting his shoulder at the rhythm of a bolt loading the chamber. Some might have decorated the Instrument with claimed ears and tongues, those of the hardest core even sewn the strap on their shoulders. And in the end all cadets would strike the ground with their their rifle stocks thrice exclaiming O SACRED MURDER, their nostrils intoxicated by the wafting smells of the valiant fallen in the massive cauldron of the Freedom Pyre.
The cadet overcame all challenges and everybody knew he had a glowing military career to look forward to. And so it was, and everyone was saying he’s the prettiest cadet, and of course, all this took place in peacetime, and he never had to go to war.
the Budafoki amended 