We see corpses every day in images meant to document, record, perhaps to incite. In case your death was sudden or horrible, with no time to reflect. “Has this class has been too long for you?” she softly asks the dead.

The square — home to the uprising at its dawn — here serves as a radical quarantine, fabricated by the shepherd-turned-hunter to smother a political sickness…It is an ancient medicinal ritual, this bloodletting.

People, goods, forces seep in and out of the city, along lines both visible and invisible. Cities as continually bordering phenomena. Horizontal roots, flowing fibers, extend as a capillary consequence. Orifices emerge only to melt into bright lava.

A display of ‘technical wizardry’. Magic, they say. The eyes blink when tired. The lungs inflate and deflate in synchronicity. A theatrical procession that appears only where geographical spaces meet with ancient myth.

Is there a typology of the sacred that generates itself through the forces of torrent and outpouring (that which spills infinitely, bleeds everywhere), and then another that manifests only through processes of containment and drought (that which wastes nothing, overflows nowhere)?

And yet, far from all vertical meditations, we find ourselves confronted with a horizontal universe of black nets strung together as suspension bridges (there can be only unstable travelers/passengers here).

There can be only one, in the end. The rest, like the cobra used in ritual suicide by ancient Egyptian pharaohs, become nothing more than a serpentine sacrifice. The tangled martyrs of the frenzy.