At first, I could not quite understand what I was seeing. There was a young woman seated before a strange device; a seeming hybrid of typewriter and musical instrument. The bizarre object was rife with small, pipelike protrusions whose frills and arcs terminated in fragile fluted cones.

But for her skin, in the room was dark of a color, and the girl’s beauty so breathtaking that it silenced me completely. As she adjusted something before her, upon the instrument, I nearly gasped to behold the exquisite structure and movement of her white fingers.

It appeared that she had arranged, above the keyboard, a disc of paper perhaps 13 inches in diameter, and on this smokey membrane there was scribed some form of musical notation; but it was nothing like I had ever seen. It was a chirality, and as it drove inward it shrank.

The note-shapes did not seem familiar and were…in a word, somehow incandescent… but not in terms of light so much as hue… Strange colors seemed to swarm forth from them into the atmosphere like a liquid or … gas. I cannot describe this adequately; it reminded me of colors playing on the surfaces of bubbles.

The young woman arranged herself in preparation, and a magnifier descended into place between her and the uncanny score facing her. At once, she began to play, and, slowly, the disc began to revolve; apparently presenting the current element of the score at its upper pole. It seemed that the lens adjusted automatically, allowing her to read the score as it shrank with each turn of the spiral…

What emerged from her efforts was not precisely music, or anything else I can name… it was… a symphony of sound and image, impossible vapor-histories, embodiments of moments of awareness furiously buried in the aching sands of deep time.

Each stroke of her fingers ripped away eons of myopic hubris and misapprehension. I had somehow stumbled upon the very blade that perfects minds and souls. And she was turning it against my roots by virtue of her manual intimacies with this bizarre prosthesis.

Cascades of transcendental insight rose like stygian plasmas within my breast, and all within my silence roared with liberty and vision. A holy world long hidden in me came then to perfect presence, and as she tapped the keys (and with her feet, she worked small pedals), the history of time became alive, ascending unbidden — but not as vision, as my mind herself… not memories… but memory.

Not vision… but more — the living source of seeing. And still she plays, and still… the spiral slowly turns… and we are here and I shall never leave…