Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you, and all in all.

A friend of mine talked about it lately, how much the world had changed in, say, the past three years. And not for the better. The general perception is: the world is on fire, and the fire cannot be extinguished. All that in spite of so many people who try to make a difference. And those people collide invariably on Malraux's human shortcomings, which is essentially nothing else than our innate code of conduct. And so extends the Vale of tears ever further out on our planet. A really distressing situation.

And almost like a form of escapism, I try to understand the universe further in a rational way. The publications are going on steadily and with some effort I understand a tiny bit about it. At bedtime, everything is blurry, but, between sleeping and waking in the morning, everything comes back in a gently swaying dream version. The quasars, black holes, string theories and antimatter parading in front of me. But see, there is a mist that I had not previously noticed. Clouds consisting of a yet unknown matter.

Cores of inorganic consciousness. They have nothing to do with biological life but spontaneously arise in places in the universe. Analogous to crystals they grow, as they perceive more order. The bigger they are, the more they can notice sophisticated forms and feed on the mere perception of them. Ultimately they are also capable of noticing life, and the extent to which that life has potential to evolve. And thus was born the idea that in strange parallel worlds cosmic observers take notion of our qualities.

And then I think of life on Earth, and of the life of one specific species: humans. And I start to tremble. Let our fight for heaven's sake be noticed by anyone or anything. Our momentos of promise. Our rise above the misery and horror. And then there are those entities, those nebulae with consciousness.

Giant databases they are, observing our valiant fight. And while those mystic clouds recorded the fact that we never stopped trying, any person in the universe thereby, though perhaps within hundreds of thousands of years from now, will be able to witness the tale of that intrepid two-legged race on Earth.

And again I sink away in a flush of shadows and atmospheres. And I see, it is offered on a silver platter, how I can convert the above in a figurative painting. The smiling Angel of Reims passes and points me the way. Angels they are, those clouds, Angels. To pick flowers of civilization and honor, the fruits of unbridled effort for a better world. Metaphysical balance for all who come after us.

Infinitely far away from here in space and time, the evidence of our commitment to the upper bloom like flowers, and Angels picking them so that they last forever.

And only just now I can start working on the painting.

Speaking of witch,every one talks after his own fashion and if I turn myself loose, as in this case here, then I come out automatically on a process carried out similar to the pre-raphaelites, or their immediate heirs, the symbolists. Everything on the painting is symbolic, the Angel, the flower, the landscape behind the angel symbolizing the hereafter. A reference to ancient cultures could not be left out.. And much or weltschmertz, and more of sorrow and melancholy the soul of the painting, I would paraphrase from a line of a poem of E.A.Poe "The conqueror worm", because along the way of materializing the dream into a painting, you lose quite a bit of the sheer magic of that dream. Finally, I would like to thank the gifted sculptor who shaped the smiling Angel of Reims, and of course Lord Tennyson for the title of my painting. Walter Leclair