I wrote this in Mexico City, after an experience with the image above. It came while wandering around the city square over the course of a day, and was first put down on the pages of a small Liturgy & Pastoral book bought for 11 pesos from a church gift shop.

The mask stares out, eyes appalled, black and glassy. He is anonymous and intensely personal; he sees the opiate addicts and the basement dwellers, the alienated-enfranchised; all the darkness of the developed world, so that it dominates his view and is reflected in his eyes and slowly suffuses his corneas. From here it overtakes him; the pressure causes pockmarks in his face like lunar craters; dead skin sloughs off at an accelerating rate; and soon it will destroy him entirely, infiltrating the calcite of his skeletal system. Continue reading “Liturgy & Pastoral”