Everything has two aspects: the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction.
Giorgio de Chirico (1919)
Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries,
ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 440
Here’s the thing about reality, the one we’re all stumbling through, half awake, nursing our hangovers and our wounds: it’s a rigged game. You see the surfaces. The concrete, the neon, the face staring back from the bathroom mirror at 3 AM. That’s the deal we’ve all signed in blood, the consensual hallucination we mistake for truth because everyone else is nodding along to the same dead frequency.
But there are cracks. There are always cracks.
Some people, the freaks, the mystics, the ones who’ve had their heads properly blown open by ecstasy or terror or both, they see through the scrim. They catch the world with its mask off, mid change, exposed in all its raw and trembling weirdness. It’s not about being smarter or better. It’s about being wired wrong, or maybe wired right for a reality the rest of us aren’t equipped to process.
What they see isn’t some fairytale alternate dimension. It’s the same street corner, the same lover’s face, the same fluorescent lit despair, but suddenly radiating with this terrible, gorgeous significance that’s been there all along, hiding in plain sight like a killer at a cocktail party. The metaphysical truth isn’t somewhere else; it’s threaded through everything, pulsing beneath the skin of the obvious like an artery you only notice when it ruptures.
Here on the Berkeley Marina Docks most people walk past seeing nothing unusual. But in the right light, in the right frame of mind, maybe hung over, maybe heartbroken, maybe just properly awake for once, you catch the metaphysical shimmer. This egret becomes an invitation to pay attention, to notice that everything floating in this world is both exactly what it appears to be and a door into something deeper, stranger, more true.
The bird stands sentinel, waiting for those rare individuals who can see past the rope and rigging into the ghostly architecture underneath. The question is: are you capable of that kind of vision, or are you just passing through, blind to your own reflection in the water?