Prose in Conversation with Joseph Cornell

To the top and you will find a library built with wood and webs with a stone in the middle. Approach it, it's not alive. Feel the figure, it is cold and the shards below are evidence of its age. It was a perfect cube, in the beginning, with six faces: a brother, a sister, a mother, a father, myself, and a neighbor or the stranger. Complete with curiosity I found enemies through the years who deceived me, they exchanged my love and acceptance with deceit and manipulation. The faces were fractured and where there was once completion entered confusion. I could not comprehend who was good from who was evil, thinking myself to blame, I took he whom I loved most and sacrificed my brother upon my sharpened stone for guilt's sake but found no relief, only a quick rinse of his warmth before it dried. Then my father, then my sister. Finally, the stone became too fractured for sacrifice. Its edges grew dull as the cube softened to a sphere of profound complexity, confusion, yet simultaneously singular in face and simplicity.

- excerpt from a longer piece by Mikel Barajas Carrión