Why I Do Not Read Tea Leaves

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I. The Field Without Horizon

The page behaves like a cosmology that has forgotten the privilege of direction. No sky remains above and no ground persists below; instead the figures circulate in a dense republic of symbols where orientation dissolves into proximity. A skeletal harvester occupies the central vortex, its scythe not merely an instrument of ending but a curved meridian around which the entire iconographic weather system rotates. Around this axis swarm beasts, machines, saints, phantoms, and astronomers as if every century had collapsed into a single copperplate dream.

Winged creatures burst from margins that are no longer margins. Cathedrals lean toward dragons, dragons coil around telescopes, telescopes stare blindly into a firmament already crowded with mechanical suns and drifting apparatus. Nothing remains solitary. Every object intrudes upon another narrative, the way coral colonies knit themselves into reefs whose architecture no single organism could foresee.

The cross-hatching behaves almost like geological strata. Each line accumulates pressure; each pressure thickens the page until it resembles sedimentary time. One does not look at the engraving so much as descend into it, as though the paper were an archaeological section where myth, science, and nightmare have been compacted into a single intellectual fossil.

Even the empty spaces are illusions produced by distance. Peer closer and they reveal armies of miniature events: scholars bending over instruments, beasts locked in perpetual pursuit, celestial diagrams dissolving into vegetal ornament. The page refuses vacancy. It insists that meaning, like matter, cannot tolerate a vacuum.

Thus the image becomes less a scene than a field—a continuous fabric of representation in which each symbol acts as both inhabitant and environment for the others.