Rain all week, and the tall window at the north end throws a cold panel of light across the floor at four in the afternoon that lasts nineteen minutes and then gives up.
Above it hangs the fifth station. Two hundred cords rise from the perimeter of the room, cross the ceiling, and gather into a single knot at the center, which is the only place in the entire chapel where anything is joined to anything. From that knot they fall back outward in the long shallow curves of a tent, or of the baldachin over an altar, or of a circus that everyone has left except the person who still has to strike it. At the edges they drop free and hang at the height of a face, each ending in a plug, forty-two of them at last count, turning very slightly whenever the door at the far end opens.
The gallery has three small ceiling lamps. They are not part of the work. They are the reason the work is visible, and I have thought about this more than is healthy. The viewer stands beneath two hundred cords converging on one point of union, and the union carries nothing. It is a rosette with no window behind it. The light comes from somewhere else and always has. Sub tentorio sine luce.
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