Teardrop - 1996
(Click on picture to supersize)

. . . "It was a dark prism, infinitesimally minute, yet unthinkably immense. Between it's two singularities, which illuminated all but the Teardrop itself with the purest white light, it gradually thickened to it's center and then narrowed to its opposite extreme. Once inside, however, its vertiginous folding of dimension within dimension made it an infinite labyrinth, so intricately bound within itself that its two endpoints were, in fact, the same singularity. . . . From within, the victim could never perceive it's true topology, but might only comprehend deceptively small regions - a predicament akin to standing in the middle of a desert and conceiving only an infinite plane and not the spherical shape of the planet. Thus, only a few linear degrees of freedom were accessible once inside the hyper sphere's dizzying dimensionality. . . . Labyrinthine filaments of lives in every possible permutation were instantaneously perceived as a tenuous, infinite network drawn between the singularities of time's genesis and denouement. The universe is a complex of wave interactions, infinitely intricate, and only our observation forces standing waves to manifest themselves as particles, and those particles as components of matter. . . . Friends, parents, children, selves - people you would know, had known. People you would love and hate. People you would be or had been. Lives stretched from the innocent glow of childhood through the first steps, the first words, the gleeful delights, the tearful disappointments. All along each line tiny tributaries branched off at every point - infinite possibilities associated each decision, great or tiny, of every life - every possibility following to the same inevitable terminus. . . .How many such lives have you labored out in all of their variations? You might be startled to note that you have also walked other nearby lines. My God! you've been both the perpetrator and the victim of your own evils; both the benefactor and the recipient of your own kindnesses." - J.P. Befumo, Teardrop.