Dream d1517-s: Shavings and Choice

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the workshop stood at the edge of the clearing like it had grown there, sawdust in the air alongside the low hum of processing equipment somewhere behind the tree line. The Woodworker was already at his bench. The Lens stood nearby, watching him work.

Not helping. Watching.

Lano padded ahead on the footpath, nose low, reading the sawdust. His tail moved once when he reached the bench, then stilled. He sat and looked at the Lens's hands.

The Woodworker was cutting a rectangle from a piece of hardwood - fine passes with a small saw, measuring twice. Deliberate. The Dreamer stopped beside me and raised his camera. He held it there without shooting. Just looked through the glass.

"What are you making?" the Student asked.

"A limit," the Woodworker said.

He shaped the edges clean, bored two small holes, fitted a shallow frame - a box with no back. The kind a director holds up to a scene before the cameras come. The kind a painter uses to decide where the picture ends. He handed it to the Lens without ceremony.

The Lens looked through it at the tree line. A strip of bark. Three branches. The light between them.

"It removes ninety-eight percent," he said.

"Yes," the Woodworker said.

The Builder had been leaning against the workshop wall reading the structure of the thing. He crossed his arms. "You built infrastructure for the other ninety-eight. That's what bothers you."

The Eye came around the corner from the pressed specimens behind the workshop, a small clipping held between two fingers. She had been there long enough to have an opinion. "That hawk feed from yesterday. That one was looking. The traffic feed at the interchange is still recording."

Lano's nose turned toward the viewfinder. Elige, I thought, watching him - choose.

The Lens moved the frame slowly. The strip of bark became a knot in the wood. The knot became the gap where the root entered the ground. His hand steadied.

"Every picture I've taken," the Dreamer said, lowering his camera at last, "I held something like that. Not always wood. Sometimes just my hands around the viewfinder. The decision about what to include was already made by the time I pressed the shutter."

The sawdust settled in the clear air. The processing hum continued, patient, untroubled.

The viewfinder sat in the Lens's grip like a question that had finally found the shape it needed.