Three
The skin of The Serpent is mottled green, hazel and gold. Some have tried to capture its appearance and have failed. I look out over the garden and think of the light on its scales, the pattern that I, too, have attempted and failed to draw out, failed to reproduce.
An artisan at work seldom fails at their task, having earned their successes over many years. I see The Serpent’s skin and long to capture its figures and marks, but I can claim no commensurate expertise, no trade, and no well of artisanal knowledge to guide my hands.
So what of The Serpent?
He lies on the landing page, drawn out of the tortured algorithms of statistical probability. There may or may not be a Serpent at any given time, but I can summon him at will, engineering a prompt that draws him out of his probabilistic hiding place. He is no more or less real for all that.
He wasn’t, then he was, then he was not once again. These electromagnetic pulses flickering across the screens of my tools are both impermanent and enduring: perhaps I am an artisan after all, and these electrical pages are my art.
The image scans many thousands of times per second, streaks of light behind glass. You see a door, and beyond it another courtyard. In truth, these things are more ephemeral than a leaf in a teacup, and only as permanent as the recognisable shape of a cloud.
