The article was an opportunity. A possibility. There were so few of those, these days. A way that she could change her Tiktok-addled mind, all the things she had unconsciously absorbed. Outfit-of-the-day videos. A Gymshark-clad woman RDLing two plates with a fixed smile. The tyranny of culture, in other words. It was an NYT article called '10-Minute Challenge: "The Unicorn Rests in a Garden"'. It was a gimmick, she knew, but exercises were not gimmicks if you gave something of yourself to them. The piece itself was a French tapestry, she already knew that, the unicorn represented something, virginity, perhaps. Fragments of a high school art class. Education had replaced her sense experience with factoids and uncited analysis. Her perceptions sidelined in favour of data. 10 minutes. She clicked it, she pressed Continue. Random words popped up, high-school style prompts which she attempted to ignore. Instantly she scrolled in, in, in, using her touchpad.
It was a tapestry, yes, though her mind didn't process it as such immediately. Rather on her laptop screen she processed it as a static image, a JPEG, then from there a painting. It seemed like a painting, that the unicorn was a white smudge on a black underpainting. But then she scrolled in more and she could see the horizontal and vertical lines that made up the threads themselves. The tiny flowers—there were millions of them, exploding on that deep black--looked like pixel art at this resolution. And yet at the same time she rejected the adjective which her mind instantly supplied. "Pixel art"—how could she describe a 17th century tapestry with "pixels"? It reminded her how theologians of a certain generation had compared God to a master watchmaker—probably then watchmaking was the height of technological sophistication. In the modern day God was more likely to be called a programmer, the mastermind behind the Matrix, the orchestrator of some grand simulation. In other words she could only see things through culture, through the technology which was her natural birthright.
But set that aside now. Look at all those tiny fleurs, four-petaled red ones, white-petaled monocots. Monocots, she remembered, had 3 or 6 petals generally. The unicorn was gentle and ugly, his face modeled after a goat, perhaps, an embroidered blue collar at his neck, chained to the tree above him. His white fur spattered with red droplets, she saw now, which looked like blood. A Facebook notification went off with a loud chime. Her leftmost tab started flashing between the words "Jonah messaged you" and "(1) Messenger", distracting her, irritating her. But look at this unicorn. He looked an equine St. Sebastian without all the arrows. He looked like he had been killed but was taking it calmly. She saw the odd rope/noose configuration above him, noticed that it spelled out A E. The artist's name perhaps?
Now she scrolled around in earnest. Her Youtube tab in the background auto-played a loud German ad, interrupting her concentration. It continued until it exhausted her apathy, guttural and obnoxious. She middle-clicked the tab to kill it. In the upper-left corner there was another A E. Scrolling around like this gave her a sense of great vulnerability, she knew that if she misclicked above she might kill the tab entirely, annihilating this whole configuration, the painting that was really a tapestry. She could see the clutter of her Bookmarks bar, its textbooks and folders. She felt suddenly aware of the interface that she used all the time, the hovering bar, the way that new portals could be entered and exited at will. Without continuity. And look at those thin white edges at the very top where the tapestry ended, the plain undyed threads, the narrow red border. What was the tree above the unicorn? She wished she could identify the tiny red balls that it was fruiting. To the upper right too was an A E, and the lower right corner A D, as if the central mark of the E had been forgotten. In the bottom left corner it was strangely absent. All of these random European flowers probably symbolized something, certainly that must be true, and yet she had grown up in a society where she was completely ignorant of them. Unable to identify flora in the same ways she could not identify an augmented triad or Orion's belt. She had been raised by pop music and light pollution, she had been raised in a culture heavy with the traditions of dead generations, yet totally unequipped to understand them.
"1 minute left", it said. At that she scrolled out, the tiny flowers unbearably vivid and bright against the night deep black, framing the placid white unicorn with his ludicrously long narwhal horn, until suddenly as sense-experience it felt overstimulating. Too much. Even the leaves had their own shadows, even the foliage of the tree was surrounded by a narrow gap of negative space, blue-black. Red specks staining the unicorn's pelt. It was like her own soul was crying out, bloodied and waiting to die.
Then the 10 minutes were up. Now, the context, given after the phenomenological experience: and yes, maybe this was the correct order, the right one. She read that the background style was called millefleurs, a thousand flowers, popular in tapestries at the time. That it might have been commissioned for two lovers, designed in Paris, woven in Belgium. That the unicorn could be Jesus. That the unicorn could be a husband-to-be, ensnared and waiting. Ready to embrace monogamy, erotically compliant. "A E" the initials of two lovers.
And the tree. It was fruiting red pomegranates.