.
There remains the problem of not being able to see one's loved ones again, up against the problem of never having really seen them in the first place. Were they simply too close to be looked at? All one would see would be the irrelevant detail, like the pile texture of the grey towel the confined defenseman threw over a camera in the penalty box. A coarse grainy fabric approximately the texture of brain tissue, going out over the satellite, like the cry of the blind muezzin in the mosque, a star of incalculable feeling in the great algebraic night.
Muezzin in his mosque in Mali: photo by Ferdinand Reus, 2008
Page from Al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hasab al-jabr wa-l-muqbala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing): Abu Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, c. 820 CE. (from The Oxford History of Islam: John L. Esposito)
