that has faded away, disappeared. Their mutual significance, the propagation of one in another and vice versa, may be considered exiguous, but it would be more accurate to say the link between them is so substantial that it is totally silent. The images are arranged as a set of inaudible shifts. One follows another because it is a slightly altered version of the other. The slight visual difference might be expected to produce some kind of word or expression which would, after all, aid comprehension, but what is actually produced is a loss, or crystallization, of phonemes in the silence. It can quite reasonably be assumed that the only sense capable of establishing a vocabulary for silence is sight, that is to say, the visual image, and it is therefore equally reasonable to assume that visual perception also has an ability to hear. The sequencing of the images is governed by the very nature of this sound, a sound only audible in visual terms — in the shifts perceived between one image and another. One image follows another not only because it is an altered version of the preceding one, but also because it more accurately pinpoints the preceding image’s meaning. Unlike the notion of a degrading echo, in which the quality of the sound decreases with each repetition, the sequences in After the Rainbow show no deterioration: they are series of echoes and resonances where no weakening can be discerned in the sounds, where there is no sense of before and after. Both images mutually betray and correct each other; each one sees its own original objective, its own original light refracting body, in the other. Each image finds in the others a real reference to their common source, answering its own enigmas in a strange pattern of precision based on disorder. Its grammar is reminiscent of Chinese writing. Signs containing other signs
Chinese ideographic script is untranslatable: its rules of perception are inaccessible to an alphabetic script. It also incorporates a double logic which, contrary to the widely held belief, is actually more complex than the simple duality of its pictorial and semantic components, its plastic and symbolic dimensions. In Chinese writing one sign contains another, and one character contains a sequence of characters. An ideogram like the word magnolia includes the word face and also the word for “mouth” , which, literally translated, means that which speaks. The two terms are synchronically bound together in a visual etymology where neither of the two takes precedence over the other. In Chinese ideograms, past is present. Or, in other words, the Chinese script itself refutes the notion of linear chronology, because in it one word does not merely have its origin in another but actually contains the other, in all its plenitude. Two ideograms placed in sequence