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THE PRESENT
IMAGE
Visible Stories in a
Digital Habitat
Paolo S. H. Favero
The Present Image
Paolo S. H. Favero
Cover illustration: Pattern adapted from an Indian cotton print produced in the 19th century
It has been a true joy to write this book for which I have been given total
freedom. I owe this to my editor, Shaun Vigil, who encouraged me to
embark on this project and supported me throughout. Thank you Glenn
Ramirez, for your precious work on it too.
Many colleagues and friends have given valuable contributions to the
various bits and pieces that make up this book. I am truly grateful to their
engagement and comments. So, thank you Ali Zaidi, Asko Lehmuskallio,
Cristina Favero, Edgar Gómez Cruz, Eva Theunissen, Judith Aston,
Giampaolo Coppo, Giuliana Ciancio, Melinda Hinkson, Naoyuki Ogino,
Nils De Groef, Roberto Anchisi, Suor Silvia, Tito Marci, Valerio Monti.
Thank you Gudrun Dahl, Helena Wulff, Marcus Banks, Scott McQuire,
Thomas Fillitz, Ulf Hannerz for your constant support.
Thank you colleagues at ViDi (Visual and Digital Cultures Research
Center, University of Antwerp) and thank you in particular Luc Pauwels
and Philippe Meers, the best colleagues an academic could wish for.
Thank you Shahram Khosravi, Arturo Andreol, and Rohit Nair, for
sharing with me the ups and downs that make up our life journeys. And
thank you Cordelia Jansson Mangia, for your loving presence in my life.
The hardest and perhaps most precious chapter of this book is indeed the
last one, which deals with matters of living and dying. This chapter was
conceived during a particularly difficult passage of my life. I wish to dedicate
it to my humsafar Giuliana who joined, supported and challenged me along
this perilous, painful yet blissful journey. My gratitude goes also to all those
ghosts (living and dead) who have shed light on my path: Walter Benjamin,
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Antwerp
Summer 2017
CONTENTS
2 Participated Images 19
3 Immersive Images 43
4 Material Images 77
Index 123
ix
CHAPTER 1
Images come to us in many ways. They decorate our houses and offices, the
streets of cities and villages. They pop up in the most unexpected moments
in our wallets and smartphones, books and computers. They inaugurate the
drafting of a life-story at the moment of our birth and often end up closing
the circle of that story at the moment of our death. We live most of our lives,
to quote Melinda Hinkson (2017) “in the company of images”.1 Images are
a constitutive part of our manifold ways of “being in the world” (Merleau-
Ponty 1962). It is through them that, paraphrasing Paul Stoller (1984: 93),
we allow the world to penetrate us.
There is, however, a great diversity with regard to the type of images that
human beings accompany themselves with. Images carry, indeed, signifi-
cantly different meanings across space and time (see Pinney and Thomas
2001; Edwards 2006). And they can also be significantly different from a
material and technical point of view. For many citizens of today’s “wired”
parts of the world, for instance, images are the result of a particular “mash”
born out of the encounter between things visual and digital technologies.
Within this dialectic, the “actual” and the “virtual”, the material and the
immaterial, the manual and the mechanically produced, the visible and the
audible, meet and merge giving birth to things, practices, and tokens that
are, at once, new and old.
This generative dialectic has given new life into the pervasive debates
regarding the supposed “visual hypertrophy” (Jay 1994; Taylor 1994) of
late modernity. More than ever, images are today considered to permeate all
aspects of our lives. Tapping onto social actors’ growing capacity not only to
“consume” but also to “produce” their own depictions of the world they live
in, images are transforming us, we could say by paraphrasing John Peters
(1997), into “bifocal” creatures. Incorporating, as McLuhan (McLuhan and
Fiore 1967) suggested long ago, technology as a “natural” prolongation of
our bodies and minds, we have learned to trespass the boundary that separates
mediated and unmediated experiences.
The specific confluence of digital and visual technologies and practices
that characterizes the historical moment and cultural context within which
this book is being written has a number of important implications. Politi-
cally, we are today asked, as scholars and practitioners in the field, to provide
a critical and nuanced understanding of the dialectic between liberating and
oppressive forces in the context of contemporary digital/visual technologies
and practices. Epistemologically and ontologically, we must dare to renew
the terms of our debates, moving away from simplistic dualisms and toward
a perspective that integrates the digital with the material (analog) world.
Most people living in the digital habitats of the world have today abundantly
overcome the naive fears regarding the death of photography (see Ritchin
1990) and the supplanting of reality by mechanically produced representa-
tions (see Baudrillard 1994; Der Derian 1994). They are aware of the
possible deceptions and mystifications that images can generate and have
1 INTRODUCTION: PRESENT IMAGES 3
circulating them. The images involved in digital circulation are not neces-
sarily digital ones. I wish to reposition images along a continuum (images
can be simultaneously analog and digital, mechanical and manual, new and
old) rather than within conventional sets of dualistic oppositions. In an era
of separation such as the one in which I live as I am writing this book (I am
referring indeed to the political transformations taking place at the present
moment, when walls are being built and new wars are being fought), we are
more than ever in need of tools capable of bridging gaps, of covering
distances and creating dialogue. Images, I suggest, are valuable tools for
doing this. This is what they have always done and this is probably also what
they will always do. Echoing Kandinsky’s (1989) observations on art, we
can say that images do not merely “reflect” and “echo”; they also function
as a “prophecy” (p. 20).
In the following pages, I will share the conceptual platform on which this
book has been built, hoping in this way to facilitate the reading of the
chapters to come. I will finish this introduction with a brief outline of the
chapters that compose the book.
material world out there. An image, Belting reminds us, is always both
internal and external, personal and collective (p. 9). And if we are to follow
Mitchell (2015, 1984), it can also be verbal and acoustic. “Media are always
mixtures of sensory and semiotic elements. . .mixed or hybrid formations
combining sound and sight, text and image” (Mitchell 2015, p. 14).
Ingold (2010) too has extensively tapped into this question. In Ways of
Mind Walking, he shows, by bringing the work of Mary Carruthers to bear
on the writings of Richart de Fournival (canon of Amiens Cathedral in the
mid-thirteenth century) and other examples gathered from Aboriginal
Australia and classic Chinese painting, how images often contain an element
of what the Greeks called ekphrasis, that is, the translation of words (and
sounds, I would say) into images. The core ingredient in the stitching together
of these separate sensory areas is imagination. Ingold (2010) says that:
we must recognise in the power of the imagination the creative impulse of life
itself in continually bringing forth the forms we encounter, whether in art,
through reading, writing or painting, or in nature, through walking in the
landscape. (p. 23)
during the screening of a movie, he claims that today the “end of images is
behind us” (p. 17). We need today to think of images in novel terms, as “a
regime of relations between elements and functions . . . relations between
the sayable and the visible, ways of playing with the before and the after,
cause and effect” (ibid., p. 6). Russian philosopher, theologian, and art
historian Pavel Florensky (1993) too shared an interest for this kind of
sensory enlargement. In his work, he repeatedly spoke about the image as
a form of physical movement (something he has in common with Ingold).
Images were for him portals allowing human beings to move across the
border that separates the world of earthly and celestial matters (Florensky
1977).
[T]hey are on an entirely different level of consciousness, and among them life
proceeds in an entirely different atmosphere. Visualization is something
completely different from depiction, something radically new. (Flusser
2009: p. 13)
While being able to understand and possibly also partially subscribe to his
point, I believe that a major shortcoming in Flusser’s argument is that it
builds on an a priori postulated, rigid distinction between the two types of
images. Key to this distinction is, again, the meaning of imagination, which
in Flusser’s (2009) view “must be excluded from the discussion to avoid any
confusion between traditional and technical images” (p. 10).
This book sets off with a significantly different assumption (and ambi-
tion). Rather than postulating a priori the distinction between the digital
and the analog, it seeks to empirically discover it, letting it eventually unfold
by means of continuous engagements in this terrain. Indeed, digital images
impose a number of novelties. Their aesthetics can be relational (Bourriaud
1998), ephemeral (Murray 2008), unknowable and mediated (Cubitt
2016). Yet, I suggest that such qualities are to be discovered by means of
a progressive dive into the terrain. The diverse, culturally and historically
situated ways in which specific social actors invest meaning and action on
images and technologies should be discovered by means of practical
engagement.
My own modality of engagement with the contemporary world of
images for this book has been an (auto)ethnographic3 one. Foregrounding
practice, direct engagement, and observation, I have (and still am) contin-
uously exposed to emerging (and not) visual technologies. I engage with
them as tools for communication (Favero 2015), as instruments for
conducting research (Favero 2013) and for teaching (Favero 2017a). As is
evident in Chap. 5, I also use images as instruments for narrating my own
life and for understanding the changing world surrounding me. As a visual
anthropologist, I believe that a practice-based approach can help to open up
and unpack aspects of technologies and practices that may not be accessible
through verbalized explanations only. Practices gain their centrality, as
Gómez Cruz and Lehmuskallio (2016) state in the introduction to Digital
Photography, by being “both part of social symbolization processes and
materially mediated” (p. 5).
Needless to say, such mode of engagement is made up of many more
mistakes than successes. It is made up by constant acts of, to quote Deleuze
(1997), “difference and repetition”. This is a matter of doing, undoing, and
8 1 INTRODUCTION: PRESENT IMAGES
redoing the same thing over and over again. And as a matter of fact, a
number of the technologies described in this book have already failed just as
these lines are being written. Yet they are not meaningless because of this
failure. In response to these difficulties, I have chosen to stick to those
technologies that can allow us to lift up overarching questions, desires, and
ambitions that move beyond the specificity of the present world.
often referred to as the “Digital Era”. As a matter of fact, I believe that there
is no such thing as “a” Digital Era, and we can expect hidden cultural
assumptions to be able to exercise influence upon computerized systems
and models of explanation. The digital (just like images at large) is not a
monolith but rather something that gets molded on the basis of the context
in which it acts (cf. Miller 2011). In this book I have tried as far as possible
to avoid banal generalizations. A common practice in many texts regarding
the digital is, for instance, the use of a sweeping “we” form that hides from
view the intrinsic diversity in meaning and access that characterizes the
terrain. I have tried to avoid such slippages. The reader may, however,
have to forgive me for eventual inconsistencies at this level and always
bear in mind that this book builds on a situated auto-ethnographic set of
explorations rooted in the “present” of the ethnographer. Hence the exam-
ples verge mainly around practices and technologies encountered in West-
ern Europe with small detours into South Asia.
The politics of contemporary images are, however, not only a matter of
geopolitics. They also point, as I mentioned earlier, in the direction of an
ongoing struggle between freedom and oppression. While giving us, on one
hand, a chance to narrate our lives and, through contemporary social media,
also to create community (see Favero 2013), images are, on the other hand,
fundamental tools for our incorporation into the dynamics of late capital-
ism. We often fail to see that the online sharing of images is far from an
innocuous activity (Uricchio 2016) but rather part of a broader political
context. Gehl (2009) brilliantly argued that YouTube users should actually
be addressed as unpaid laborers. The roots of a possible sense of “disenchant-
ment” (to use Weber’s term) with the world of images and technologies can
be traced back in time. Debord (1967) articulated this in a detailed manner in
his Society of Spectacle. According to him, images were fundamental in the
latest stage of capitalism. They were quintessential to the progressive detach-
ment of humans from everyday life. Making individuals experience life
through its own representation, “the spectacle is capital to such a degree of
accumulation that it becomes an image” (1967, ch. 1, thesis 34).
For Adorno and Marcuse, technology and media could never have been
neutral. In his analysis of the cultural industries, Adorno (2001) looked on
them as tools for the propagation of oppression and control. In One-
Dimensional Man (2001 [1964]), Marcuse looked at media (and the
technologies supporting them) as tools for domesticating citizens to obey.
As I mentioned, in Chap. 2 I explore in greater depth the extent to which
“present images” are involved in this unresolved tension between liberation
10 1 INTRODUCTION: PRESENT IMAGES
book looks at human beings as immersed in the world they live in and at
images as one of their channels for coming to terms with it and for acting on
it. Images are not subjugated to narratives imposed on them; they are not a
simple matter of encoding. Rather, they are co-actants in our lived world;
just like human beings, they simply “are”. Inspired by Pavel Florensky, this
book also addresses (mainly in the last chapter) images as gates, as tools that
help us to bridge the existential gap between life and death. The notion of
the present should also favor associations with the multimodal and multi-
sensory nature of images and help us to overcome conventional distinctions
between still and moving, between different types of media, between pro-
fessional and amateur, consumption and production.
The hope is that the notion “present images” will help me to provide a
timeless narration on the basis of what looks like a set of timely practices,
technologies, and topics.
VOLUME STRUCTURE
The book is divided into five chapters, with Chaps. 2 to 5 each addressing
one core theoretical question vis-à-vis one well-delimited and ethnograph-
ically explored field of practice (a particular set of technologies, a visual
form, a practice, etc.). I am aware that each of the ethnographic terrains
addressed could indeed give rise to more reflections than the ones addressed
in these chapters. However, my intention is to look in depth with one
particular theoretical angle at the time, rather than to foreground the
ethnographic exploration of the terrains under scrutiny.
Chapter 2 looks into the tensions between liberating and oppressive
forces that arise in the context of contemporary interactive and participatory
visual practices. The ethnographic field under scrutiny is that of iDocs (also
known as interactive documentaries). Divided into two main sections, this
chapter begins with a brief introduction to the history of this “avant-garde”
visual form followed by a more detailed analysis of its core ingredients.
Structured on the basis of a typology that I have been fine-tuning during
my years of (theoretical and practical) engagement with this visual form (see
also Favero 2017b), this section is divided into three main subsections, each
corresponding to a particular type of iDoc. Thus I speak of “active”,
“participatory”, and “immersive” iDocs and offer for each of these types
of practices some examples of recent projects that may help us identify
leading contemporary trends in this arena. In this section, I suggest that,
among other things, iDocs signal a search for universal (perhaps
12 1 INTRODUCTION: PRESENT IMAGES
that such practices (regardless of whether old or new) make on the possi-
bility of co-living in separate regimes of truth.
Chapter 4 pushes some of the questions raised in Chap. 3 further,
looking in particular at the tangible, material nature of many of the images
that circulate in contemporary digital habitats. Focusing mainly (but not
exclusively) on wearable technologies and cameras, this chapter begins with
a reflection on the genesis of the discourse on digitization. I aim to draw the
reader’s attention to the origins of the discourse that has shaped our
understanding of digital technologies. Claiming that this discourse builds
on a misunderstanding (a confusion between compression and dematerial-
ization), the text then dives into the contemporary scenario of digital
consumer technologies. Looking into leading trends in the consumer mar-
ket, I show the extent to which today we are witnessing the growth of
technologies that increasingly close the gap among technology, the body of
users, and the materiality of the world surrounding them. I suggest that we
are in an age characterized not only by digitization but also by a process of
materialization taking place within a digital environment (elsewhere I have
called this process “analogization”; see Favero 2016). I then proceed to
explore the nature of such a shift in the context of image-making. Focusing
on two selected wearable camera technologies (one “life-logging” camera
and one “action” camera), I identify the presence of a “material turn”
happening alongside (and probably within) the much-debated “algorithmic
turn” (Uricchio 2011). Before concluding this chapter, I suggest that such a
shift requires from the scholar a capacity to move away from simplistic
dualisms and toward a perspective that integrates the digital with the
material (analog) world. I conclude by sharing some reflections on the
political and ethical challenges that such new technologies and practices
may pose.
Chapter 5 is the most intimate one. Expanding the realm of images into a
territory that blurs not only the distinction between the analog and the
digital but also between visual, aural/verbal stimuli, and imagination, this
chapter looks into the role of images in connection with death. Tapping into
one of the pillars of the history of photography (the nexus of photography
and death has been a fundamental one), this chapter is based on my personal
experience of accompanying my father toward his death during the summer
of 2015. Suggesting that this passage amounted to a parallel movement of
the author toward a new birth (hence closing what Freud called “a circui-
tous path to death”, see Taussig 2001, p. 309), the chapter looks in depth
into the meaning of images during this journey of grief. Opening with a
14 1 INTRODUCTION: PRESENT IMAGES
NOTES
1. Funnily enough, Melinda and I ended up both using the expression “in the
company of” as titles for two presentations we had for the same panel. She
ended up completing that sentence with “images”, I with “things dead”.
2. In this critique, Latour refers to Cartesianism as the central pillar of modern-
ism. According to him, Western societies have never been truly convinced and
clear about the distinctions between nature and culture, body and soul, as it is
often argued.
3. For the notion of auto-ethnography, see Okely and Callaway (1992) and
Khosravi (2010).
4. By this I refer to my almost obsessive habit of making written, aural, and visual
notes of all that happened during this process.
REFERENCES 15
REFERENCES
Adorno, T.W. 2001. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture.
London/New York: Routledge.
Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Baker, G. 2005. Photography’s Expanded Field. October Fall: 120–140.
Barbatsis, G., M. Camacho, and L. Jackson. 2004. Does It Speak to Me? Visual
Aesthetics and the Digital Divide. Visual Studies 19: 36–51.
Baudrillard, J. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan.
Becker, H. 1986. Do Photographs Tell the Truth? In Doing Things Together:
Selected Papers, 221–272. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Belting, H. 2011. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Benjamin, W. 2015 (1931). A Short History of Photography. http://monoskop.
org/images/7/79/Benjamin_Walter_1931_1972_A_Short_History_of_Photog
raphy.pdf. Accessed 15 Oct 2015.
Bourriaud, N. 1998. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Reel.
Crary, J. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nine-
teenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cubitt, S. 2016. Aesthetics of the Digital. In A Companion to Digital Art,
Christiane Paul. London: Wiley-Blackwell.
Debord, G. 1967. The Society of Spectacle. http://www.nothingness.org/SI/debo
rd/index.html
Deleuze, G. 1997. Differenza e ripetizione. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore.
Der Derian, J. 1994. Simulation: The Highest Stage of Capitalism? In Baudrillard:
A Critical Reader, ed. D. Kellner. London: Blackwells.
Driscoll, C., and M. Gregg. 2011. Convergence Culture and the Legacy of Feminist
Cultural Studies. Cultural Studies 25 (4–5): 566–584.
Edwards, E. 2006. Photographs and the Sound of History. Visual Anthropology
Review 1 & 2: 27–46.
Favero, P. 2013. Picturing Life-Worlds in the City: Notes for a Slow, Aimless
and Playful Visual Ethnography. Archivio Anthropologico del Mediterraneo.
Anno XVI (2013) 15 (2): 69–85.
———. 2015. For a Creative Anthropological Image-Making: Reflections on Aes-
thetics, Relationality, Spectatorship and Knowledge in the Context of Visual
Ethnographic Work in New Delhi, India. In Media Anthropology and Public
Engagement, ed. S. Abraham and S. Pink. Oxford: Berghahn.
———. 2016. ‘Analogization’: Reflections on Wearable Cameras and the Changing
Meaning of Images in a Digital Landscape. In Digital Photography and Everyday
Life: Empirical Studies on Material Visual Practices, ed. Z. Gómez Cruz and
A. Lehmuskallio, 209–227. London/New York: Routledge.
16 1 INTRODUCTION: PRESENT IMAGES
Participated Images
In a postscript to his book Art & Multitude (2011), Antonio Negri writes:
the artistic paradox consists today in the wish to produce the world (bodies,
movements) differently—and yet from within a world which admits of no
other world other than the one which actually exists, and which knows that
the “outside” to be constructed can only be the other within an absolute
insideness. (p. 108, emphasis in original)
With these words Negri sheds light on the unavoidable tensions taking place
within contemporary late capitalism, between the desire to construct strat-
egies of freedom and the impossibility of exiting the terrain of capitalism
itself. Following his argument, we must question whether resistance is at all
possible from within the rules of a (economic, cultural) regime such as the
one characterizing this age. The tension between these two parallel forces
has been the focus of attention of a large number of scholars. Horkheimer
and Adorno (2016 [1944]) and later Marcuse (2001 [1961]) addressed the
extent to which technological development is characterized by a dialectic
between liberating and oppressive forces. Offering a set of potentially
emancipatory tools and practices, technology tends to anchor its users to
preexisting networks of power. Debord (1967) took these reflections fur-
ther, suggesting that media were nothing but a propagation of capitalist
worldviews, progressively detaching human beings from lived, everyday
experience. According to Debord (1967), we have entered the last phase
of capitalism, the age of spectacle, characterized by an immense accumula-
tion of spectacles in which all that was once lived directly has distanced itself
in a representation (Ch. 1, thesis 2).
In the last decade or so, with the explosion of smartphones and the
consolidation of the web 2.0, such debates and visions have gained further
relevance. We have witnessed, on one hand, celebrations of the arrival of
digital technologies as the beginning of a more equally participatory society.
Right after the launch of the first iPhone (and its competitors), books such
as We Think (Leadbeater 2009) and Here Comes Everybody (Shirky 2008)
popularized the idea of a society moving toward a greater, bottom-up
democracy made possible by digital media. These were also the years in
which the European Union started designing its policies of cultural
co-creation and in which, on the academic stage, Henry Jenkins suggested
with his book Media Convergence (2006) that the global spread of media
would lead to new subjects that, armed with a collective intelligence, would
constitute an alternative source of power. Scholars like Hay and Couldry
(2011) accused Jenkins of overstating the power of the user and of not
understanding the role of corporations and of contemporary capitalism.
Like them, many other scholars looked critically at digital technologies as
possible tools for incorporating human beings into “soft capitalism” (Thrift
1997) and “soft power” (Nye 2004). Using Foucault’s terms, we could say
that these tools are the ultimate stage in the development of “biopower”
(see Foucault 1978). In his book Images, Vilém Flusser (2009) asks:
2 PARTICIPATED IMAGES 21
"Hän tulee! Hän tulee!" Syntyi kauhea tungos. Jokainen tahtoi tulla
lähemmä.
"Ja jospa tietäisit, sisar Borcsa", selitti Matias Toth, "että hänellä
on kotona vielä kolmesataa kuusiseitsemättä vaimoa".
"En."
"Mutta mitä sanovat siihen isä Bruno, isä Litkei?" urahti ylituomari
puolin vihaisena puolin nauraen. "Hehän ovat teistä tehneet miltei
pyhimyksen."
"Minäkö?"
"Minne?"
"Tuon varkaan! No, sen minä löylytän, jos hänet vain missä näen."
4.
Papit vietiin, ja Kecskemetin kansankapinahanke nukahti, ja läheni
se merkittävä päivä, jolloin senaattorien piti lahjoineen lähteä
Budaan — Turkin keisarin luo. Puvut olivat valmiit ja kolmeksi
viimeiseksi päiväksi ne pantiin kaupungintalolle yleisön
tarkastettavaksi. Siitä syntyi oikea juhlakulkue. Heitukka Pintyö
vartioi suurta pöytää, jolle aarteet oli levitetty houkuttelemaan.
Gyurka vanhus siinä seisoi kerubina, mutta lieskamiekan asemesta
hän heilutti kädessään pähkinäpuusauvaa. Niin ihanasti kaikki
välkkyi, että hänkin näytti sen tartuttamalta. Sellaiset verkot ovat
naiskasvoille suuri jälkiapu. Tavallista sievempiä neitoja hän rohkaisi
toisinaan, sekin oli hänen virkaansa. "Koetelkaapa vain sitä,
kyyhkyseni, tuolla sivuhuoneessa." Ja kuka olisi voinut vastustaa?
Oliko sydäntä, joka ei olisi rajummin sykkinyt, katsetta, joka ei olisi
kiehtoutunut? Kaikki "tuhannen ja yhden yön" aarteet eivät olleet
mitään näiden rinnalla. Kuinka moni tyttö hiipikään arkana kuin
metsäkauris kaikkien näiden ihanuuksien ympärillä ja antoi
katseensa hempeänä niillä harhailla, mutta pian avautuivat silmät
suuriksi ja alkoivat loistaa kuin kaksi liekehtivää kynttilää, jäsenet
alkoivat hiljaa vavahdella, ohimoissa poltti ja takoi rajusti, ja juuri
samaan aikaan sitten alkoi heitukka puhua. "Koetelkaa toki,
kyyhkyseni!" Ja he koettelivat ja olisivat sitten mielellään kuolleet!
Mutta voi sitä, joka tuon loiston kerran oli ylleen pukenut! Ihania
nauhoja pujotettiin heidän kiharoihinsa, vartalo nyöritettiin solakaksi,
heidän ylleen pantiin kummasti ommellut paidat, taivaansiniset
silkkipuvut, joihin oli kirjailtu hopeisia puolikuita, ja lisäksi jalkoihin
karmiininpunaiset pikkusaappaat ja huikaisevat koristukset. "Kas
noin, enkeliseni, tarkastele nyt itseäsi!" Heidän eteensä pantiin
kuvastin, ja tyttäret alkoivat riemusta remuella; he näkivät
keijukaisunta. Ja heidän siinä itseään kummeksiessaan, kaipuun
polttamin sydämin, aaltoilevin povin ja turhamaisuuden nälän
kalvamina, astui kerubi jälleen esiin: "Nyt riittää jo, riisuudu — tai jos
sinun tekee mielesi, niin käy aina noissa pukimissa".
Oli kuin jokainen sana olisi ollut pilvi, joka kuuroina valui tytön
kasvoille, niin murheelliseksi kävi lapsi. Tämäkin villinä kasvanut
oravainen karkoitettiin pureksimasta. Hän kääntyi pois ja pyyhkäisi
kädellään silmistä kumpuavat kyyneleet.
"Mikä nimesi?"
"Czinna."
"Minä lähden."