Poke a hole through the blank outer wall of a lightight container and the world will come pouring in, projected (albeit inverted and flipped round, left to right) onto the darkened interior’s facing wall.

Poke a hole in the flank of a pristine, glacier-fed mountain valley lake (a hole that is, in the form of an aqueduct, a 270-mile-long gravity-pitched siphon straw) and watch the one valley empty out as its far counterpart fills up.

Scrape out the silver from the emptied valley’s mountain margins, transport it all the way back cross-country to another lakeside town, where, pulverized, it can be salted into emulsions to form the basis for reels and reels of film stock that can then be transported back cross-country, only  this time to that emptied valley’s now-bustling metropolitan counterpart, where the reels can come to undergird an entire industry of dream weavers, who, in their own turn, will now begin streaming  back to that original emptied valley, using it as the blasted backdrop onto which they project their own epic fantasies, capturing such Western sagas onto the  film stock spooled at the back of little dark boxes with pinhole apertures, from out of which, presently, will emerge full-fledged movies, projected out through the pinhole  apertures of other slightly bigger black boxes onto  the otherwise empty white screens, to the rapt delight of drop-jawed audiences all around the world (the flickering screen image entering through the pinholes of their eye in to the darkened recesses of their myriad respective imaginations).

And all of it, all of it constituting the ever-compounding vision of the good folk in the Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio in Los Angeles, that same bustling metropolis built on siphoned water and processed silver.

 

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