Everything sacred gets covered. The chalice before the offering. The icon behind the curtain. The relic in its reliquary. The Virgin under her manto. The warm bread. The dreamer inside the hood.

Mona 2 sleeps under a manto of hand-loomed Turkish cloth, embroidered by me in Mulberry silk with unborn fetal goats and bulls, Paleolithic references, ovules alive, nervous sperm, human fetuses and abstract figures. Underneath, the plastic sleeping bag, and underneath, mechanical voices bellow in the dark, producing a rural animal chorus — little bulls? sheep? goats? — with small cow-bells. The mechanism is silent, like a concert grand's instrument — built to represent. What emerges is a raw nocturnal field.

While building the mechanism and listening to what it produced, I kept thinking of Beethoven's Pastoral. I don't know why — it wasn't rational. Perhaps because Beethoven was also working at the threshold between nature and emotion, trying to materialize a sense of the living world in sound. The 6th goes from nature toward feeling. Mona 2 is the reverse — from feeling toward a biological field that exists without me.

The head is also a self-portrait — a nocturnal forest emerging like a rotating planet from inside the hood — no ears, no eyes. The branch tips of this planetary forest do not interweave — they grow toward each other across the curvature of the sphere, and on the other side become the branches of other trees, on the other side of the planet, as in the Mycelia drawing series.

In Tent Visions 4, the drawing that accompanies Mona 2, two foxes fly around a nocturnal tree, as perceived by my dog. I slept there and had a dream.