Photographer Unknown, (The Writing Man)

“The individual characters. Look at that one, what’s that called?”

“It’s an E.”

“Right. There are lots of them. and they’re all the same.”

“Of course they’re all the same. They’re all E’s.”

“Idiot. I mean they’re exactly the same. Same size, same shape, no variation at all. You’ve meditated, you’ve studied the Abhidharma, you know how the mind works. Say it takes a tenth of a second to make one stroke of a pen. Then there’s a gap in consciousness too brief to notice, but it’s vital to your functioning. During that gap the whole history of humanity intervenes in the form of sparks and flashes, your own personal history, the whole cosmos, actually, which of course doesn’t exist in time, but when you make the next stroke of the pen you are a different person. After a whole inhalation and exhalation nothing at all remains except the blueprint. No way the next stroke is going to be identical to the first, there has to be a subtle difference. When it comes to a whole letter, well, no normal person possessed of normal consciousness will produce exactly the same letter over and over again.”

-John Burdett, “The Bangkok Asset”, Discussion of the Writing on the Mirror