10 OCTOBER 1992, Page 31

A Downed Butterfly

Yet here it is: This is meant and is no accident. (How speak of 'design-by- accident' and not stultify English?) One can allow being whacked by a windshield in mid-hover and killed. That is accident. But not this.

Every index of artifice in its mesmeric format, and artifice far beyond any we understand: Two red-orange smouldering discs on each dun wing like planets, one in full view, the other occluded. — What on earth do we make of it? I already imagine things like harp-shaped shadowy wings wide as the night sky and rimmed in such blues and ivories and rainbows, such astronomies — and that sure- ly God looks a lot more like this than like us?

Peter Kane Dufault