Implying that being is most acutely experienced as an affront, "confess" derives from the Latin com fateri, to admit or acknowledge. To confess is not to say what one is guilty of, simply to elucidate existing. To utter, aligning with God, the unaccountable, a mystery experienced as dread.

Life is never the same. It severs from itself, on the one hand the past-meaning contaminated by history-on the other the void of presence. Crossed out of innocence, we behave as we must-whether out of fear or love-walking in shadows.

In Tim White’s ethereal video parable, a girl is reading a book on history. She enters a cathedral for confession, finds herself in a forest, diving into a river, appears in a war zone, gathers bullets and cartridges, appears back in nature lying in the stream… She is muse, memory, miracle. A self at once susceptible-alone, exposed, bewildered-and defiant-learned, armed, magical.

Her strength and vulnerability are one. Like us, she inhabits a contrary, self-abrogating existence. Through her, Sobieski-White alludes to the impact of family and historic heritage on each of us at a time when the lethality of our blood feuds is notching toward apocalypse. Entering history, the dream mirrors our animal despair, becomes nightmare, necessitating an unforeseeable awakening or death. History confronts our collective cultural imagination with the impossible: the necessity of expiation, of transmuting the excoriating experiences that most define our relationships with one another into the understanding we need to survive. Sanity requires effacing the indelible.

Experience would be cruel were it not impersonal. Every claim to mean is finally unsupportable. Every meaning is someone’s joke. Can anyone be said to have lived who has not experienced a stinging impotence in the face of all being, the arms reaching to comfort one there seeming those of the fellow drowning, gnarling roots dragging us to the grave? The girl dissolves into nature in a stream, near its bank. "Confession" emphasizes that this moment of dissolution, even if into non-being, is crucial.

Fateri is a relative of the English "fable," "fame" and "fate." The fable issues from the schism between us and God (the term is scarcely removed from pater), between the past and present, absence and being. It is as close as we come to the unmitigated without dissolution, is the last scrim or veil. In fables the primal verges, however fleetingly, upon the tolerable and consents to…us. Their strangeness stems from this proximity to the ineffable. Their logic that of dreams, they issue from a pre-historical, animal or instinctual memory. Their language is so strange we do not question it anymore than we interrogate the singing of birds.

"Fable" is linked etymologically to "fairy," our existence being concomitant with the unreal or, more precisely, with the magical. While secularism suppresses this, resulting in the fanaticism of the demonstrable, its science returns us to the threshold of the inexplicable. Conversely, the ancients maintained what Robert Lawlor calls the "discipline of acknowledging a supra-rational, unknowable mystery" as a first principle. (Robert Lawlor, "Sacred Geometry". New York: Thames and Hudson, 1982.)

If we are not careful we mistake the overwhelming richness of being (the face of God the mortal does not apprehend) for an impoverished, linear concept of time, where we are cut off, referent-less, inhabiting not paradise but paradox. In this case Zeno’s, where we can make no claim to touch or know. In linear time we surrender claims to the moral and experience not freedom but license. Severed from the all, we inhabit matter, identity, a secluded (secular?) existence where prescience narrows dangerously and everything is umbrage, cost.

White’s apprehension remains manifold. "Confession" doesn’t lend itself to an exclusively linear concept of time. At one point the girl’s profile is superimposed over a full view of her face. And we experience the entire work from four views, compelled to experience more than one moment of what is occurring. The implication is that in some crucial sense, everything is happening at the same time, though we are only equipped to experience some an aspect of it that is ultimately private, beyond any touch or representation, that is ultimately us. To intimate, to gesture toward the inviolable from which we issue.

Within consciousness, the fable or dream of living, we are basally virgin, awareness equaling innocence. If we are preoccupied, confused or menaced, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice or Dorothy in Oz we are not powerless. To score a saccharine term from pop-analysis, the "inner-child" redeems the universe (which always, according to the mystics, has the first move) by continuing to experience it. Our responding "as variously as possible" (Frank O’Hara) is freedom. Here is meaning in mere persistence, where to feel is pure, and to apprehend all feeling. The girl both lights and vanquishes the flame.

As recognition of the annihilatory is the terrible core of the imagination, character begins in dreams. In the imagination self experiences the estranging fullness of being as its own. The flicker, skirmish of static, noise…image, imago, likeness…Lost to English are the word’s etymological connection to echo and ghost. I-mage, the magic of the I, an incorporeal entity whose transience is freedom.

Knowledge occurs in cyclic time, implies the abstract, a double…recurrence. If the "me" half of the duo inhabits linear time, where it participates in the irrevocable, it has reference to another. We are close to what some mystics mean when they refer to life as a game. It is precisely not to diminish or nullify the importance of temporal action. Games are only fun if the rules are respected, and only beautiful games survive. Rules invoke chance, detail, God. To measure is prayer. For "Confession’s" child a sense of unreality is no longer oppressive or the occasion for license, but an invitation to sacral play.