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Panopticon, with all its inhabitants completely visible at all angles, at all times, simultaneously.
    And you will hold that curiosity in your hand, though your sense has left you, and be left, forever, with the question: “Am I a warden, or a prisoner?”
     
    Tshibumba’s Skeleton
     
    Tshibumba Kanda Matulu painted what he dare not speak.  His depictions of Belgian colonial brutality gave voice to the un-utter-able.  The brilliance of his palette cut through and broke the jungle-shrouded silence of tortured screams and the thick layer of background weeping that pervaded central Africa for a lifetime or more.
    The hierarchy of power was clear.  European officers in starched white uniform held the kiboko , or rhinoceros-hide whip.  Below them, dark-skinned askari in dark-green uniforms shouldered rifles and clubs.  The askari were truly the fist of colonial law.  Beneath the fist were the citizens, if that term may be used for those who lived under such forms of oppression.
    Thsibumba’s Skeleton shone like an African kaleidoscope.  It was a mélange of cast off paint chips and unused canvas drippings in the form of a three-dimensional skull and spine.  The bones were not cleanly separated by color.  You would not, for instance, have found paint-by-number lumbar bones neatly stacked in barbershop stripes.  Rather, each bone was mottled in a sort of candy-store camouflage, a hypnotic, if macabre, osteological tie-dye.  That is, if you ever saw it.
    Most who saw it claimed not to.  Those who wished to see it dare not let their desires be known.  The authorities hated the thing because, for all its concreteness, the ideas that it gave voice to – freedom, equanimity, hope, and possibly even joy – these ideas were anathema to the authorities.  When the key was seen, by those who admitted it or not, it was inevitably in a position that strengthened its iconographic standing as a representation of those ideas: in the lock of a recently-opened stockade, protruding from a freely swinging prison cell door, stuck in the barrel of a gun that had been leveled at fleeing prisoners.  For all the denial, Tshibumba’s Skeleton seemed to be everywhere.
    These repeated appearances of the key gave rise to several possibly un-answerable questions.  What is the magic of art that leads man out of captivity?  Is this escape literal or merely metaphysical?  Exactly who was being freed, and to what end?
    One final question must be asked: Why must we speak here of Tshibumba and his key in the past tense, as if he were already dead?  Perhaps it is because the past has not yet given way to the present.  The uniforms are different; the key remains unchanged.
     
    Chung Ho-hsiang’s Visitor
     
    No one can accuse the Chia-yu empire of ingratitude towards its subjects.  In 1054, one Chung Ho-hsiang discovered the famous “Guest Star” (a massive supernova explosion that has since expanded into what we now know as the crab nebula) in the constellation Taurus.  A scant two years later, the star faded from naked-eye visibility.  Chung Ho-hsiang, who had since been promoted to the office of Director of the Astronomical Bureau of the Chia-yu empire, was rewarded with a token of remembrance by the emperor himself: a glass-blown key infused with a gold replica of the supernova as it appeared on the first night of its discovery.  The locks on the royal observatory were switched out for new ones that matched the key.  And there was only one key.
    Astronomers and empires come and go, and China, despite its storied history and ancient heritage, holds no exemption to these changes.  The key passed from director to director through a series of mentoring, regime changes, and public beheadings until 1449.  Not long before that time, during the Qing dynasty, a bronze telescope had been built and mounted at the ancient Beijing Observatory.  In that year, Emperor Zhengtong, known for his collection of one-thousand peacocks and his