The screen opens almost black. A room before the eye has adjusted. Nothing is titled. Continue by scrolling.

Morning begins to reveal architecture. A long band of sunlight crosses the floor. Dust exists in the beam. A curtain moves beyond the frame.

A name enters the field, then leaves. Maria.

MARIA

A glass of water catches light. Forty-two.

42

A doorframe passes across the field. Galway. Still no explanation.

GALWAY

A hand at rest on something ordinary. A brief unfamiliar sensation.

a brief unfamiliar sensation

A sentence arrives without effort. Call her. A fragment of last night's dream: the station in the rain.

CALL HER.

Darkness.

Have you ever known something

you had no obvious way of knowing?

Have you ever dismissed it?

Different traditions name the arrival differently. Intuition, inspiration, imagination, pattern recognition, the unconscious, the Muse, second sight, dream, revelation. They are not synonyms.

What do we call it?

• Prophets dreamed.
• Poets invoked the Muse.
• Greek tradition made Memory the mother of the Muses.
• Gaelic traditions remembered second sight.
• Artists have described work that seemed to arrive before explanation.
• Scientists and mathematicians have described sudden insight.
• Psychology studies intuition, incubation, unconscious processing, and pattern recognition.
• Christianity speaks of revelation, discernment and manifestations of the Spirit.

But human beings have been asking some version of this question for a very long time.

Where does knowing come from?

What is it for?

The glass of water again. Sunlight passes through it and, for a moment, creates a small spectral separation. A physically tiny phenomenon.

Gift. English Ordinal. G 7, I 9, F 6, T 20. Forty-two. Twenty-four, full reduction. A correspondence, not a proof.

Spiritual gifts. Full reduction. Sixty-nine. A correspondence, not a proof.