Once upon a time, mankind awoke from a dream with a great start. Some men with tears, some with screams, others in a clouded ecstasy, one or two opened eyes full of resentment and a silent fury that could not speak. Each man turned to his neighbor and began to ask, “Did you…” but he saw answered in the face of the other man that he had also dreamed a divine dream.
Artists, story tellers, musicians, carvers, all those skilled to create symbols of things, began, without command or organization, a great campaign of creation, to make a record of the dream.
Bits and pieces only could anyone remember, and when men tried to correlate the details, they began to differ. Portraiture, they all agreed upon a face, a beautiful face, a terrible face, an angry face, a loving face. When the pictures of the man man had dreamed of were compared with each other, they were not the same face. No, and it was said, it was observed, it was whispered, that the portraits looked far more like the painters than whatever fading image remained of the dream.
Time went on, and a funny thing happened. A man, here or there, seemed, for a time, to be the face in the dream. Man would ask, “Is it He?” But like all men and dreams, the man would die, his glory fade, and the name that all tongues knew would be spoken no more.
Perversity set in too, and some men set themselves to creating mocking images and caricatures, faces made to shock and terrify.
Others forgot the dream and simply tried to make the best portrait they could.
Then, one day, of the many men who said or seemed to be the face more forgotten than remembered from a dream that no one recalled except in discarded or unconscious assumptions, another one came.
He was derided, a simple man with rough hands and manners from the bad part of town with followers of the worst repute, and He was asked how He would prove that His face, out of all the others, out of all the contradictions and diversions and philosophies, that His mortal face of flesh and blood, was the face all mankind had grown weary trying to remember.
“I will tell you what you have dreamed.”
“And what was our dream?”
“My life,” He said. “My death, and my life.”
Tale Told 