This is the fourth installment of our mysterious text. Once again, what I present here is a very rough draft. It could use comments.
In the cathedral people were celebrating the solemn novena to the human eyes of St. Lucy. The exterior of things was being glorified, the clean, well ventilated beauty of the skin, the enchantment of shallow surfaces. Aid was being requested against the dark physiologies of the body, against the central fire and funnels of the night, raising up, beneath the smooth cupola, a sheet of the purest cristal, bombarded from all directions by fine golden reflectors. The world of grass was opposed to the mineral world. The fingernail was opposed to the heart. God of the outline, of transparency and surfaces. In fear of the heartbeat and in horror of the bloodstream, people were calling for the tranquillity of agates, and the shadowless nakedness of jellyfish.
When I went into the cathedral the lamentation of the six thousand diostrias was being sung. It sounded and resounded in the three vaults, full of ropes and cables, waves and rocking, like three battles of Lepanto. The eyes of the Saint looked out from the tray with the cold pain of an animal which has just received its coup de grâce.
Space and distance. Vertical and horizontal. Relationship between you and me. Eyes of St. Lucy! The veins of the soles of the feet sleep stretched out in their rosy beds, soothed by the two little stars which light them from above. We leave our eyes at the surface, like aquatic flowers, and we crouch behind them while our palpitating physiology floats in a dark world.
I knelt down.
The music directors were shooting rifles from the choir.
In the meantime night had fallen. Deep and brutal night, like the head of a mule with leather blinders.
N.B. Diostria does not appear in the DRAE or in the Larousse. From what I have been able to gather from other sources, it seems to refer to degrees of myopia, and also to the festivals between the days of St. John and St. George.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Comments, PZ? Jee-zuz! These bits you’ve been posting make me burn to be able to read the original text. The words and images are deeply disturbing. They enter me and come out through my skin. They eat my eyeballs while I’m reading them, making me read faster in the fear that they will win before I get to the end of the section, leaving me helpless and unfinished.
Oh good! 🙂 I think the same, which is why I am working on this thing. There is some big, early 20th century thing to be unraveled here, and I aim to do it.