portrait of a holstein (the black-and-white dualism, held very still)

One cow, one lens, held close and quiet for as long as you can stand it. The Holstein is the whole doctrine in an animal — the black and the white, matter and light, the frozen husk and the living spark, mapped onto one hide. Duncan dyes a stripe of his tefillin white for exactly this reason. Look long enough at the pattern and it stops being a cow and starts being a diagram of everything. Then it blinks, and it is a cow again.