Cinematic Poetry
Trials of Destiny I
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TRIALS OF DESTINY I I came to a boulder in the field, Glinting bright, Bathed in pale moonlight. It moved; Armor smooth, solvent in its healing. A sword lay broken at his side, KNIGHT: "What if?... What if?... What if?..." The knight repeated over and over. KNIGHT: "I've been watching, Since the first time you galloped through. Did you not think I saw you from the woods?" FAUN: "Watching me?" KNIGHT: "You gave me life, There is more at court, More etched upon its walls. Your presence has been known, Since Elysium's first stones? Don't you know who you are?" FAUN: "And who are you?" I asked. KNIGHT: "I was your guard, Before this world I did depart." FAUN: "How can this be? Here you stand before me." KNIGHT: "This field ~ I will never leave. For I will wait where I was slain. You gave me a kingdom, A life of wealth." FAUN: "I don't understand. I am just a faun from the forest. You must mistake me for a man." KNIGHT: "Today your thoughts are small, Because you've only seen a glimmer, Of your destiny. You called his name, And they heard your cry ~ It echoed through destiny's pages, Your thoughts are threads through Elysium's sky. Take these robes. You will pass as one of the court. Find the library. There... you'll see." It was days and nights, Through fields of dew, Dawns falling to mountains & caverns. I ran until my footsteps, Vanished into the mist. Before the fog fell in blue. Emerging from the woods at last, The entrance rose before me, Wreathed in vines, The library's door. I stepped inside. The walls stretched with paintings, Yet they moved, alive, Each a portal to paradise. I watched for hours, enthralled, Each frame a door. Could I knock? Would they make me wait?
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This is a story of ambition, seduction, and betrayal ~ an odyssey into the machinations of power. Trials Of Destiny 1/1 triptych premiered as an immersive exhibition at Eth Denver, February 2025. Exhibited at Mesa Contemporary Art Museum throughout March. Performed live at Superchief Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles, April 2025. A faun, the eternal dreamer, steps from the forest into the court, donning armor he found by the ghost of a knight in a field. To wear the suit is to engage in the theatre of history, to submit oneself to the trials of those who have come before. And yet the deeper one walks, the more apparent it becomes: the journey is not through a kingdom of men, but through the mind itself. The King, he discovers, is a reflection of the self ~ he praises, then undermines. Teaches, then mocks. Trials of Destiny stretches from Romanticism's fevered dreams to the existential labyrinths of modernity. Fuller has constructed a mythos ~ stepping into the lineage of Keats, Blake and Baudelaire. Power is not given ~ it is embodied. Poetry & AI Animation & Music & Produced & Performed by Laurence Fuller.
