Friday, November 12, 2010

Creator of Light

Slope of moon fingernails her yellowed Cheshire smile, fixed, tart, bent lines ending, into eternal demi-god of deep, barren blank. I blink, fixated beneath this wonder – that the sun should mesh herself, flabby and yellow-shadowed, against the hoary rock of moon to color even this sliver.

How small I feel, and fragile. What miniscule token of yellow the sun blithely offers me to heat skin tawny from gray night forged.

Dillard’s words flow in and out of my tangled web of mind: “How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you’re not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination” (Holy the Firm, 72).

I wonder at this thought – artist as tool, upholder, revealer of light – of truth that already was and only needs telling. Not creator. Only proclaimer. Proclaimer of that which is already – of that which was far before sun offered skin yellow, far before skin – and sun – and yellow.

We all then, Dillard, are fleshy wicks. All of us proclaim, reveal, enlighten – sacrifice. But what? And to whom?

I wake up to jacket shuffled over chair just so, and the lines – shadows – colors of it all intrigue me. I drive home to telephone wires plastered against a grayish seething sky. I sit in the kitchen adjacent to jaunty curtains lined against door frames, archaic wooden fences pushed in crooked lines against the houses and fences and naked trees beyond, like a pile of postcards stewed together clumsily.

The power of cell on cell, forged beauty – the significance of color shades and jagged shapes – the ordering of creation – is a wonder. Capsized by her beauty, I am overwhelmed by the mystery of Creator pushing natural, temporal, onto eternal. We all, like a hiccough in time, breathe to enjoy His handiwork. He belches fire and glory, and we, his people – shrouded in his own blood sacrifice – are the quintessence of His beauty.

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