Beauty in the Dark Forest

Charm, purely and in magic entirety is the slow moving currant I'm drifting in. The other day...I must tell you what happened.  Though before I can, there must be an explanation of the perception through which I see this scene.  I so badly want it to be understood. 

  

It all rests in the deep attention to the contrast of light and dark I see in this life, where I comfortably reside inside my mind.

It undoubtedly begins with my own sense of myth.  Growing up the way I did...castles, digs, graveyards, museums, emphasis on reading, etc...when they are your playground, they are stage upon which your childhood games are set.  A child's mind is quite capable of understanding that with each medieval graveyard experience there were people who lived lives full of untold stories. If an active imagination is involved (mine by the bucket loads) then the dead individualize themselves, and they become companions in a stream of running inner dialogue ( and I must explain that when I mean 'the dead,' I mean those that were uncovered in digs, immortalized by carvings over tombs, etc). Here were some of the dialogues I had with myself:

"Who are you?" "I wish I could hear you laugh."  "What song do you know?" " If you are here, I wish you would tell me." "Were you  handsome?"  "Were you quite wicked?"  "Are you buried with treasure?" And the most asked, "Are you lonely?  Don't you wish to talk to me?"

In this sense, it's living with your own created ghosts.  To my child self, death wasn't 'end' because a grave seemed to welcome too many questions and I correlated them with characters in a novel:  they were real to me, they were companions in the mind, and their voices were as quiet as a page in a book; marker's recite their dates and names, and their village's mossy architecture spells out the lives they once lived. How can the dead truly be gone when their imprint is still here?  Perhaps that seems strange, but it made for a wonderful childhood.

So, for as long as I can remember, the idea of death was drastically different than what all my friend's were.  I talked often of the places I'd been and the people buried there, and they thought it quite odd.  I certainly felt odd after reading their expressions and hearing their silence.  It didn't deter me from what I thought, though.  My heart still reached out to the remaining presence of the past, and a romance grew.  The motets sung in Norman or medieval cathedrals soaked into my bone marrow. They weren't just songs, they were a composer's voice reaching to me through dregs of time, and time to me was only a veil that could be seen through.

Of course, I did have my childhood fears, mostly of what the media had pushed into my mind.  This created the evil monsters that resided in hidden places, waiting. However, in my early teenage years, I experienced events that that thrust out that imaginary fear and replaced it with a much more terrifying reality : humans who have such a need to escape themselves that they escape even their humanity.  With this dramatic realization, the dark no longer represented places for monster's to hide.  The dark was a place where I could hide.  Thankfully, I had mostly associated dark with my ghosts.

 After that event, life set me apart from my peers.  I didn't want people, I wanted the grey and haunting scapes of Dunwich beach.  The somber colors of the sky and dunes were restful, the black, frozen ocean waves that came grinding in on the sharp, rocky shores was severe enough that it was able to strip me of my own severity.  Such peace!  I wished the feeling was tangible so I could grab it, grip it, bite into it and swallow it in great gulps.  I wanted to feel something so punishing and sharp scraping down my throat, harmonizing in physical pain what I felt in my mind. The wind would whip my  hair against my face like a slap.  I believed the spirits of the lost city beneath the water were trying to pound me into wakefulness.  I ached for that reality.

When home, I watched the sun set to dark.  It was anchoring.  Before I slept, I made sure I was surrounded by light. This was because should I wake from nightmares, it would sting my eyes and guide me back to where I was.

The need for the contrasts of light and dark was rooting quickly and so deeply into the fabric of my being.  Coupled with many weekends spent walking old abbeys, castle ruins and graveyards, the ghosts of my childhood began speaking in different tones.  They were the only presence I could understand.  The lines between us had fudged.  I didn't want them to be with me, I wanted to be with them.

They buffed the pain I didn't understand, and showed me it was loss I was experiencing. I was the broken spirit of what I once was, and the magnitude of that reality altered me. How does one cope with any disturbance that shoves us into a void of what once used to be? Our mechanical brains can't process when suddenly stripped of something it was supposed to take for granted.  There is memorial on repeat in the mind, there is the sickness of bitter sorrow and vicious regret in the heart.  In those places I had to somehow find consolation else I'd go mad.  Sometimes, I wonder if perhaps I did.  Regardless, consolation did come with those ghosts ever in my mind.

I looked for the ghosts in everything.  Where I found them most was in art.  Poetry, music, paintings, novels, film, architecture.  I began to find their dark places, and that was where I loved being with them the most.  Those dark places were often laced with the opium of romance. Couple that with my already romantic nature, a teenager's transforming hormones, and a host of other chemical unbalances, and all of me was lost in the need of a Gothic tortured soul to grasp onto my heart. The yearning for this was intense. A man, but not one of flesh and blood.  A secret, silent specter who could come and go from behind the veil to bring me peace.  There was no defined face, there was only the solidarity of a mind without rest.  I found peace in the dream.  Once I discovered putting pen to paper was beneficial to release this longing, I wrote endlessly.

I continued to write this release well into adulthood.  I suppose it was a search, really.

And so, with that last thought, I'll take you back to walking in the woods, just a few days ago.

It was into the near dark of the late evening. The trees are all silhouettes against the deep purple of the remaining sunset.  An owl began to call some distance away, as though the velvet color of the sky had a voice. It was one of the moments where magic really does become real, and I wonder if my dismissal of fairy tales is a farce.

As I pick up odds and ends for my art, I see the Snape ahead of me.  Just his form.  He looks off between the trees, and after my breath is caught in my throat at the beauty of him, he calls to the owl.  His voice is slight more tenor, though had I not seen him I would've thought I'd heard another bird.  His call is measured by the owl, somehow understood, and returned.  My skin is covered in goosebumps.  I listen as he waits, then calls back.

And that was the beginning of a long dialogue between man and what is wild in him, so much as it is a conversation between man and beast.  I'm still in awe of the conversation, several days later, as I was in the moments it happened.

Eventually, The Snape finalizes the communication with the owl's last call, waits a moment as he listens to the forest, then begins to walk ahead of me until he's disappeared around a grove of sycamores.

I have known for some time that He is that ghost who comes in and out of the void.  And, though that might sound dramatic to most people, he understands it.

That night I lay awake in the dark listening to the rain.  There was only the barest hint of moonlight in the overcast sky, but it was enough to outline his face.  His skin looked like the effigies I'd spoken to in my mind, pale and still as marble, even his mouth. I could hear his slight breathing.  He sensed my attention, and his hand reached for mine beneath the blankets.

It leaves me grateful that what the mind might crave may not be an illusion. It could be real.

     

And after the woods....

...clay, the clay, the clay.

It's becoming obsession.  Sleep is disturbed, the kitchen shows my lack of interest, and concept sketches are now an irritation.  

The woodland provided generously for creation, though so much of it was brittle because of the drought.  I'm going to use what I found despite it and pray that at least a bulk of what is used will stand a time test.  So, this new piece will probably end up more as run-through of what I'll more seriously create once I can get better medium. probably when the olive orchards are clipped back at the end of season I'll go hunting then and be able to work with more preservation in mind...which, from what I understand, will definitely take fresh clippings and glycerin.  Here's what waits for me now:

Looks pretty dried out, doesn't it? All of that will become a mane of hair.  Seeking bright stones next for eyes.  I'm thinking that each sculpture should have stones eyes that aid in expressing the piece.  It'll be wild looking, but I rather think that's the point.  The organic growth of art will be the focus of this series. 

Selfishly, I want several days with no responsibility except answering the call that keeps me up at night.  Finger's crossed, i'll be washing off clay up to my elbows tomorrow.