Archive for December, 2011
These are the words I find hidden in Martin Abel‘s sketches, lines of prose where he believed only pencil lay. He posted this drawing and, per usual, I immediately connected with it and saw through to the universe he creates when he composes images upon a page. I just thought I would share a little example of how our collaborative efforts usually begin: with my overwhelming love of his work.
Though the plucked flowers which adorned her flowing hair were bright with spring’s nectar, her heart grew cold, her summer soul seizing sickly, wrought with the frost of winter death. Some would insist it was but a melancholy autumn mourning, but she knew far better; one’s spirit could not survive such loss, would not. A thousand years and a thousand tears could not wash that which the great waters have taken away. The sea, in its crushing depths, holds strong those it grips; such drowned souls do not wander afterlife shores.
She turned to the heavens, heavy with dejection. The stars shimmered. Were those who were lost amongst their number free to swim through the dark expanse? She believed they must. Did they move with light speed to return to the lovers whom they left behind, brilliant comets with homebound intent? How could they not? Burning suns, millions upon millions of lifetimes away, their lights were not impeded. Then too must their explorers, incorporeal as they may be, catch those pulsing rays and slip once more into wives’ and husbands’ embraces.
But not hers.
Sailors, the ones who dreamt close but deep, the ones who shunned the stars for the sea, played lottery with their lives. They teetered upon and peered into Hades’ abyss, the sort of darkness through which came no light, from above or below, a hellish landscape of lost souls, clutched forever by the greatest of weights. And so he was gone forever, his sight never to fall upon her eyes again.
Those same eyes wept powerless tears; powerless to extract her grief, powerless to return her loss, powerless as brackish brine against an ocean’s salty current. And yet light poured upon her face, stars running down her cheeks, a spirit whose light would never traverse the divide which so split her soul.
The ocean roared. Within its growl came the cries of countless souls, and she heard. She screamed back, the wailing sound of her grief all she had, a foghorn cry to reach where no lighthouse fire ever could.
She wept, and wept, and wept. Even in her unending misery, she was thankful to have at least this. God pity the souls who ventured nowhere, whose whole essence lay buried beneath six feet of shovel-packed dirt. No light, no sound, no spirit could bridge that regretful gap.
It was this knowledge, and this knowledge alone, that kept her blood from freezing in the cold night air, still warm within her veins, returning to a heart which would ache for a time longer than memory could ever hold.
A poem is the breath that was taken away, and a short story but poetry spun and woven into prose. A novel is a puzzle whose pieces are stitched of short stories’ fabric, and the great works of literature are those whose pages hold many novels, told all at once, a beautiful, perfect chaos composed of countless breaths, each ringing true and pure and profound. And thus is life returned to us, captured in timeless essence and bound by something stronger than book glue, more powerful than pressed ink: the need to share that which overwhelms the heart and overflows the soul. This is why we write, because we long back for the breath that the universe has taken from us. This is why we read, in the hope that another has found the same.
