everything shimmers
“It’s so hard to forget pain,” Chuck Palahniuk says, “but it’s even harder to remember sweetness.” Hurt, harm, heartbreak, anger, and rage are the loudest voices in the room. They always have been. Maybe they always will be. How could anything kind or docile ever stand a chance to be heard, much less remembered?
Joy comes in small waves, In tiny sparks and little bursts. In flashes of glimmering refractions. A play of light and dust and magic. Sunshine through open windows. Cool breezes. The taste of salt and sweat and skin. The smell of grass, and earth, and rain. It's something ephemeral. Something vaporous. Something fleeting. Something that fades.
"[T]hese moments," Nick Cave says, "so quickly dismissed are the radiant points...that pierce the gloom." But only if we let them. Only if we notice. Only if we see. Only if we can embrace them and hold on to them in some small way.
The task of the artist is to notice. To look around the world and see what’s worth noting. To point at it. To capture it. A passing moment. Something seemingly insignificant. To frame it in sentences, sounds, colors, textures, shapes, and words. To put it on display. To stare at it in wonder. To ask others to stand and wonder with you.
When that happens, something changes. The world finds a focus. Everything becomes more visible. Every moment, more real. Everything shimmers with a mixture of strangeness and familiarity. With recognition and the uncanny.
It’s not that everything becomes holy or sacred, it’s that you discover it already was, that it always is.
P.S. ICAD Day 62-65
Really love we wrapped our words in dreams; your use of the white space is quite nice. And I so appreciate your thoughts, too.
Beautiful! Words and collages!