Art Wins in the End: The Ooey Gooey in Exile

I once heard someone say “Art wins in the end.”…that after rings, and veils, and birth… after maelstrom, and shrouds, and death …. that the words that remain most true are those we remember in our skin, the stories that give us the sights and sounds of a younger us, that stir the cavernous quiet of our souls below the surface.

There is a part of me that thinks this is the stuff of bad marketing, poetic fluff of the kind of romantic who never lived up to his predecessors, Keats and Shelly…but I can never quit escape that I might be wrong; that the way a thing appears may only be the smallest corner of a much larger picture.…

When this happens it is like being stirred by a touch of something while in deep sleep. These are the times when the winds of remembrance blow so deeply, past the hustle and bustle of the day, past the many distractions of the hour that they rustle the surface of the deep places in our hearts, where we know there is meaning, and not just for us, but our parents, and grandparents, and ancient relatives … It is here we know that beauty and sorrow are flip sides of the same coin reminding us of what might be and presently what is lost. 

Somewhere in the tree, or upon the form of the clouds, or within the creases of the face of the old men is a truth we cannot put to words, a truth that words can only point to. We see it in faces, we remember it in the warmth of the sun on our skin near dusk, we feel it in the wind and the smell of the seasons. But we cannot write the thing, nor paint it, nor give it form; for none of these things are the thing we seek....they too are only a remembrance of the still deeper thing. 

In putting to words the tremble upon the flesh of a pond, the green and gray beauty of a bud in spring, the sky still wearing its winter ash...I feel we are attempting to bringing forth a truth that is somehow more raw. These point to a something that we have not been able to grasp, a something that has been hovering over our heads, somewhere just off screen, just beyond the horizon this whole time.... this thing we all wonder at and see glimpses of in art. We know it is there, even if we can never hold it, nor ever let it go. It holds us nonetheless.

They leak past our eyes, the images play cognate to cerebral hemorrhages. The word is no longer a word the paint is paint no longer. They becomes grenades of sensory experience a blaze of historical tangency. It leaks all over inside... faces and feelings, floods of long ago and fountains of last week, unannounced and unattended, they rush upon you giving form and fortitude to an idea.

This thing lets all its ooey gooey insides glub down the back of your eyes and your vocal chords, it paints the colors of a life lived with its drips, drops, and glops, of the canvas of the heart....

And then we spill the ink, and spread the oil, and change the ribbon all to remember it again …to try to feel the soft breath that came through the words…the same breath that let us remember humanity at the beginning, that gave us not a remembrance, but the real of it, the flesh and blood and spirit that now calls our for reunion with the living, the beautiful in exile.