“Angel’s Reach“- At the West End Gallery
How fathomless the mystery of the Unseen is! We cannot plumb its depths with our feeble senses – with eyes which cannot see the infinitely small or the infinitely great, nor anything too close or too distant, such as the beings who live on a star or the creatures which live in a drop of water… with ears that deceive us by converting vibrations of the air into tones that we can hear, for they are sprites which miraculously change movement into sound, a metamorphosis which gives birth to harmonies which turn the silent agitation of nature into song… with our sense of smell, which is poorer than any dog’s… with our sense of taste, which is barely capable of detecting the age of a wine!
Ah! If we had other senses which would work other miracles for us, how many more things would we not discover around us!
― Guy de Maupassant, The Horla
I had someone recently ask me at the West End Gallery about this sky comprised of slashes of paint colors. Why was it painted that way and what did it represent?
I explained as best I could about the fact that there is there are forces always swirling around us, unseen and undetected by our feeble senses. The sky here just gives them a bit of form.
This always reminds me of the final story written by Guy de Maupassant, the great innovator of the short story. Titled The Horla, it is a tale of horror about an alien being — an invisible organism, actually– called the Horla that comes to earth with the intention of subjugating the human race. This unseen invader has the power to enter and sway the minds of its victims.
The narrator of the story describes his emotions, the vast emptiness that overtakes him, as he realizes what is happening and his powerlessness in the face of the threat.
It’s a story that certainly echoes these times. We are beset by a virus we cannot see and are hampered in our efforts to combat it by those who manipulate the minds and opinions with innumerable conspiracy theories for the purpose of obtaining money and power. Perhaps Rupert Murdoch is the Horla?
There’s another passage for the story that adds to the drama of these unseen forces:
I told myself: ‘I am surrounded by unknown things.’ I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?
This idea that emptiness does not exist is fascinating to me and echoes what I see in this sky. My idea of what might be contained in that emptiness is much more benign than the terror of the Horla, of unseen forces wanting to gain control of our world or destroy us. I would like to think that there are new dimensions and valuable energy swirling around us at all times if we could somehow detect them.
That might be more of a hope than any glimmer of the reality of what is really contained within the emptiness.
Maybe empty is just empty, a void that we fill with our highest hopes or darkest fears.
I don’t know.
My mantra.
I need to send some time looking at this painting so I can fill my emptiness with those higher hopes before darkness and fear rushes in to fill the void.
Hope it does the trick…
Redtree Times 