Redtree Times

Affirmation— Now at Principle Gallery

It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organized dust — ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable, and life is more than a dream.

–Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden (1796)

I came across the paragraph above recently and it really spoke to questions that often run through my mind. It’s from a letter from Mary Wollstonecraft, a renowned writer in the last half of the 18th century and the mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Her intellectual career as a writer and philosopher was a relatively rare thing in that era and her most significant writing, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, was perhaps the first piece of feminist writing, paving the way for the much wider movement that was to come.

Are we but organized dust? Is there something that remains alive in some form after our current carcasses have run their course?

What is that thing, that force, that animates us?

The religious among us will say it is the holy spirit, the soul. Maybe it is some great natural electrical spark, something akin to the force used to animate the creature in the younger Wollstonecraft’s Frankenstein. Or maybe it is some form of energy that we just don’t have the ability to discern with our meager faculties.

Or maybe it is as she hoped against, that we are all just players in a far-flung dream, ready to disperse instantly on the wakening of whoever or whatever dreams us into being.

Who knows?

I certainly don’t. I guess the takeaway is that we’re still here, one way or the other. If we be dreams or dust, let us live our lives as though they are our one opportunity to experience this world.

The painting shown here is Affirmation and is 10″ by 25″ on canvas. It is included in my solo exhibit Continuum: The Red Tree at 25 which is hanging now at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria VA. Time to see it is limited as the show ends later this week.