Naked under the Sky

  “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth; it is the truth that hides that there is none.

The simulacrum is true.”

Ecclesiastes

 

Struck by the revelation from the one he believed to be his friend — humiliated, laid low, as though a poet touched by a tongue of fire — Ignatius rises and begins to declaim:
Man, in his lucid knowledge, flees the law of nature,
Naked beneath the sky, unbridled, boundless, without guide;
Elusive spirit devoured by his own striving,
He seeks the light of day, yet slips back into shadow.
For his being hangs, trembling and alone,
Between shadow and flame where the earth breathes.
The capital awakens, shadow glimmers sharp;
Pillars, like bones rising in the frost,
Bear the whole edifice, their opaline mass
Half-concealing the heart whose soul has crumbled.
I glimpse, quivering beneath this shroud of dread,
Fragments of a life unfurling its past:
Threads of memory woven in narrow mesh,
Where wind stirs the trembling dust of forgetting.
Ropes are there — taut, white, trembling —
Vibrating with each assault of breath and time.
They hold the world in fragile embrace.
Should they yield, all falls — light and burden collapse together.
Lucian, impressed, takes notes and sketches in silence… this past so vastly surpassed…
– It is astonishing to see how far a human being may transcend himself. Will Ignatius ever learn to bind his tongue to his hand… to stand again without the shifting sands of his tormented mind? Well then, let us be humble…
He clings still, you see it… he wants to hold, endure, take root…
He has yet to learn how to pass through.
Ignatius has calmed. He remains there, eyes half-closed. Who could imagine what, in his mind, merely passes through… never to be remembered… yet appears suddenly in his drawings…
– You see, Ignatius, the world too passes.
But there are passages that create meaning. Every time someone speaks, looks, remembers, loves… or draws, he creates a passage. He links what would otherwise remain apart.
And that, I believe, is what it is to be alive. A bridge, perhaps, between two shores that never entirely meet…
Those two shores may be you — the one who is here, and the one who draws…
Each brings to the other what he knows — and what the other ignores — until the process reverses…
As it happens, I know the author of the drawings you purchased and brought into this office… and the illegible signature upon them is none other than your own…
for none but you can best depict what remains you… in shadow.