Slats of Light

My partner and I are having our rotting back deck replaced. Right now, in the interim, you can peer through the cross-beams up to the sky. What that means is that the morning sun penetrates through those slats, warming and exposing an area beneath the deck otherwise untouched by light.

It is a sacred envelop of time. I feel great joy sitting in these bands of light, practicing my songs. This won’t last long but the memory of being touched by light in this underworld space will not be forgotten.

The rhythmic, angled pattern of light and dark stripes is thrilling. It is a masterpiece frieze the likes of Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew or Léger’s Three Women :

Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1600

Fernand Léger, Three Women, 1921

Also, clearly, Picasso’s Guernica, with the added bonus of a bald light bulb, atop a pyramid of tonal, geometric shapes:

Picasso, Guernica, 1937

I love the idea of letting light into a place in your life that isn’t usually touched. To expose it, to sit in it, to warm your bones in it. To write new songs in it.

This unexpected gift is a call a for a deep healing and a re-building of inner strength. These shards of light and dark will be useful to us, will help us move with integrity towards our next chapter.

Enter Autumn.

Charlene Fix has a poem called Persephone and the Light. I read this poem to my students as we study Value and Design. In Fix’s poem, Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld, builds a stairway of light-and-dark slats to climb up out of the root cellar each Spring.

* * *

She opens blinds and basks

in bands of light falling on the bed-

dark, bright; dark, bright; dark, bright.

In a rush she sees the risen pattern

of brocade, the gold and emerald

threads, the hairy roots that dangle

overhead. She pulls cords in every

room, shifts slats. Alas for her

committed and conflicted heart,

her former world beckons her back.

She closes blinds when he returns

from his hard day of dooming

knowing he’s allergic to light,

but next day opens them again,

and next, until the lines of light

form steps, and she climbs out.

* * *

The contrast of light and dark become the very tools for movement and growth. These shards can be rearranged and seen anew, building an architecture of meaningful images— new spaces to inhabit.

It is no surprise that this gift arrives as I prepare my Fall teaching outline.

The light through the deck is also a lesson in process:

That often the opening that reveals itself comes from within the journey itself, as an unexpected twist that inaugurates a newly illuminated path.

Yesterday, the iron railing was removed and set-aside in the garden.

I adore this temporary, physical and decorative boundary. I love the parsing-out and dividing of the space into new “rooms” and distinctions. I love how my mannequin legs, on the other side of this railing, now appear in an altered state of proximity.

There is so much to see. So much to notice and learn from in the small daily changes around us. Life, as in Art, is a deep and meaningful process of witnessing and participating in this grand choreography of moving parts.

I am so thankful to be a part of it all.

Persephone, painted wood and screws, 2020.