Echoes in a Hollow Space

Not to be confused with these guys.

No, I’m talking about the guy who painted this:

Madonna and Child with Two Angels 

I became enamored of this painting when studying Art History the year before I went to Europe for the first time—so enamored, in fact, with all the luscious Italian Renaissance art that I had to go see it in person. I was poor as dirt, but I bent all my will towards saving money to go. I quit Santa Monica College and worked full time for a year before applying to UCLA. My mother was freaked that I wouldn’t finish school, but I knew I would once I got a little traveling out of my system. Ostensibly, I was saving towards the Big U (and I did a little of that), but really I was hellbent on going to Europe. And I went. And then I came back and settled in to working part time to put myself through college. I did earn my BA, much to my mother’s relief.

But, oh! The sights I saw before that. I saw the original of my beloved Lippi and many another wonderful painting at the Uffizi in Florence. And the David at the Academia! Ghiberti’s doors! So much, so much. I was swimming in honey beneath the Tuscan sun.

A few days later I was in Assisi going through the basilica to see the Giotto and Lorenzetti frescoes, back before the basilica and the frescoes got ruined in an earthquake. I was going through the Upper Church and there was an open door leading to a outdoor balcony. It was a glorious, sunny fall day and this balcony offered staggering views of the rolling Umbrian countryside so I was naturally drawn outside. The monks probably counted on luring the tourists like that on beautiful days because they’d set up a little gift shop out there. I found this and had to have it:

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Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

The last few days I've been reading, The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination by Patrick Harpur, a wonderful, chewy book running the gamut from shamanism to Levi-Strauss to depth psychology to alchemy to the soul of the world...and so much more. I love it because it makes my mind spin with ideas. Today it helped crystalize something that's been rattling around in my psyche for weeks.

Today I read this:

The brokenhearted woman dreams for years that her faithless lover: has returned, has rejected her again, is tender and loving, is cruel and mocking, has married another, is married to her and they have four children....Dreams enact the unrealized possibilities of our actual lives. As they unfold, the heartbroken woman begins to see that the variant of the "myth" she actually lived was not the only one, or even the real one—it was simply the literal one. And all the different roles she played in dreams, and all the different feelings she experienced, are equally "her" within the totality of a psyche which treats our lives impersonally as if they were myths.

"Consolatory fiction," it occurs to me, isn't just consolatory. It's an enactment of possible outcomes, alternate universes in which things did turn out right; a place where the myths of our lives enact themselves in different ways. That's one of the reasons they have such a powerful draw to so many people, the idea that somewhere, in some universe, we might have better lives, truer lives, more happily-ever-after lives.

I don't think there's a damned thing wrong with wanting that consolation. It isn't a false hope, after all, because some people do enact these lives. Whether the archetype of the questing hero or the archetype of the perfect romance, they are all valid human aspirations, and deserve their place at the table.

The world is a damned hard place that hands out hope sparingly to most of us. Why should I read fiction that crushes it further? Because it's supposed to be good for me? Is the myth of Sisyphus more enriching to me because he's doomed to perpetually roll an immense boulder up a steep hill only to lose his footing halfway and have it roll to the bottom again? What about immortal Prometheus, chained to a rock, cursed for eternity to have his imperishable innards regrow and be ripped out by Zeus' vengeful eagle time and again? Does that tell me any more about the human condition than the myth of two people, soul mates, who find one another after years of travail and missed opportunities?

I say that it doesn't. Sisyphus and Prometheus may certainly be part of the way we enact our daily lives, but they don't exclude the miraculous possibility that some day, somehow, something may work out according to our heart's fondest desire.



*Robert Louis Stevenson.