Saturday, October 24, 2009

Beauty Rises From the Ashes



An artist peers into the rubble of death and decay and glimpses what one less inured to such travesty cannot. He sees form, even intricate structure of great complexity, and ultimately, a singular, transcending beauty. This believer in what is not easily read by most senses that, in the swirl of visual chaos and stench of life's loss, renewed life will assuredly come to birth. With or without the mere mortal's attendance upon life's reemergence from the grave, this process is an unending cycle: life, death, renewal. The destruction of the painter's canvas, the writer's essay, or the composer's manuscript is not an untenable blow to the creator's genius. Whether the ensuing conflagration is by literal fire or that of a public's outrage over a body of work ahead of its time, the perceptive artist knows that the phoenix will arise resplendent from the ashes. Her song shall be heard. The hidden masterwork moldering away in a cemetery of a cellar long forgotten will be rediscovered, recopied and premiered before a humbled and contrite audience. The artist, now freed from earthly care and turmoil, observes among a once disbelieving public what he never ceased believing:


Beauty shines forth where the eyes of others have yet to fall. Beauty sings forth what their ears have yet to hear.