mythopoetics, Image & Psyche, an Essay

For The Weak and Malformed Artist -stephanie pope
featuring the poetry of Richard Lance Williams

...she chose to hear it...as an approach to the mystery...as a sign of respect...as a kindness...for the weak & malformed instances...
                 from  as if from why we crawled ashore - Richard Lance Williams

  ...how the horrible draws us in...
                 from   quickly the dream in - Richard Lance Williams

Someone near me remembers. She remembers walking the Native American Arts Fair sponsored annually by the Heard Museum of Phoenix, Arizona. She was walking. And, as she walked, she began contemplating a paper she was writing just then on Psyche & Nature. She found herself walking through a field filled with seasons of embodied natures living in such worlds as only art can render, worlds... living beyond words. Someone walking with her just then remembers how she began musing over embodied psyche in nature and with such nature remembering itself again in art, she meandered through this landscape thinking, "What is the proper way to approach such wildness and such places?"

Because she still remembers this, I, too can remember how her eye caught in its corner a landscape painting as tired legs rounded a sharp corner where there were no more spaces for resting anything, no more room for objects without subjects of their own. Someone had a subject of her own but no identity in which to go in or to come through...but, she chose to hear just then through an approach to the mystery. That's why the painting startled her and it is in that moment she sharpened while still in the sudden rounding of that corner.

The artist was a young woman. She had been through things. You wouldn't know it to see her. She painted a big scene. She painted a bright scene. You wouldn't know such darkness lived there off-hand. The figures were small within the frame. It was a memory she painted...of a horse & a wee girl. The young child was on her knees. Her head was bowed. She was offering the horse that towered above her a gift of apple. It was an approach to the mystery. Hers. It was a sign of respect. Her hands tremble still.

She told me horses have always frightened her. This horse she painted was her horse. A grandparent had given it to her. All hers. And she was afraid of what belonged to her. The horse came to her many times over her young life. When she faced violence in marriage and drug addiction and poverty and prostitution and when in the midst of all this, motherhood, each and every time the horse came to  her. It wouldn't leave her. Not once. Like a poetic language with a taste for its own symbolic order, it penetrated her and threatened her very existence. That is, until she painted it. For not until she worked it out in her art did she face within her psyche what it was that shadowed her and haunted the landscape of her own flesh. The painting itself let her face and gift to the horse-spirit the gift that was hers to give.

She was too young to have known so deeply such a thing. And I, much older than she, was only just then working such logic through. We were two (rough) women sharing between us a respect for a kindness offered us each in a weak and malformed instance that must have recognized now in each other the pervasive emptiness that encompassed us both. Of course, this now is only a story someone is telling...
    (...maybe someone following the scent of that apple!)