I’M ALWAYS LOOKING AROUND FOR OMENS. In the downy woodpecker I glimpse taking off from the tall blue spruce outside my study window like a flash of television static, the cluster of crows descending on the dumpster in the neighboring cul-de-sac, the red of the sky in the morning or at night. “Everything is proof / of something,” writes Constance Hansen in her poem “Gnosis,” lines that felt truer to me each time I read them as we prepared this issue of Image: the woodpecker’s disappearance is proof of an elsewhere beyond my snow-drenched street; the way the branches keep swaying and shifting in its absence “evidence[s] the wind.” And surely both bird and branches hold inside them some promise of how the future will unfold, all that motion signaling change, even if I can’t make out its shape.
By the same token, I have a habit of constructing makeshift altars wherever I am: a tiny porcelain dish my best friend brought back from a yard sale in France, a battered tin votive and a Safeway carnation. Or a little pile of pennies, a beeswax taper, and a medal of Saint Francis de Sales. Gathered beside me on the desk right now are a small brass lion, a button illustrated with a hummingbird, my grandfather’s old Zippo lighter, and a jasmine blossom candle in a glass jar. In hunting for omens and assembling altars there are versions of the same instinct: to make what is intangible somehow tangible, what is unknowable somehow known, to strike a match and render what is cloaked in darkness subject to light.
“Light a candle. Open a door” begins Katharine Coles’s poem “Advent.” It is both a command and invocation, ushering the reader into a place of mystery. Lit candles abound throughout our winter issue: In Jessica Gigot’s “October” one shines in the belly of a jack-o’-lantern, rendering it a masterpiece, and in the opening line of Aaron Fagan’s “Overlooking the Desert” “candles burn low” and “thoughts grow clear,” the little flames illuminating both an interior and exterior landscape before the sun rises. In Katherine Zlabek’s essay “Quiet Nights in Paris” it’s a boy who “arrive[s] at [her] door each night like a lit candle,” upright and expectant, puncturing a season of loneliness and suffering with late-night walks and quiet conversations about the stars above that will echo through her life for years.
In the winter, it gets dark early. And this winter in particular, when the world is freighted with suffering, violence, and fear, when we continue to fail one another in so many ways, that dark can feel especially hard to puncture. But I’m moved to find, in so much of the writing and art constellated in this issue, an illustration of just how much light the smallest flames provide.
This is an issue of long marriages and enduring fascinations, of repeated domestic sacraments and abiding desire. Of woodlands and gardens spilling over walls, populated by fifteen hundred different varieties of plants. It’s an issue of letters, photographs, and papers kept for years, like the long-hidden envelope in Ana Menéndez’s novel excerpt, bearing an old address in a grandmother’s script, and Jehanne Dubrow’s “scraps that carry the name of God.” This is art about what lasts, and how we manage to survive, for as long as we are here with it.
In his essay “Married Sex,” Dan Leach offers us a portrait of a relationship characterized by fierce, continuing intimacy, one sustained not by grandeur or flawless synchron-ization but by humor and conversation. That, and fifteen years of surprising, generous carnality both ongoing and recalled, washed in the wobbling florescence “of a forty-dollar motel with a neon boot for a sign.” He describes an early photograph of his wife that he keeps folded in his wallet:
The angle (low and heroic) captures your profile as you recline on a porch in Santa Monica. You slouch in a deck chair, afloat on the backing haze of lemon trees. The angled jaw, the splayed hair—here is that woman who is keenly aware of the camera’s presence. Here is the smile that says, “I know how a thing endures.”
The young woman in that sunny photo is an oracle, prophesizing the long marriage to come. The photograph itself is both a kind of offering to the reader—look, here, share this happiness among the lemon trees—and an oblation to protect against the way time passes: inevitable suffering, inescapable change. Later in Leach’s essay, the same young woman presses stop on a film they’ve made of themselves in bed together. She turns back toward her husband and prophesizes again: “This one’s going to break your heart.” And, of course, she’s right.
When I told you this was an issue full of light, I didn’t mean to suggest anything easy in either its joy or its devotion. The domestic sacraments in “Parable of the Bromeliad in Bloom” are “the sacrament // of leaving groceries on the deck / for the virus to die,” and the
…sacrament of
bleached exteriors of jars, boxes,
and cans, of strip-and-showeras soon as we came from anywhere,
clothes cast to the basement, heapedlike the flayed flesh of saints
on the concrete floor.
They’re the sacraments of fear, of fright, of partial, ever-changing information, of desperately trying to keep people safe. But, like any sacrament, they signal devotion. A willingness to labor to protect something worth saving: a life, a love.
The gardens growing throughout these pages aren’t paradise. There’s no Eden here, just the ground we’ve had to try to cultivate after the fall, which holds both the winding paths of the flower garden where Michele Issel welcomes a wide array of visitors and the sculpture garden where Serkan Görkemli is subjected to a stranger’s xenophobic vitriol. Reading the two essays, I imagine a woodpecker flying between them, then a murder of crows.
In every class I’ve ever taught, it’s become a joke among my students that my reading lists are famously depressing. “This story made me cry again!” complained a
sophomore, lifting her coffee in protest at the end of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter.” As a joke, my graduate students once made a bingo card of my greatest hits, sources of tragedy laid out on a grid: Divorce. Medical Trauma. Mass Shooting. Heroin Addiction. Environmental Devastation. In one class they ticked them off: “This essay has four!” The truth is, these things make up so much of the fabric of our world. This is when I would remind my students that fire burns while it glows. In Maja Lukic’s “Black Candle,” the speaker accidentally drags her hair through a candle flame and thinks of another kind of fire: “In two days my father’s body / will be ashes; in two days / we burn the last of childhood.”
Flesh, hair, wood, paper with our grandmother’s uncertain script across the back, all of it burns. It lasts only when we protect it and even then, not forever. In “Greening Wisdom,” painter Josh Tiessen quotes eco-theologian Steven Bouma-Prediger: “The virtue of wisdom is shot through with an abiding awareness of life’s precariousness.” This is part of why I always light a candle when I’m fashioning an altar: In one gesture, brightness and destruction; something instantiated, something lost.
In my initial message as Image’s editor in chief, I wrote that art is a critical part of the way we collectively steward and shape our world, unfathomable and broken as it can sometimes feel. And that there’s never been a more crucial time for Image’s rigorous, inclusive, delicate, and determinedly multifaith commitment to cultivating space for devotion, wonder, and religion in the literary landscape. I believe this, not because I labor under any delusion that art alone is enough of an offering to save us—to combat hatred, or stall rising sea levels, or stop a bullet—but because I have faith in the importance of what Jane Zwart calls the “undefended heart,” a life lived with one’s feelings turned up to full volume. In her essay, Zwart quotes Ross Gay, who writes, “Sharing what we love is dangerous, it is vulnerable, it is like baring your neck, or your belly, and reveals that, in some ways, we are all uncommonly tender.” In this moment, I can hardly think of anything more necessary, or more difficult, than the courage of such tenderness, the refusal to calcify into something impenetrable, incapable of being moved.
Art is a record of what we’ve valued, preserved, engaged with, and illuminated, the corners where we’ve carefully tilted our candle flame in order to see what’s hidden in the shadows. And in this way, it’s also an omen of where we’re headed, the shapes our survival will take. “Maybe / Comfort has arrived. Maybe Not” ends “Advent,” the final poem in this issue. I don’t know where these pages will find you this Advent season, what birds, if any, are waiting outside your window. But I know I’m grateful to make you this offering, of where we’ve been, of what’s to come.
Learn more about Molly McCully Brown, Image’s new editor in chief.
Photo by David Monje on Unsplash
