WHEN THEY TURNED the old territorial prison near Laramie, Wyoming, where I live, into a museum, curators filled its high-ceilinged kitchen with bright faux fruits and vegetables: carrots, apples, peppers, and big sweet onions. They strung artificial ham hocks from the ceiling as if to cure them in the sun, stacked the shelves along the wall with empty cans bearing old-fashioned labels for sweet corn, Winsom green beans, and Longwood Plantation’s syrup. On the old wooden sideboard: golden loaves of bread, plastic and shining. On the floor beneath the table: crates marked crackers and jam from Trabing Commercial Company, one of Laramie’s earliest businesses, established in 1869, just before the prison itself.
The idea of this diorama is, of course, to transport you back in time. This is how it once was, when the West was new and wild, when Butch Cassidy was hauled in in the back of the US Marshals’ coal-black wagon, spitting and swearing, to serve a two-year sentence for stealing a horse. When justice was clear, swift, and simple. But it’s an unconvincing kind of bounty: too much clean, green excess. And it feels especially hollow beside the bleak and narrow cells, where even through the layers of sandstone you can hear the wind whipping outside, a storm moving in.
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“Maybe a storm / is rolling at us dog-eared and panting,” writes John Blair in “Aphorism 17: The Grass Is Always Greener.”
Each day we hunt like grackles
through the fields for whatever the plows
have turned over, heads down
the world’s ripe belly open in its bloodless way.
Everywhere in this issue of Image, things are scraped, ripped, and scarred, torn up and torn open. If not the belly of the world, then “the broad belly of the sky” scratched by “carpals and vertebrae perched at wild angles” as Moses carts the remnants of Joseph, piled high, out of Egypt in Jessica de Koninck’s gorgeous grieving poem “Carrying the Bones.” Later in the issue, John Hendrix reviews Manu Larcenet’s graphic novel adaptation of The Road, a depiction of a ravaged planet, torn apart in minutes, where the “jagged ripples of [characters’] skin match the cracks of the fractured world around them.” In “Martyr and Maker,” painter Eric Aho reveals the “accidental cruciform” behind Zurbarán’s Martyrdom of Saint Serapion, its rough linen canvas stretched across a makeshift cross and affixed “with iron tacks not unlike the nails driven into Christ’s flesh.” Here, both flesh and fabric tear a little; something is ripped, and something is made. In so much rending, there’s both violence and the potential for grace. A rip is a wound—and also a place where brightness filters in. But the potential for light doesn’t mean the tearing doesn’t hurt.
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Lately I’ve been rereading David Rosenberg’s A Literary Bible, an interpretation of the Hebrew Bible I especially love. Maybe that explains why the things I noticed most in our fall pages were rainstorms, and prisons, and things rent and riven. In Rosenberg’s translation of Genesis, “rain spills on the land unceasing: forty days, forty nights.” And Joseph “lies there in prison” waiting for the pharaoh to dream. Joseph’s father fears he has been “torn limb from limb” by a wild animal. Later, David tears his clothes apart in despair, lies prostrate on the ground.
Centuries later still, in Destin, Florida, poet Christopher Childers writes of a sky “at war / convulsed with a dark charge far out of reach.” Everywhere, the stormy weather of suffering: in the atmosphere, in the body, in us and upon us.
At one a.m. in Arlene Quiyou Pena’s story “Islands,” Calvin Jones walks into a “fifteen-by-twenty-foot holding cell full of primarily Black and brown men packed on rows of steel benches.” A young immigrant in Brooklyn, he’s been taken into custody for three joints tucked among the cigarettes in his knapsack. “The odor of unwashed flesh” in the cell is “like rotten onions.” Reading the description, I think again of that immaculately curated prison kitchen in Wyoming, its onions never spoiling. A man in a denim jacket lies on the floor of Calvin’s cell, and I think of Joseph on the floor of that Egyptian jail, his many-colored coat long since gone from him. Across space and time, the weather of suffering: some of us so much less sheltered than others.
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My colleagues at Image will tell you that when I’m worked up—in passion or curiosity, frustration, amazement, sadness, or righteous indignation—I sometimes talk so loud and fast that my Zoom audio cuts out entirely. They have to say, Molly, hang on, you’re too much for your mic! It’s become something of a joke among our staff, but, really, loud has always struck me as the correct volume for the brutal, ecstatic exercise of being alive in the world. So much is happening that ought to move us to wailing and to rage, to rending our garments in grief: all this killing in pursuit of power and dominion, a staggering desire on the part of so many to make themselves safe at the expense of others, a propensity to look toward another person and fail to see ourselves reflected, to deny their humanity because it infuriates, baffles, or frightens us. And yet, this savage world is the same one that makes Ryan McIlvain’s nine-year-old son turn to him during a twilight walk and ask, guileless and grateful, “Why did Jesus make this night so beautiful?” Like I said, living: brutal, ecstatic, or both, depending on the weather.
As you can probably tell by now, I’ve always been compelled by the texture of the word weather, this term that conjures both gale-force winds and a cloudless expanse of gauze-blue sky. As a noun, it means at once the condition of the atmosphere and the “state or vicissitude of life or fortune.” As a verb, both to “undergo or endure the action of the elements” and “to bear up against and come safely through.” In other words, it means both to suffer and to survive. Said aloud, the word holds, too, the meanings of its homophone, whether, itself a conjunction of choice and fate, uncertainty and possibility. Weather, then, houses both the inevitability of pain and the promise of recovery, both damage and great beauty, agency and providence. I think about the word nearly every time I contemplate what it means to be a believer. The longer I work to live actively, imperfectly, as a person of faith, the more it strikes me as an exercise in holding this same wild catalog of things together, sometimes in harmony, often in roiling tension.
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In “This Pillar of Cloud,” essayist Claire Hanlon shepherds us from Genesis into Exodus, from Joseph’s confinement in the pharaoh’s prison to a landscape of plague: “the river that became blood, the frogs and gnats and flies, the livestock struck down, the boils upon the flesh of man and beast alike, the hail, the locusts, the darkness that lay upon the land for three days.” Interwoven with these biblical storms is the “towering monolith” of her husband’s addiction and abuse, her own questions about how to make sense of the shifting seasons of abundance and deprivation, how to make it out of the desert and away. The piece resists easy consolation—plagues do their harm even if they pass— but it does remind us that a pillar of cloud is not always a tornado ahead. This is the other thing weather has in common with belief: Both remind us that what we see is only part of the equation.
In our conversation for this issue, the writer Emily Bernard poignantly reminded me of Father Richard Rohr’s assertation that not all suffering leads to enlightenment, but there is no enlightenment without suffering. I feel sure, as she does, that he’s right, but the first part of the sentiment strikes me as just as crucial as the second; I’m wary of any theology that tries to yoke revelatory meaning to all pain, conscious of how quickly it becomes a convenient justification for excusing or ignoring torment and injustice. I distrust it for the same reason something in that reconstructed prison kitchen makes me shudder: It buffs what is fraught and scarred and weighty to an empty shine. It’s this thought that makes me return to Eric Aho’s description of Zurbarán’s saint. Aho tells us that the linseed oil used as a binding agent in the portrait’s paint contains a form of glycerol identical to a compound in our bodies; there’s a truly “human element” to what makes the painting come together. Its luminosity is lifelike, fleshed. It briefly “holds the coming darkness at bay.” This is, I think, what all good art does, in its textured complexity: evokes and enacts the weather of living, acknowledging, and so in some little measure attenuating, our inevitable pain.
It’s almost too perfect that it’s storming outside as I finish these sentences, raining in the fierce, sudden way of the high desert. The water is half hail, and it makes a sound like stones hurled against the roof, chaotic and loud enough to wake my dog from his dreaming. The ice might leave divots in the ground, downed trees or branches, but any other evidence of the storm will be gone by daybreak. The thing about weather is that it passes. And it is a messy kind of benediction if, in the morning, the sunlight filters through the space the fallen trees have made.
Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash
