The Glimmer of the Other

Every year, my husband and I trek to a local arts festival. We go mostly for the art and a little bit for the funnel cake and lemon ice. Booths line Cottonwood Park. Dogs sniff at dropped pieces of popcorn. Artists stray from their tents to neighboring ones to discuss techniques or the rigors of living from festival to festival or their favorite beer.

My husband stroll down the pathways named for famous artists--Picasso, Matisse, Rembrandt. Our fingers trace the baskets half-carved from walnut wood, half-weaved with bamboo. Our eyes linger on a painting of a dream-like hippopotamus in tap shoes.

But one particular station stays with me. The artist photographed mundane, even dead, objects--weeds, grass, dead branches. He zoomed in until you could barely identify the original subject. Before he printed his photographs, he prepared the canvas by painting it with a glimmery, shining substance. When you viewed the dead and mundane, the glimmer of the other shone through, giving the ordinary something beautiful and extraordinary, imparting something of the essence of life.

This photographer's art didn't take anything away from the original objects. The objects didn't disappear in the glimmer, nor did they become the glimmer. The objects rose above their previous mundane, dead selves because the artist imparted this in them.

Or, as C.S. Lewis put it, the more we lose ourselves in Christ, "the more truly ourselves we become . . . Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in" (Mere Christianity, p. 189-90).

As artists--writers, musicians, painters, actors--we seek to understand and portray what it means to be human. We muck through the despair, pain, and sorrow of death in all its forms. We explore the mundanity. But sometimes we see the glimmer of the Other painted on the canvas, shining through, lending his life and hope to otherwise dismal, ordinary subjects.

This is what I seek in my stories, those moments when the glimmer of the Other shimmers through the dirth and banality of everyday life, lending the daily a meaning beyond itself and yet immanent. It does not abandon the physical, the commonplace, the usual, but sneaks in an eschatological hope that hints at the fullness of the material, or everyday materials.

In him, there is life.

Heather A. Goodman spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about things like how to escape the Mafia, how to get rid of dead bodies, and how to escape a basement imprisonment. But she also knits, reads, plays piano (albeit in minor keys whenever she gets the chance), and breaks into song and dance (often without warning). And she blogs.

Comments

[Jeanne Damoff]

Thank God for the glimmer. Thank you for the reminder to look for Him.

Love, Jeanne

[Madison Richards]

I love this Heather. It is so much the essence of creativity, because although we as artists put in the mundane, He is the glimmer - the Other... and because he is painted on our canvas beforehand, what shines through when we put in our ordinary shines through as extraordinary...

Awesome post!