Part 2: 

He had been assailed and he was weakened from his former state of strength and pride and dignity. He was much changed. In fact, he had lost his way. When he looked across the landscape, he saw the desert sands and the rocky crags of a far-stretching waste land, devoid of the green sap of life and the variegated coloration that comes with God’s bow in the sky that promises life, not death. And he longed for the damp gust of wind that foretells the approach of generating rain. His mistress was out there somewhere, and he was on a quest to rediscover her whereabouts. Without seeing her, without feeling her presence, life was an empty cup. The Grail had been emptied of the life force; the sacrificial blood that quenches the thirst of the languishing warrior had dried up. As a knight, he had followed the code of truth and purity and justice as Arthur had required; Arthur had proclaimed,

I made them lay their hands in mine and swear
To reverence the King, as if he were
Their conscience, and their conscience as their King
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To honor his own word as if his God's,
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And worship her by years of noble deeds,
Until they won her.

But constant battle with the evil monsters and giants and slimy and hirsute beasts that plagued had sapped him of his strength. The battles had been bloody and hard and finally the accumulation of contests had so enervated him that he could barely any longer lift his arm in protest at their ignoble purposes: to suck the life out, to beat down, to prevaricate, to betray, to cheapen, to defile. They were the same old adversaries in new guises; they went by such names now as Corporate Power, Politics of Values Control in the Name of Freedom, Consumerism, Mindless TV Programming, Education for Profit, Racial and Class Pride, Sexual Predation,  Pollution of  Nature (with its henchmen Plastic, Chemical Waste, Planned Obsolescence, Synthetic Food, and Species Annihilation), and the fiercest of them all, Murder in the Name of Religion or Patriotism. The evil forces held sway, but he knew that somewhere his mistress was still alive, the one maiden for whom he had always done his noble deeds and that if she could be once again given her due respect, the world could be returned to sanity and humanity; the world could be healed. Her name was Art, and she was a Queen of rare device and power, attended by her gentle and humble handmaidens Beauty, Delight, Order, Imagination, and Peace. Beauteous though they were, they and their mistress were not weak. They wielded great power, but only when adored. He knew she was still alive; he knew if he could find her, he could believe that renovation, reconciliation, regeneration were possible, not only within his weakened soul but also in the world at large. 

And so he wandered in search of the place where she had been driven, but which would surely be a sacred place from which she could reach out, a new Delphi where the prophetess would prognosticate, diagnose, and heal. Though she held the key to the releasing of all the sins and sicknesses to which the majority is prone, this Queen rarely sought the places where the majority ruled. Sometimes, they sought her and even imprisoned her, but though they dirtied her gown or besmirched her ravishing cheek, her refined spiritual essence shone through their attempts to clothe her meretriciously. She cared not about the money or the prestige, and when she could, she escaped to places where she could be her self, unencumbered by designs to use her for selfish motives. She and her devotees and her defenders must be pure of spirit. In her presence, all egoism fades and in its stead comes a silent knowledge of the reality of the good.

He searched across the world and in many towns and places where she supposedly lived, and he sometimes actually glimpsed her, and undoubtedly, missed her, though she was there, because of the disguises she was sometimes forced to wear. He himself had tried to capture her, but he found himself seduced by the guileful temptress known as Reputation. Nevertheless, he knew her guiding spirit was helping him to chart his course to the fixed star of her purpose: to assist humanity. She was always there helping to sustain him despite his sometimes flagging strength and clouded will in the fight against her many formidable enemies. 

And then one day, he knew he was in her presence. It was in a town called Floyd, off the beaten track of the world, where she had taken up residence. Spiritual Beings are sometimes associated with out of the way places or with simple professions. She was like Zeus taking the form of a mortal and visiting Baucis and Philemon, somewhere in the countryside and not initially identifying himself. Or Gawain starting his career as a kitchen knave. Or like Jesus being born in a manger in Bethlehem and when older, working in his father’s carpenter’s shop. 

She did not appear directly to him. He knew that only the very special few would have a pure enough existence to glimpse her complete refulgence, but she presented herself to him nonetheless, and he knew it was she. She spoke to him through the presence of five women who spoke of her insistently and strongly in the very short space of one street. 

The walk started out more or less purposelessly, but he knew that sometimes the gods and goddesses reveal themselves in the unguarded moment in the inobvious place. He was reminded of a poem that his Queen had taught him that described an urn on which was pictured a ritual associated with a marriage that had taken the people of the town into the countryside in a procession, so the town was empty: 

Who are these coming to the sacrifice? 
To what green altar, O mysterious priest, 
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, 
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? 
What little town by river or sea shore, 
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, 
Is emptied of its folk this pious morn? 
And, little town, thy streets for evermore 
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell 
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

The words were penned by one of his Queen’s greatest adorers, one who believed in the power of art to nourish. He wrote the poem about this decorated urn that had lasted thousands of years as a warning to his age of the importance of Art as a guiding, sustaining, and immortal being in the face of those monsters he knew that then (when he wrote in the nineteenth century) were wreaking havoc under the guises of Industrialization, Science, and Empire (of course, Murder in the name of Religion and Patriotism was there in its familiar apparel). At the end of his poem, this other knight in the service of Queen Art addresses the urn, but he is also addressing her, and he says to it and her:

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede 
Of marble men and maidens overwrought, 
With forest branches and the trodden weed; 
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought 
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! 
When old age shall this generation waste, 
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe 
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, 
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

These words resounded in his head that morning as he walked the nearly empty streets of Floyd. He stepped quietly into a place named Café del Sol to partake of some  repast. After such a long journey, he was thirsty and tired. But he wondered about the significance of the sun reference; there was also a sun mentioned in a place next to this nondescript bar, a place called Winter Sun, which caused him to wonder if it was a sign that described his existence without his queen, his goddess Art nearby. 

Inside, the sun burst from the walls and on the sunny walls was the Art he had been seeking. It was not she in full panoply, but it was she nonetheless, a part of her. He heard her voice speaking words of welcome and love. She spoke in the voice of Suzanne Guppy’s semi-abstract paintings of nudes, dreamy colorful room landscapes filled with beautiful bodies and the voice of Starroot’s brightly colored mushroom and spaceship shapes and the woman with two mirrors and of the voice of Samuel A’ Court Bason’s lotus and sky and figure with moon and water with little window shapes in each contributing further to the wondrous mystery. 

He was heartened by these images because they were bringing him back into the state of spiritual health he had been seeking. She spoke also through the rose on the table, the sun images appearing everywhere in the room, and the three children and their mother slurping their fruit concoctions and listening to Ann Bower’s continuous monologue on the virtues of older brothers protecting their younger sisters. He felt comforted. Art’s handmaiden Peace was in this place, the result of Art’s ability to provide a subtly calming mood deriving from the awe inspired in the presence of the mastery of paint, parenting, and poetry. 

With his spirits lifted, the knight journeyed on, but knew something was afoot when only a few feet away and across the street, he discovered other evidence of the presence of his queen in this little town. This time her power was present in the work of Pat Sharkey at Earth Dance where she displays rock, mineral specimens, fossils, meteorites, and jewelry fashioned from these gifts of the earth. She is the appointed collector of local rock specimen. The knight-errant felt drawn back to the mother in the form of elemental nature. He smiled. Here were Art’s handmaidens Delight and Beauty. And his cup filled even further when he glimpsed the work of Michael Costello at the Yellow Pony workshop in the next room, powerful, grand, ebony sculptures, one of which entitled Swimmer reminded this seeker after beauty of the masculine impulse balanced in the universe against the feminine, represented here by the presence of some prints of the works of Lora Leigh Giessler. And next at a local restaurant with the symbolic name of Mama Lazardo’s, the knight saw the feminine further represented by an exhibit of the videography images of Peruvian girls by MonicaVon Rest of Willis. 

At this point, he was dizzy, disoriented by so much beauty crowded into such a small expanse of space. And his journey was not yet completed because across the street, he could see a place with hand-crafted willow branch chairs displayed on a porch. It was another home for Art, the New River Mercantile. She lived here in the Indian art of Cheryl Dolby and the pottery of Noah Byler and Deb Tome. The knight knew that these ancient crafts and cultures were reminders of a way of life in tune with nature and all living creatures, a world where the life of a caterpillar was as significant as the life of a man because life was perceived as an intricate web each piece of which maintained the whole.

And around the corner, the knight, now confident, strong, and happy, saw yet another place for Art. Art was lavishing her bounty on her new home. Here was the Altered Earth Pottery. He peered inside to see pots and sculptures, but what captured his imagination was the motif of rabbits. Rabbits made him laugh. But his journey was not over. He glimpsed a sign that led him to a place off the beaten track where he met an older woman, at a hideaway called Talley’s Alley Granny Shoppe, a kind of sibyl who warned him, lest he become complacent that the monsters that he had so long fought sometimes assailed even this small out of the way spot. And so the knight left Dot Martin’s shop realizing that his beloved Queen Art was reminding him that despite her power to counter much of the evil of the world, the ogres of Greed and Violence and Prejudice were always pounding at the door, even at the door of the Palace of Art in Floyd. So he reminded himself that Beauty is Truth, Truth, Beauty and that that is conceivably the only sure thing in our fragile existence.
 
 

James Locke

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To part 1 - "Traveling Home"

Please enjoy more of James Locke's writings in his regular column on FCIV: ArtEventures

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An Allegorical Journey -Part II-A Biography of Place -©2005 James Locke
"A View From Floyd©"- ©2005-floydcountyinview.com All Rights Reserved
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