Reminiscence of a Summer Evening
This somber nocturn still fills me with a retrospective compassion for the imaginative but sorely disheartened young artist who made it. Once on a late night drive near Iowa City a lone dead cottonwood appeared in the moonlight, its bark fallen, its trunk circled in vines, its pale branches stretched eerily up against the sky. Here its wrists are bound, capturing the tension between death’s claw and thwarted transcendental yearnings. But look to the center where luminous leaves float like fireflies. Do you see a face? The Gospel of Thomas warns us: “When you see your likeness, you rejoice. But when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die nor become manifest, how much will you have to bear!”
