My Great Hobby-Novel
Wednesday, April 29, 2009 at 3:06AM Friends,
No pictures quite yet, but speaking of the macabre, I’ll taunt you with a snippet from my hobby-novel, with which I play on occasion. Being that my ‘work’ is visual, I find writing a fine flight into play. My ‘book,’ which may well never advance beyond scraps & bits, is a... what to call it: a grotesque, perhaps, concerning a deranged liturgical artist, a woman who’s lost half her face to fire, and a mighty strange sanatorium with it’s own chapel. The deranged artist, Philip Waithe, is painting murals in the chapel, which have to do with my Fiendish Plot. It’s set around 1900.
I toy with this dubious opus in first person; a journal for each main character. While I don’t consider myself quite as deranged, and certainly not as homicidal, as the artist depicted, it does give a place to ‘use’ my own creative processes and curious adventures.
From Deranged Philip’s journal, which he scratches on the scaffold in the Deranged Chapel, as he lies on a narrow scaffold board in the dome:
...
Philip Waithe, date unknown:
“I have lain seven hours with Lazarus, and still I cannot see his face. I have caressed the winding cloth with ocher and sienna, touched the feet with a merest sliver of vermilion, yet the head where the spirit must look out remains blind.
It cannot be forced.
I look away. I shift on my narrow bed, and am held in an arc of scarlet tipped quills and gold. I spread my arms into nothing, feel the fever bleed out, feel my breath settle, still. I say, Beloved, make me transparent. I wait, I lose thought, quiet my spirit to a flawless water. I see. I see reflected there the Descent into Hell.
I have drawn it on the East wall.”
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Reader Comments (4)
You have a very gifted way with words, like your visual work, you create with such passion from the heart.
You are definitely a painter of words...
Thank you for sharing...
I'm not so much into the macabre, but I'd read your novel, based on that snippet alone.
My, thank you dear Eirewolf! Watch out -- if I should actually finish it, that may come back to haunt you...