For the...

Sometimes you sit down to write with no idea of what will come.

Images.

Representations of the real, in paints on canvas. Representations of the surreal, on a whiteboard. Masterfully-crafted images to emulate something in three dimensions, on the sidewalk. Photographs, representations of the real made by recording bits of the real. Angularities, warts and all. The beautiful, the glimpse into a glistening future, a long look at the fading past.

Images are just one of the many media we use to express our existences, and why? Because we don’t want them to go. From the childhood moment we grasp the meaning of our mortality, we cling to the present moment as if there won’t be another.

For we know, one day, there won’t be.

Yes, please, take my picture. Let me be. Let me stay. Please, let me.

We build great brick and stone buildings to house our images, and we call them galleries. Men make their livings simply by lighting the greatest of the images, for display. We publish books, collect reflective images into albums, flood the web with images created and displayed via transmitted light.

And then, there is sculpture. Some among us are gifted, in that particular artistic endeavor. Nothing quite says it the way an accurate sculpture says it, three-dimensional, in any position. Lions, horses, cannon, most of it has been sculpted by someone. Somewhere.

But, nothing could ever match the beauty, of the angularities, of the mighty or of the sullen, of the real. Of the present moment. Of genuine life and of looming death, of peacefully placid lakes, of fire, of wind, of crashing waves of water and of sound, and of scent. Of fishes and of kittens and of bears and of babies. Scent; baby powder. Even the best of movies and of video fail miserably to capture the reality.

And of all of that, I say to you now; there can be no words.

For the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies,

For the love that from our birth, over and around us lies

Lord of all to Thee we raise,

This our hymn of grateful praise.

Author: Folliott Sandford Pierpoint (1864)